Chapter 5:
How to Build Your Audience – From Scratch

Now that you have a working website and online course up and running, it’s time to start building an engaged audience for your online business… most likely from scratch.

It’s vital that you build an audience for yourself because creating a course on its own — no matter how good it is —  is not a recipe for success. If you don’t have a way to attract new visitors AND get them excited about what you have to offer, your online course launch will probably fall on deaf ears.

But don’t worry. Cultivating an audience isn’t as hard as you think. Your main path to steady sales includes building an engaged list of email subscribers and we’re going to show you exactly how to do it.

By the end of this chapter, you’re going to have all the tools and guidance you'll need to build an email list of “1000 true fans” eager to engage with your content and buy any and all of your future products.

So let’s get started by first discussing what sort of audience an online course creator like you needs to most effectively grow your new business.

The short answer is a highly engaged email list.

“Wait, not a large YouTube subscribership or Instagram following” you ask?

Nope. Social media audience building will be a secondary focus for you after growing your email list.

However, don’t misconstrue the above points as a warning never to cultivate followings on social media. They're just there to show you that social media marketing should always be secondary to your primary mission of growing an engaged email list.

A clever social media marketing strategy is one that boosts your business by funneling new people back to your website who can then sign up to your mailing list and buy your products. You’ll know you’re getting this balance right if the thought of losing ALL your social media accounts tomorrow DOESN'T keep you up at night.

So now that you have the primary goal of growing an engaged email list nailed down, what sort of tools will you need to get going? Well, let’s time to get technical to find out...

Essentially, there’s 2 crucial tools you’ll need to integrate your new WordPress site with before you can start building your email list.

The first tool is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create and display attractive lead generation offers for the very important purpose of converting your new online visitors into happy subscribers.

To manage this important job, we recommend using Thrive Leads — the most powerful lead generation plugin for WordPress. And if you followed all our website building steps outlined in the previous chapter, then Thrive Leads is already installed and waiting for you to use on your site!

If you don’t have money to spare right now for a premium email marketing tool, you can get started with a service called MailChimp. That’s because MailChimp is free until your email list exceeds 2000 subscribers.

Now, this free MailChimp plan doesn’t give you all the bells and whistles you’ll need down the road and there’s limits on things like how many emails you can send per day & month, but it’s “good enough” to get you started.

Remember that for now, the most important audience building goal is to start collecting email addresses and interacting with your new subscribers as soon as possible. With the free MailChimp plan, you can jump right in.

And don’t worry. Once you have the enviable problem of having a list greater than 2000 subscribers, you can switch to a premium service like the one we recommend based on our own extensive experience and testing...

ActiveCampaign is the email marketing tool of choice for all of us here at Thrive Themes. If you have the budget for it, we recommend it for you too.

Why?

Because you can grow your email list and business faster by using ActiveCampaign’s advanced email automation and A/B testing features. Compared to their closest competitors, ActiveCampaign offers the most power when it comes to some crucial features.

But if automation and A/B testing sound intimidating to you now, relax. You won’t need to jump into learning how to use such things right away. We’ll show you how to set that up in the next Chapter.

However, if you can afford to start with ActiveCampaign’s basic plan, it will benefit you down the road since you’ll already be familiar with the tool.

So now that you’ve got your lead generation plugin and email marketing service selected, it’s time to deploy them on your website.

...watch the following tutorial video:

If you’ve read this far, it means that your email marketing tool stack is set up and that you’re ready to start creating your very first lead generation opt-in form.

This section is going to walk you through exactly how to do that in just a few short minutes using the Thrive Leads plugin. That means by the end of this section, your website is going to be live with an opt-in offer to start capturing your very first email leads!

Let’s dive into it by learning how to create irresistible opt-in offers.

But before you can get started creating an opt-in form for your website, the first thing you’ll need to put together is an actual lead generation offer — sometimes referred to as a lead magnet or opt-in bribe.

In other words, something valuable you can dangle in front of your online visitors in exchange for their email address — as well as their permission for you to contact them directly in the future.

But here’s the rub: the days of “Sign up to my newsletter!” are over. That’s because the last thing anyone needs these days is another boring newsletter in their inbox.

You’ll need to go above and beyond the internet riff-raff by offering something irresistible that provides immediate and tangible benefits to a visitor in exchange for their email address.

Don’t get me wrong though. Your opt-in offer DOES NOT have to be a 400 page free eBook or a 100 hour long free online course. Instead, your lead magnet just needs to be a desirable nugget of value you can start offering to visitors on your site as soon as possible.

Once you’ve got your offer ready to go, come back here to learn how to put that juicy morsel of free value on the digital fish hook we like to call — your opt-in form...

So now that you’ve got an irresistible offer ready to go, it’s time to build an opt-in form for it that you can display strategically across your site.

Although there’s an infinite number of designs you can create for that opt-in form, our recommendation to you is to keep it simple.

The best way to do that is to first learn about the fundamentals every high converting opt-in form needs and then use a pre-designed template to implement them.

The very first thing you need to learn about creating opt-in forms is that they must communicate your offer as clearly as possible.

To make sure your first opt-in form actually converts, you’ll need to spell out the tangible benefits a visitor will get in the most concise set of words possible.

However, this is often hard to do because THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE (i.e. you automatically assume everyone else knows what you know) makes it difficult to put yourself in the mindset of a brand new visitor.

Think about it. YOU know everything there is to know about your site, topics, online course and lead generation offer, but most of your new visitors won’t know jack about any of that.

That’s why you come across so many bad opt-in forms on the internet that completely lack clarity. See if you can guess how the following opt-in form examples miss the mark:

Once you look at each of these offers with a critical lens, you notice that they’re trying to market their features (e.g. a “Free 42-Page Detox Guide eBook”, “Free Responsive Email Templates”, and a “Free Solopreneur Toolkit”) instead of the benefits or outcomes visitors would experience from obtaining these freebies.

To make sure your opt-in forms are not only clear, but focus on the benefits your offer provides, follow our 3-step system to help you achieve outcome oriented persuasiveness:

Now that you know the right way to frame your offer through copywriting, let’s talk about how to visually design your opt-in form…

When creating your opt-in form, here are the fundamental elements you’ll absolutely need to create:

To make your job of creating a kickass opt-in form using Thrive Leads even easier, we put together a free 7-Day List Building Challenge for you.

Click here to join our free 7-Day List Building Challenge in Thrive University.

And once you finish building your first opt-in form in Thrive Leads, it’s time to learn how you can use the power of testing to boost your conversion rates. We do that by “split testing” or “A/B testing” your opt-in forms and Thrive Leads makes that complicated task crazy easy...

One of the easiest ways to grow your email list faster — and on autopilot no less! — is to A/B test the opt-in form you just created amongst the traffic that comes to your website.

But first off… what exactly is A/B testing and how the heck do you do it on your WordPress website?

Well, if you want to A/B test an opt-in form, essentially you’re going to run an experiment where 50% of your online traffic views one variation of your opt-in form (Variation A) and the other 50% views a different variation (Variation B). The variation that performs best to convert new visitors into subscribers “wins”.

And even though running a test like this seems super technical to do on your website, like I said before, it’s super simple to do using Thrive Leads (another BIG reason why we recommend you use it as your WordPress lead generation plugin).

But how do you go about creating a second variation of the opt-in form you just created to run your A/B test to get a meaningful boost in your email signups?

Now that you have your Variation A created, it’s time to craft its Variation B counterpart so you can start testing! But what should you focus on testing first?

Well, you need to begin by picking a single “big lever” variable. For example, a great “big lever” you can use is a completely different opt-in form type against your Thrive Lightbox form (like testing a Thrive Lightbox form versus a Thrive Slide-In form).

At this point, you now have a lead generation offer, two variations of your opt-in form, and an A/B test running to try and maximize your subscriber signups — all on autopilot!

Great job! You’re well on your way to actually building an audience for your online course based business.

However, don’t think you can sit back and relax now that people are starting to give you their email address!

That’s because there's no guarantee your subscribers will actually stick around, buy your products or even remember who you are if you don’t keep engaging with them in ways they find valuable.

To do this, you need to be someone that your subscribers actually look forward to hearing from. One of the best ways to do that is through informative emails that announce the release of your high value content as soon as you publish it.

To become their inbox hero, you’ll need to write engaging blog articles, film irresistible video posts, and just provide all-around great value through all the content you create.

Once you’re consistently sending valuable content to your audience (let’s say on a weekly basis to begin with), you’ll create a following that's always eager to open your emails.

And even though this content marketing strategy won’t bring you instant returns, your efforts cultivate a trusting audience ready to buy your outcome oriented products whenever you pitch them. That's the power of a highly engaged mailing list!

What’s one of the most annoying things a website can do to its followers after they already sign-up to become subscribers?

How about asking them to subscribe again… and again… and again... and again…

That kind of website experience doesn't make you feel very special, does it?

Of course not. But that’s another reason why you want to use Thrive Leads to manage your website’s opt-in forms and lead generation offers.

With it, you can use a feature called SmartLinks to improve the post-subscription experience for your visitors and boost the likelihood they’ll move from subscriber to paying customer in a lot less time.

Here’s how SmartLinks works inside Thrive Leads:

Within the Thrive Leads dashboard, click on the “Advanced Features” option to open a dropdown menu:

In that dropdown menu, click on the SmartLinks option. When you do, a new lightbox opens giving you the following SmartLinks setup menu:

From here, you work through Steps 1 through 5 to create a link you can send to your 'already subscribed' followers in your announcement emails. When your subscribers click a SmartLink, they’ll load a specific post or page of your website that shows them different opt-in form displays compared to what an 'unsubscribed' visitor would see.

If you’re curious to see how quick and easy it is to set up the Thrive Leads SmartLinks feature in your opt-in forms, click here to join our free advanced SmartLinks training webinar so you can deploy it on your website.

Great stuff!

Now that you’ve published your first high quality blog content, how do you keep doing it consistently?

Although quality content creation may seem like an intimidating hamster wheel to keep going right now, the good news is that your new online course creation skills are exactly what you need to succeed. If you’re ready to learn how to deploy your new skills to develop a solid content marketing strategy for yourself in 2020, read on...

So now that you’re comfortable creating online course videos, you should embrace that skill to make your blog content richer. That means you can quickly and easily create video articles for to publish on your website and YouTube channel.

In fact, interesting and helpful video content is one of the most engaging types of media available so the majority of your new blog posts will benefit by featuring video within them.

By following this 80/20 content creation rule consistently, you’ll ship so many "80% pieces" so fast, that your new 80% quality mark will be lightyears ahead of your old 100% quality mark.

Because it's better to learn by doing, not only will you publish much more content this way, but your ability to publish quality content will improve rapidly.

To learn more about this 80/20 content creation philosophy, check out Thrive Themes co-founder Shane Melaugh’s video all about it:

The best way to begin pumping out consistent 80/20 content for your new website is by creating a Content Idea Brain Dump. Essentially, that’s the place where you can mentally vomit all of your content ideas into one place so they're ready to use whenever you need.

Of course there’s a million different ways to do this, but we recommend keeping it simple. Either carry a notebook and pen with you at all times to record your ideas when they bubble up, or use an online tool like Trello to manage them all.

To learn exactly how you can use Trello to help manage your content creation process, check out this blog post by Shane Melaugh on how to become a content creation monster:

Awesome sauce!

You’re well on your way to building an engaged audience of true fans.

Now that you have your website and online course built, an opt-in offer running to grow your email list and fresh content getting published on a weekly basis to generate increasing amounts of traffic, it’s time to start converting all those new subscribers you’re collecting into paying customers.

That’s the primary reason you set out to start an online business in the first place, right?

So let’s now discuss exactly how the online course you’ve built, the list building tools you’re using and all the weekly content you’re publishing comes together to create an increasingly powerful sales funnel on your website.

There’s a lot of reasons why we’re encouraging you to create a once-a-week posting schedule on your website, but the primary purpose is because it helps you sell courses.

“How’s that” you’re wondering?

Well, here’s how...

Like we mentioned earlier, it’s important to keep your subscribers engaged with you and your content. The way to do that is by emailing them consistently to let them know helpful new posts & videos are available for them to consume. The more “touches” people have with you and your content, the more likely they are to purchase something from you when they finally get in front of your sales page.

And not only does this keep your subscribers connected with you (so they start to associating value with your brand), but it also creates multiple opportunities for you to sell your products to them — but not in the way you’re probably thinking.

You very rarely want to make direct, hard-nosed sales pitches to your followers. That’s a surefire way to come off as salesy and lose potential customers forever.

Instead, your content marketing sales funnel should be a lot more indirect.

It's at this point that you then indirectly pitch to your premium online course to your followers in 2 very clever ways...

Simply put, if you see a relevant opportunity to place a “by the way” sales pitch for your course within your content, make sure to do that — especially if the course you offer can solve the problem you’re discussing within your blog post, video or ultimate guide.

There’s definitely an art to email nurturing sequences, but don’t let yourself be intimidated as version 1.0 doesn't need to be complex.

To help you setup your first automated nurturing sequence to convert more of your subscribers into customers, check out this resource to get it written and rolled out fast. It includes a template you can download based on the analysis of a popular copywriter's own online course soft sell nurture sequence.

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