Do you feel like your business isn't reaching its full potential? Are you wondering how to generate more leads and grow your email list without breaking the bank? We've all been there, trying to figure out a way to create meaningful relationships with our clients. Don't worry—this blog post has got your back.

We consider list building to be the heart and soul of your online business. In this post, we’re sharing seven specific tactics that can help you grow your list.

These are ideas that you can use right way and we’ve seen success with these strategies both in our own businesses, as well as with our online teachers. As always, choose which strategies resonate with you and your business, and leave the others alone (at least, for now).

Also, you may want to try more than one list building technique at a time; building momentum in this way can help you grow your list a little faster.

01 Webinars

Webinars are a really fast way to grow your email list. For us, they have been the most successful technique — hands down. We have also seen that webinars are a fantastic way to connect with our potential clients.

For those of you interested in teaching online, a webinar is a very natural place to begin your relationship with your prospective students and clients. Excluding a live event or retreat, webinars are as close as you can get to a face-to-face interaction with your community.

If you are a yoga teacher, personal trainer, creator, or coach, webinars are a great way to give a preview of your paid online classes, course, memberships, and programs. We have seen many of our teachers find success by sharing their teachings directly through webinars.

Want to run your first webinar as inexpensively as possible? Google Hangouts are free, and when we first started out, this was the tool we used for all of our webinars. On Marvelous, you can host a free public webinar on your Marvelous site.

02 Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be a great way to expand your reach. Existing blogs and publications are always looking for great content – so it can be a win-win situation. With guest blogging, it is important that you are providing content that is tailored to the readership of the site you’re writing for.

Of course, it is best to stick to guest blogging on sites where your quintessential client is active.

When you’ve found a potential site to be a guest blogger, look for their submission guidelines. If you’re in the wellness industry, here are the links to the submission guidelines for three great sites where you could share your wellness journey and professional insights:

Use guest blogging to build exposure, try to include a call-to-action right in your post, and make sure to link back to your own site via your bio.

Not sure what to write about? Here are 108 Blog Post Ideas to Inspire Authentic Content (you’re welcome)!

03 Testimonials

When you buy someone else’s product or service, you are often able to submit a testimonial. Not only does this help the person you bought the product from, but it also can help you build your own reputation online.

This is especially true if there is a program or product you bought from someone who has a bigger online following and presence than you do. Often, your testimonial will be highlighted not just on this person’s website or sales page, but also in the new version of her course or program.

If you’re lucky, she might even feature you in her next webinar or on her podcast or book! If a person or book, or course has made a big difference in your business or life, consider sharing a testimonial - #BeKindBeBraveBeLove.

04 Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is online advertising. Our favorite cost-effective ad platforms are Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest (promoted pins), and YouTube ads.

We suggest that you choose just one ad platform to try out at a time. Choose the ad platform that targets the place where your quintessential client is spending most of her time. Our biggest piece of advice when it comes to paid ads is to focus on quality over quantity.

Running one or two ads that perform well on just one ad platform is all you need to create a huge bump in your email list. One strategy that has worked very well for us has been to use Facebook ads to drive traffic to a free webinar, combining two techniques into one!

Not sure if you’re ready for paid ads? Then read our article How to Know When YOur Business is Ready for Facebook Ads.

05 Links from Social Media

If you are not feeling quite ready yet to jump into paid ads, there is still a lot you can do to capture email addresses through free social media. Social media is an excellent way to raise exposure for your brand and encourage your followers to join your email list.

We encourage you to get creative with where you send your following. With Instagram, you only have one link to share, just there in your bio, and an easy solution to this is to sign up for the free single-link landing page software, Marvelous.bio.

With Facebook, you can create a sign-up and email capture right within your own Facebook page or group. With Pinterest, you can customize your pins to link back to any part of your site you choose. Instead of sending people to your blog or homepage, try being strategic and linking to a landing page customized for that following (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest).

Offer something relevant to that audience in exchange for their email addresses. Don’t be surprised that what works for Instagram, doesn’t work for Facebook or Pinterest —they are all different audiences and should be treated as such.

Looking to maximize your branding potential? Marvelous.bio offers a stunning, free link in bio that will help you do just that!

Built for the day-dreamers, change-makers + future-thinkers.

Get your Marvelous.bio URL while it's still available! ›

06 Blog Posts with a Call to Action

If blogging is a big part of your business, including a call to action (CTA) can be a game-changer for email list growth. We encourage you to only use this technique if blogging is something you are passionate about and have the capacity to keep up with. Nobody wants to visit a blog that hasn’t been updated in six months 😔.

07 Paper + Pen

You might think that this technique is old-fashioned, but it is a tried and true method that still works even in the online space. More than ever, our online and offline lives are intertwined. The majority of our teachers come to Marvelous already having some type of offline teaching presence. As a teacher or trainer, you have already connected with many people through your in-person work.

Cultivating relationships offline can be one of the best strategies for starting to build your email list. Even outside your own classes that you teach, you can still collect emails in person at retreats, conferences, or trainings. If someone aligns with your teachings and methods IRL, he could turn into an online student somewhere down the road.

Here is more advice on How to Land Your First Online Student by Marketing Offline.

Final Thoughts

Remember, we don’t recommend that you try to tackle all of these strategies at once; one or two at a time is plenty. It is best to start off focused on one technique and master that one before adding more to your workload. If you are not finding success, try out a different technique from this list, but know that email listing building can take a bit of time.

It’s the long game that matters for growing and scaling a sustainable online business. Good luck and stay persistent. Getting your first few emails is always the hardest, but by starting now, at the beginning of the year, you are moving in the right direction.