Do I need ads, SEO or both to grow my email list? Ep. 164

If you're an entrepreneur who's trying to market your business, grow your email list, and make more money, you may find yourself wondering if you need to use ads or SEO to get more people to your opt-in. Join me in today's episode and find out what I recommend entrepreneurs do to grow their email lists and which online marketing channels generally work best. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. By now, I bet you've noticed that there's a new name. That's right. This is now the Marketing for Entrepreneurs podcast because I really wanna be able to work with you and teach you about more than just SEO or search engine optimization. We're not getting away from that. At all. We're not leaving that behind, nothing like that. We're going to be talking more about our entire sales funnel. Our entire sales process. SEO is a very important piece of it. It's the beginning, it's the visibility and the traffic. But we also need to generate leads. We need to look at the conversions we need to make money. You're, you're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur. You're not here just to learn how to get traffic to your site. You're here to learn how to get the right people to your site so that you can build your email list and grow and grow your business and be ready to grow and scale. So I wanted to jump right in. Kind of address that,'cause you're probably seeing a new name and you may be wondering, Hey Rachel, what's going on? The other thing, I wanna let you know a little bit, kind of behind the scenes what I've been working on over the last six months. You know, I also teach podcast, SEO and I talked to you about keywords. I've been working on several different strategies in the background. The first one. Was to start ranking for the word online marketing rather than just the SEO related terms. So last summer I saw a really great opportunity. It's about six months ago now. There was a great opportunity to potentially rank for online marketing. So I went after it and I made some edits and some changes in updates to the podcast. From an SEO standpoint, I'm very happy to say I'm now in the top 10 for online marketing as well as very visible. For email marketing and SEO related terms, that has helped the podcast grow to a top 5% podcast, which is amazing. So thank you so much for listening and being here and being part of this journey. The next stage is I really wanna go after marketing. I wanna see if I can get this podcast to rank. In the top results for marketing. So that's part of why there's a new name marketing for entrepreneurs, but it's also going to help it hopefully grow. It'll help you learn more about the overall marketing of your business, and my goal is to go from the top 5% where I am now. To the top one and a half percent. That's the next step in podcast ranking. So I'm very excited. I'm working on this. I'll share a little bit behind the scenes if you're curious, interested how it works, all of that. If you wanna help me with this, I would love it if you would do a review and a rating of the show and then send me a screenshot of your review. Just DM me at Etched Marketing. Um, at ET Marketing Academy on Instagram, and I will keep track of those each month. And somebody who does a review will get a free 30 minute one-on-one elite marketing coaching session so that you have a chance to ask me any questions you have. So once a month I'm gonna do a bonus one for podcast listeners. The best chance is just go ahead and leave that review because the reviews do help the algorithm, it helps the pro, it helps it grow, it helps all of that. But then in return, somebody's gonna get to work with me one-on-one for a half hour to really ask the questions that you have and help you learn a little bit more about how you grow your business. Alright, let's jump right in because today's. Training. Today's podcast episode is more marketing than just SEO related, but we're gonna talk about both. So we talk about growing our email list. We talk about having an opt-in, a freebie, a valuable free offer, a lead magnet, whatever term you use, whatever term your mentor uses, it's all the same thing. So you wanna have a freebie. That you give to people in exchange for their email address. That's how you grow your email list. Now, your freebie, you know, needs to be something that's very beneficial for your ideal customer, your dream client. It needs to help them. It needs to be a quick win. It needs to be something that they can really. Focus on, do something in 15 or 20 minutes, get a quick win, and then it helps them start to see that you might be able to be a resource for them. If you're not sure what freebies are, I do have a podcast episode that talks about freebies. I believe it's episode number. 31. What is an opt-in? That'll kind of walk you through that. If you want some examples, go to the freebies tab on my website, etched marketing.com/freebies and just take a look. I've got all sorts of free resources for you. What I want you to pay attention to is how they all relate back to a different part of the business. So there's ones that are SEO related. There's email marketing related ones. There's podcasting ones, and then there's online marketing, marketing strategy. That really lead into the different programs and groups and things that I offer and the ways that we can work together. You wanna do the same thing with yours. So now let's say you've got your freebie, you've got your opt-in, you know that it's working well, it's what people want, and now you're trying to figure out, how do I grow my list? Do I do ads? Do I do SEO? Do I do both? Do I share it on social? Like what do you do to grow your email list? So I'm going to tell you from my experience, my perspective, you should be sharing your opt-in everywhere you really should because people are going to be connecting with you in different channels, and it's going to be important that you have the same message, the same opt-in, the same creative, et cetera. Across channels so that they know that, oh yes, this is Susie, this is Joe, this is Peggy over here, so that they know that. This is the same person, the same business. That's why your branding is so important in making sure that you have a consistent look and feel across channels. So yes, you want to share it on multiple channels. Now, let's talk specifically about ads as CO, and let's even touch on social for a minute. I know I'm not a big proponent of social because in most instances I don't see social lead to significant sales for most of my clients or students, and it's honestly always been that way. If I look at social as potentially a way of just nurturing the people that are already in your world, but you're probably not going to get a lot of new people and you're likely not going to get a whole lot of. Sales from social, unless you're like a TikTok, TikTok shop or something like that. But most of us who are entrepreneurs who are working from home, things like that, social's not gonna be huge for us. But if you are on social, it does work for you. You should s. Seriously consider using a tool like ManyChat, something that allows you for the chat engagement, so they just can comment a key word and get sent the link. Rather than asking them to go to your tab on your profile, it is going to work better. So if you're on social, consider that. Now let's move back to. SEO. Should you use SEO for your lead magnet? Yes. 100%, absolutely. This should be your main focus. So what you wanna think about is your lead magnet. Your core lead magnet should be on your homepage, front and center. You should offer it several times. You want people to be able to get whatever it is that you have a value. If it's your discovery call, it's your freebie, your video series, whatever it is, you need it to be front and center on your website. However, you also wanna make sure that you are offering it on your blog post, because remember, when we're doing SEO, we're focusing on a content strategy where we are serving our customer, we are creating content that is of value to them, that is going to help them to grow their business, to solve their problems, to do whatever their issue is. Whatever your niche is. So that blog content, you're content that you're creating should also have an email opt-in on every blog post. So I personally do an opt-in. I also have a pop-up option, though I do not have the pop-up option immediately because you and I both know that's incredibly annoying. So my popups are set to about a 32nd delay if somebody has. Scrolled on your page and they've read for about 30 seconds. They're interested in what you have At this point, your freebie popup is not as annoying as if they were to land immediately on your page and have it pop up. Nobody really wants that. The other problem. What the immediate popup is, you can sometimes hinder Google Bot from crawling your page because Google Bot cannot click that X to get rid of that popup. So if that popup has come up too quickly, then Google Bot can't crawl and index that page, and you actually have now hurt your chances of having people find it because. Google doesn't know it exists, so no immediate popups. So we want to offer our freebie in our content, and we want to think about the content. If you have multiple content pillars, you may have different freebies. I have multiple freebies because I have different content pillars, because I have different programs. I have the group program for SEO, simple SEO content. I have the new marketing, like really make sense of your marketing program, the Confident Marketers Club, where we're gonna go through everything that you've been working on and really hone in on what's working and what's not working. And we're gonna get your hours back and we're gonna help you start making more money and get you on that path to grow and scale. So you are ready to go, however high or however big you wanna go. I also have the elite marketing coaching and then also podcast, SEO. So you'll see different, um, freebies because they relate to different parts of the business. And the content is different because different audiences need different things. Yours may not be as advanced as mine, and that's okay. If you only have one opt-in, it actually makes life easier. So you're going to have your opt-in on each blog page. You're gonna have it on your homepage. That's how you're using SEO to help grow your email list. You also can and should optimize your actual landing page for your freebie, because sometimes you can get those showing up. In Google and now chat, GPT. I know that chat, GPT refers people to my freebies because in testing I've had it. Recommend my freebies and then give that page. So you wanna make sure that you're doing your traditional SEO on your website and setting up that funnel. Now, if you really wanna get. Focus. Let's say you do want to join me in the Confident Marketers Club early next year when it launches. You're going to want to understand your metrics, so you're going to want to track your SEO funnel separately from an ad funnel if you decide to run an ad funnel. So what you'll do in your email service provider, you'll actually create two separate automations. So one will be for your organic traffic only, so you'll have one landing page. You'll have one email funnel, like one email automation so that we can look at that and look at those numbers and know for sure how that's working. Then on the other side, you'll have a separate landing page and a separate automation for your ads, and you'll want to make sure everybody's tagged so you know if they're organic or ads, because I can tell you. My personal business, my conversion rates are very different between organic traffic and ad traffic, and then podcast traffic. And I'll be honest, I have not yet built out a separate funnel for podcast that's on my 2026 plan. So we wanna do that so we really know where people are coming from. So yes, we wanna use SE. Now, once you know if you are converting at the right levels from an SEO standpoint, that's when you start doing ads. If you want to run ads, ads are something that you can lose a ton of money on in the beginning, and you are truly going to spend money to learn and make mistakes with ads. And if you don't have enough money that you're comfortable doing that yet, don't do it. I've heard my mentor say she expects you to spend about$5,000 before you really start to see results, and that is a scary figure for most small entrepreneurs, most newer businesses. I can tell you from my experience, it was at least that much, if not more before I figured ads out. Now what you're gonna wanna look at with ads will be mm-hmm. How is everything performing from an SEO standpoint? How is it performing organically? Once you know that you're converting where you need to from an organic standpoint, then you can start looking at ads. But with ads, what you're going to have to also consider is the cost per lead or the ad cost. How much money are you paying for each person? So there's a whole bunch of different stuff to get into on the ad side. So to get you started, what you wanna look at to understand if you are converting organically, let's just start there. So, you know, yes, I'm ready for ads. No, I'm not ready for ads. You want to look at your landing page conversion. So you wanna look at how many people got to your opt-in page. Your ideal goal here is a 30% or higher conversion, meaning 30 out of every 100 people who see your landing page, who see your offer for your freebie, take you up on it. They give you their information, they sign up and they get your freebie. So if you are at 10% or 5%, you have a problem with your landing page or you potentially have a problem with your opt-in itself. Something is not converting. Your audience doesn't like it. We want 30% or better. Personally, I aim for 50% or better on my pages. If I'm below 50, I look at it and make some edits and changes, but I've got 25 years of marketing experience. So for you starting out, 30% aim there. We can always aim to get better over time. Then you wanna look at your emails. Now, your open rate is not going to tell us as much now because so many inboxes, like open or preview, open the emails now to check for the links and to check for um, s. Scams and spam and you know, just bad stuff in them. So we don't really look at open rates as much today as we did before. What we wanna look at is the click through rate. So you're going to have a nurture sequence for your email, for your freebie. So you wanna make sure the majority of the people who request your freebie are actually clicking to download your freebie or to watch the videos. If they're not engaging with it, then it tells you that there's something going on. They were interested enough to request it. However, they're not interested enough to engage with it. So you wanna look at that and see how many people are downloading, how many people are clicking, what's going on there. Then we wanna look at this subsequent. Emails. Remember, our nurture sequence generally has seven to 10 emails. So we wanna look in there and see again what is the click through rate on the different emails throughout that nurture sequence. Are we generating leads? Because the goal of a lead magnet is not just to get somebody on your email list. It is to generate leads. So if you're offering a webinar, you are hopefully getting people to sign up for your webinar. You want to see them clicking from your emails. Over to your webinar signup page. And then you wanna look at how is your webinar signup page converting. If you are scheduling consult calls, you wanna look and see how many people who got my freebie have now gone on to schedule a consult call. And then from there you wanna look at how many of those cults booked and became new clients. You want to look at this and go all the way through. Because it's going to be important to understand how many leads you need to get into your funnel before you get a paying customer. That's gonna help you understand and start to troubleshoot. And then once you know where you're at and that you're con, you are converting, you're getting the right number of leads in, you've got a good conversion on your landing page, you're generating leads on the backend from your email sequence. You're making money if you've got a product or a service. Then you can determine if you're ready to start running ads. And if you are, then it's time to go in and you're gonna troubleshoot the same way basically through ads. And you're gonna look at, are people clicking on my ad and are they converting and requesting my opt-in? And how are they engaging with my opt-in in that nurture sequence? And are they scheduling? Consults or are they signing up for the webinar? And then are they really going from here to becoming a customer? How is my webinar funnel converting? How is my, how are my discovery calls converting? There are so many different nuances. This my friend, is why I've created. And why I am creating the Confident Marketers Club, because we're gonna break down these funnels and how they need to be converting, and we're gonna look at'em, and I'm gonna help you identify where you need to make changes based on the data that we're seeing inside of your particular funnel. So it's gonna be an amazing program. I'm so excited to get it out here because. The questions that I get in the groups I'm in, and in the Mastermind that I've been in, I see so many people who are struggling with understanding their data and like wrapping their heads around it. And if I can help you see and understand your data, you can become a much more confident marketer, which will allow you. To make decisions with that confidence. And once you understand your numbers and you know what's working and you're able to remove the things that are not working and just focus in on what is working, you will be ready to grow and scale. And I wanna help you with that as well. So. Not in 2026, probably 2027, but I'm thinking about it. I wanna help you all the way through as you grow your business. Alright, I hope that this was helpful for you. You understand that you need to have multiple channels to really build your email. So if you have a podcast and a blog and social media, I want you to be sharing your opt-in on. All of your channels the same way that I share mine here and we talk about it, just do it very naturally. Don't push it, don't be obnoxious. Don't do any of that. Just share it naturally because it is a resource for the person who is listening or the person who is reading your here to help your dream client. And the only way you're gonna be able to help them is if they know that you exist through your different marketing channels. And then you offer them what it is that you have that can help them, how you can help solve their problem. Alright, that's it for today. Thanks for hanging with me. I know it was slightly longer, but I wanted to kind of give you a little bit of behind the scenes. Let me know if you think it's fun. Um, if you're excited to kind watch. Go watch this podcast go from five top 5% to top one and a half percent. Once we hit one point half, we're gonna go for 1%. It's been really fun. It took a little under a year to go from top 10 to top five, so I'm very excited to see where we can go. We're not even at year three yet. Like we're coming up at the end of year three in February. So it's been really, really fun. Alright, I will see you back here. As a reminder, leave me that rating and that review. Screenshot it, send it to me over on Instagram at Etched Marketing Academy. Let me see it. Once a month, I'm gonna pull somebody to have that free session and that session is very valuable. I do charge$2,000 a month for the Elite Marketing Coaching, so you get a 30 minute session. With me one-on-one to ask your questions, and all I ask in return is, do me a favor and you know, give me a rating, gimme a review, share the podcast with someone else. I wanna be able to be here and help you grow your business, and I wanna help your business bestie, grow their business too. All right, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.