LIST BUILDING LIVE: 7 Unconventional Hacks for More Emails with Pete McPherson

LIST BUILDING LIVE: 7 Unconventional Hacks for More Emails with Pete McPherson

Pat Flynn: Hey, it’s Pat Flynn, and you’re listening to List Building Live, our first ever virtual audio summit right here on the SPI Podcast, where each day we release about six mini episodes to help you grow your email list. Why? Because you don’t own social media, but you should own your audience. So each day for three days in a row, we are bringing you people directly from Liz’s and my communities to share what’s working to grow your email list today.

That’s right, no quote unquote experts or eight-figure entrepreneurs talking about what worked for them years ago, just regular creators like you who are working towards making a living online. Enough talking. Let’s get into it.

Liz WIlcox: All right, y’all, listen up. I am really excited about this one, and I know I keep saying that, but Pete and I go way, way back.

We used to be– And I mention this because sometimes, y’all, you got, you gotta put in the work to see the results, okay? And Pete and I used to get up every Monday morning. For me, ’cause I lived in Central Time, he was in Eastern, we had a couple other friends, we would get up at 6:00 AM. Well, I would get up at 6:00 AM, them 7:00 AM, I think.

Pat Flynn: Mm-hmm.

Liz WIlcox: And we would set our goals, you know, talk about our progress. It was like a little mini mastermind Monday morning thing, and now I just love to see, you know, we’ve just done so many things. And Pete is– What I’ve learned about him in that mastermind is he is the ultimate, um, and he’s laughing now.

He’s the ultimate experiment guy. He’s not afraid to just get an idea in his head and go for it. So I know I’ve been asking, like, “What is the one way you’ve been growing your email list this year?” But today I’m gonna ask Pete, what are all the ways you’ve learned about list growth, and what can you share with us today?

Let’s get into it.

Pete McPherson: So I literally just brainstormed, like, four or five ideas that are not really fancy. They’re not sexy, so to speak. Half of them I think I learned probably, like, 10 years ago, but nobody ever talks about it anymore. And as I was jotting things down, my mind kept coming up with like, “Oh, what about this thing?

People used to talk about this strategy or that strategy or this strategy, that strategy.” So I have, like, I have literally, like, 14 ideas. Maybe won’t– we won’t get to all of them, but I’ve kind of categorized them, and I want to start with this list. The hijacks. I call these the hijacks. There’s four tips here.

Number one, hijack your email signature. Right now in Gmail or Google Suite or whatever it’s called these days, wherever you send emails from your personal email, your custom domain email, whatever it is, go there right now and promote something. It could be a freebie to the email list. It could be a free course.

It doesn’t have to be the email list, but obviously this is, like, five minutes. Go to the email, look at your signature, make sure it promotes you in some way. Number two. I’m gonna go through these four really quick, and then you can ask questions. Number two, hijack your existing freebies to be shared.

Here’s what I mean. Everybody has the checklist, the PDF, the spreadsheet, the free down- whatever. You already have freebies probably. What if, hear me out, you sent them their freebie, and then you, either in the same email or maybe even a separate email, you sent them another email that was like, “Hey, do you know anybody else that is struggling with XYZ?”

That’s pretty boring, basic language. But the point is, you can ask these new subscribers, “Hey, why don’t– Your journey is better with a friend. Why don’t you forward this freebie to somebody else?” Like, see if you can hijack your existing autoresponders and automations and stuff like that to be forwarded, to be shared with somebody else, and maybe they’ll forward a friend right there.

Makes them happy because now they get to talk about it with a family member or a friend. It makes you happy ’cause maybe you get more email subscribers. Okay, that was number two. Number three, hijack existing performing content. Again, this sounds kind of like a no-brainer. If you have a blog, if you have a YouTube channel, if you have a podcast, socials, whatever, see if you can do a tiny bit of analytics.

I hate doing analytics lists. I, I just, I just hate looking at everything. But it can be worth it to find what is actually working. Where are you actually getting eyeballs? Maybe it’s your top two or three blog posts that continue to bring people in, your top YouTube videos, your top podcast, your top whatever.

Go and double-check and make sure those are growing your list somehow. Maybe that means there’s a pop-up on that blog post. Maybe that means it leads directly into a lead magnet or something. Just make sure the things that are already working for you are pointing people to your email list. Hijack your performing content.

That’s number three. Last one in the hijacks here, number four. Hijack every thank you message you can get your hands on, right? Sometimes our thank you messages come after somebody opts in for a freebie, like a thank you page. Well, maybe you don’t do that there ’cause you, you just got their email address.

But a lot of times there are more thank you messages when somebody submits a form, a contact form on your website, or downloads anything, or any sort of success message, thank you message. It’s just one more opportunity that people are already looking at. They’re already involved. They’re already engaged with you somehow.

Depends on what it is. That’s another good thing. “Hey, would you like to check out X, Y, and Z?” Freebie, freebie, freebie. A last bonus tip.

Stop linking to your homepage. I noticed this yesterday. I was taking some notes yesterday, and then I went to, uh, you know, Twitter or X, whatever you call it these days, and I saw somebody who had, like, some funny stuff.

It was related to college football. I clicked through to their profile. They have a website. They have a blog, but they just link to their homepage. And I, I clicked. I was literally, like, interested in following this person, and there’s like, there’s no opt-ins, there’s no freebies, there’s no nothing. It’s basically just, like, an About page on your homepage.

So these are like… Again, just there’s no reason to link to your homepage unless it’s, like, specifically funneling people, in which case that’s fine. But if not, again, your social profiles are just another opportunity to point people towards resources that can get them on the list. So those are the hijack things.

Okay. You wanna take a breather here? You got any thoughts?

Liz WIlcox: Yeah. Okay. Well, I’ll hijack the conversation. I, I love the don’t link to your homepage, right? But then, you know, Pete clicked on that, and he said, “Oh, it was an About page, so there’s no links to anything.” So if you wanna learn how to set up your homepage, like, for success, you should listen to another episode that dropped today, Leanne Wong.

We talk about, like, SEO and website, and if you wanna go deeper on some of these things, we chat about it over there. But I wanna say, like, hijacking your email signature is so, so perfect. So how I actually grow my email list is usually through podcast interviews. You know, I, I think I was on Pat’s podcast, like, three times before I started co-hosting it.

You know, I’ve been on Pete’s podcast a million bajillion years ago. I think I’ve been on over 400 podcasts, and how I’ve been able to get on a lot of those to grow my email list is that email signature. It says, “Anytime you email me,” when I hit reply it says, “PS Liz is looking to get on more podcasts. Do you know anybody?”

And I don’t even have to pitch myself anymore because, you know, if I send that over to Pete, he says, “Oh yeah, do you know my buddy Ben? Do you know this? Do you know that?” Right? So it works super well. And something I literally never thought about, Pete, you’re so smart, is the, the existing freebies, right?

Like sending an email or even, like if… Like, for my example, my freebie is just a g- it’s in a Google Doc. I give you a link to a Google Doc, and at the end I pitch, you know, my membership, right? Of course, I’m gonna try to upsell them. But I think an easier pitch would just be to get more leads. “Hey, do you have a friend that needs this?

Send them this link.” So oh my gosh, I love this so, so much. So what’s the next category?

Pete McPherson: Yeah, let me hijack that thought- Okay. All right … for another very similar idea. All right. The next category is stuff that we used to talk about back when Smart Passive Income was founded, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and more.

Yeah. But I don’t, I don’t see a lot of people doing these days. So there’s three or four tips here. Number one, your next email to your newsletter could be the same sort of idea, asking your existing subscribers not to, like, tell a friend. I mean, that’s great. I like saying that. Like, if you enjoyed this, tell a friend.

Yeah, that’s fine. That’s great. Do people actually do that? I don’t know. But what if you specifically engineered your next newsletter or any newsletter to be forwarded? As in, it’s not just, hey, promote me. Hey, share this so I grow. What if it was for them? What if your subscribers could get value by forwarding your next email?

Again, maybe that’s like connecting with a family member, connecting with a friend, starting a conversation with a friend. Like, see if you can get your subscribers some sort of value by forwarding your email. I don’t know what that is. It depends on everybody’s niches, so to speak. But I, I heard that like 10 years ago, and I, to be honest, I don’t even know if I’ve done it myself.

But I, I remembered this, and I was like, “That’s smart.” Like, see if you could do that. Two more here. We used to talk about collaborations a lot more, and one thing that continues to work for me for this day… So I’m doing, uh, I’m, I’m a part of Liz’s List Building Summit, and by being involved in this, by being on this podcast, this video, whatever, I am infinitely more likely to share this with my audience. And we used to talk about running surveys.

Surveys are great. Do some research in your niche. Could be some trending new item in your space, could be trending news, it could be this, it could be that. You can ask your audience to fill out a form for a survey. You could have a poll or whatever, and then share the results. The power in this is that the people you surveyed, the people you got involved with in your audience, it’s almost like a guaranteed buy-in that they’re gonna look at the thing.

Of course, if I filled out your survey, I wanna see the results, right? And you can also use this for your own marketing. You could put it as a freebie. Like, “Hey, I interviewed 100 people on list building and came up with a brilliant 60-second thing you can implement today. Do you wanna hear about it? Do you want me to share this with you?”

That’s a freebie, like right there. But by getting other people involved, they’re more likely to not only read it, but to share it. That was my, that was my point. Crowdsource your freebie. Crowdsource your, your freebie. Research, surveys, et cetera. Last one. You’ll like this, Liz. Used to be this guy, Brian Harris, I haven’t talked to him in like 10 years.

He used to have a list-building program. Uh, I don’t even think it’s around anymore. One of his first lessons has stuck with me for like 10 or 15 years now. Especially if you have a small list, like if you’re just starting out, if you have 10 people, like 20 people, 50 people, 100 people on your email list, literally Facebook message your friends and family and ask them to join.

Here’s why. And no, I don’t actually care if they’re interested in your topic at all. I started a fishing blog just for fun. I don’t know if Liz fishes or not, but I should probably email Liz and be like, “Hey, you should join my fishing blog,” because we know each other, you like me, and honestly, it helps me if you just open my emails, could you do that?

It costs you nothing. You’re my friend. You’re my family member. It helps send signals to all the inboxes, Gmail, Outlook, ProtonMail, whatever, when people open your emails, when people click through your emails. My brother has probably opened every email I’ve sent to my newsletter in the past 10 years. He doesn’t care anything about it.

But he knows me, and he opens it. My wife is on my newsletter. My parents are on my newsletter. I still have friends from college that are on my email newsletter, and they still open things. No, it’s not a long-term money maker, but it can be those really small signals for inboxes. And last thing here, Liz, it’s nice to be known for something.

It’s nice for my college friend to be talking to some dude at a party, and this dude’s like, “Oh, man, yeah, I just started a YouTube channel. I’ve been thinking about that.” My friend Mike might be like, “Oh, man, you should go to DoYouEvenBlog.com. Oh, you should go to, like, LizWilcox.com and follow them, follow her, follow him.”

You want to be known for something, and the more people that know what you do, the more likely you are to be top of mind when they’re talking about your niche, if that makes any sense.

Liz WIlcox: I know that was a, a long-winded stuff there, Liz Yeah, no, that ma- I’m gonna call these… I’m gonna call this section back in the day strategies.

So we had hijack, now this is back in the day. So I’ve got a couple thoughts really quick before we move to the next section. So the ask friends and family, that’s so, so true, and also, like, it gets you momentum when you’re first going. It’s like, okay, I have an email list, even if it’s just my mom or my brother or whatever.

It gives you momentum, and actually, this happened to me a few weeks ago. I’m at my best friend’s house. He’s a librarian and an author, and somebody he was Facebook friends with wanted to meet up with him for coffee in the area, the local area. And they started talking, and apparently she has a giant YouTube channel.

She’s, like, a homesteader or something like that. And he said, “Oh, YouTube, you should, you should look up my best friend. Her name’s Liz Wilcox. She teaches email. Do you have an email list?” And she said, “Oh, I do, but I never email.” And he said, “Oh, that’s exactly what she does. She teaches email content. She has…”

And he’s on my email list. He knows that, right? And that day, she ended up spending $108 with me just from him knowing who I am, so I love that so much. And I, I do have to warn y’all, though. I have to put a label on this. Like, check your subject line. So my brother was on my email list many years ago, and I was an RV travel blogger at first, but I knew I wanted to sell that blog one day, so I changed the domain from LizWilcox.com to TheVirtualCampground.com.

And the subject line when I told my audience was, “LizWilcox.com is dead,” but my brother only saw, “Liz Wilcox is dead,” and he said he about had a heart attack. So, so I just had to tell that story- Well done … ’cause it is actually- Yeah … hilarious. And the last thing I’ll say is, back in the day, the very first real, like, email list push I did was that first thing Pete said about getting your existing subscribers to, like, forward your stuff.

So I actually, I had a paid product. It was a book about poop, actually, Tales From the Black Tank. Uh, Google it. You can still buy it today. And I actually gave away that book for free, and I told my subscribers, ’cause I had been selling it for about six months. I said, “Hey, for the next seven days only, this book is going to be for free.

This is the link. Forward these emails to your friends so they can get the link.” And that worked so well. I hit my thousand-subscriber goal within seven days. I think I got hundreds of subscribers. You know, and I was still in the first year of my business, so I love, love, love that you brought that up. What you got next for us?

Pete McPherson: A bunch of random stuff. I just wrote down a bunch of ideas. Maybe some of these will be useful, maybe some of them won’t. Uh, first of all, #promo ListGadget.com. Uh, Liz and I are both involved in this project. I built it. We have subscriber referral systems built in. I, I’m just gonna say this, but we’re by far the cheapest provider of this sort of software, right?

Where your email subscribers can refer other email subscribers and earn rewards, and you can, I don’t know, deliver swag or free products or discount codes or whatever as a reward for people subscribing. So people should go check that out. I wrote that down. Uh, okay, random thoughts for you, Liz. The only popups I enjoy personally are on ecommerce websites where they give you, like, a first order discount.

You know what I mean? Like, $10 off your first order if you join our email list or whatever. I’m pretty sure those are the only popups in the past 10 years that I’ve actually entered my email address for. I just thought about that as I was taking notes. Like, what can we learn from that? Maybe that’s, like, the dead simple popup idea.

Literally just a discount code if you have paid products. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that, I think. In fact, I think that’s been the most effective thing for me personally. All right, next up, link in bio tools. I hope you’re okay with this, Liz. I’m gonna promote another thing I built because it’s 100% free, free as in beer.

It’s called Clic, C-L-I-C dot lol, clic.lol, C-L-I-C dot L-O-L. It’s a free… It’s 100% free. In fact, it doesn’t even join my email list now that I’m thinking about it, which is awful, and I should probably get on that. So right now you don’t even have to, like, uh, you won’t even get any marketing emails. No, uh, so I built a link in bio tool that allows you to promote freebies.

So there’s, like, a little floating box and an email thing there and other marketing tools to get people on your email list. I hadn’t seen that stuff in any of the other link in bio tools I use. And you can also build, like, portfolio pages and put your social links up there and freebies and paid products and whatever.

So go check that out. If you are a YouTuber, and especially a podcaster… No, let me just say it again. If you are a podcaster, you need to have some sort of short URL. Meaning I have D-Y-E-B, that stands for Do You Even Blog, dot link. I used to have a mechanical keyboard brand, and I owned the domain keyboard.link.

Especially when you are doing audio only and people are listening in their cars or when they’re doing laundry or the kids are on the playground or whatever it is, you want something that they can remember later. Remember later. If you’re shouting out, like, “Oh, uh, doyouevenblog.com/pete-this-this,” un- no one cares.

No one cares. No one’s gonna remember that. Even if they’re super jazzed about it, they might get home later, and then they have to go to their podcast app, find the URL, and then… No, no, you need bit.ly Keyboard.link. Liz.link/freebie or something like that. Two more ideas here, Liz. This is a little controversial, but I’m gonna say it anyways.

Make more stuff free. I think when I first started my business ages ago, I kind of jumped right to paid products. There’s good things in that, and there’s bad things in that, and obviously this isn’t advice for everybody all the time for every product. But I have had great success in the past two years publishing my paid courses that I had already created for free on YouTube.

In fact, I started an AI coding channel. I don’t do much with it at the moment. But I had a paid course, and I started a brand-new channel with this course over, like, 14 different videos, and I put it in a playlist on YouTube, and it’s got like, I don’t know, 400,000, 500,000 views over the past couple months.

And it took me quite literally from zero to 5,000 YouTube subscribers, like, on its lonesome. Like, I haven’t done anything else. There’s, like, a few videos I posted, but not much at all, and it was this, like, free course that I literally just repurposed. It used to be paid, and no one was buying it, so I just made it free, put it on YouTube, and it’s– now it’s doing something for me.

Again, not for everybody, not for every product all the time. But if I could go back in a time machine to 10 years ago, I think I would actually do more free things for a while as I built up the email subscribers, a subscriber base, and then hit them with the paid product, course, membership, whatever. Okay, two more ideas.

Want me to just go ahead and hit them really quick? I know I’m going really fast. I hope this is valuable for people.

Liz WIlcox: No, you’re doing great.

Pete McPherson: Okay. The next– This is the last category here. I called this off-the-wall ideas. I thought it’d be interesting if you had a, a button on your website or whatever that says, “Email me this.”

I literally had– I spent, like, two hours messing around with my iPhone a couple of weeks ago trying to figure out Apple Shortcuts, which I’d never used before. Turns out they’re amazing, by the way. I tried to build one that was like, “Email me this thing.” I really stink at bookmarks and, like, coming back to stuff later and reading articles later and stuff like that.

So I was trying to build something that just emails me something. I think it would be cool if on your website or wherever you can do this, if you had, like, a literal button that said, “Email me this,” and it kind of joined people to your list. Like, email me this article. Email me this freebie. Email me this thing.

I think that would actually be really interesting. Obviously, you have to be able to build that, but again, I’m just talking about off-the-wall ideas that could be used to get more email subscribers. Last one, a freebie idea. Super simple. It requires a little bit of vibe coding, or coding, or some sort of building.

Again, this is something you have to build, but I thought it’d be interesting. What if you had a freebie that was a form, a landing page, a pop-up, or whatever that literally just said, “What are you struggling with right now?” Question mark. Nothing more– Like, what if every single freebie was customized for every single email subscriber?

What if that was it? You literally just had a text box and an email field that’s like, “What are you struggling right now with your email marketing?” Send that to AI, the OpenAI API. Again, this is something you have to build, and then just come up with a few answers. Bonus points if it’s actually focused on your content.

For example, I uploaded, I don’t know, it was a lot. I uploaded a lot of my YouTube videos, podcast, and blog posts to AI, and I created this, like, little miniature database I’m, I’m gonna be honest, I’m not even sure how it works. I just used AI to build it, and so AI knew what it was doing. But basically, I could put this on my website, “What are you struggling with right now relating to fishing?”

I would send their question, whatever they input, to AI, along with all of my content. That again, AI built this, I don’t even know how it works, to be frank. And then I could email them a custom freebie. Like, it’s just this idea of personalization, customization, meeting your subscribers where they’re at, meeting your audience where they are at.

I think this is kind of obvious, but then again, I don’t really see anybody doing this. Yeah, they could probably just go ask ChatGPT, but they’re on your site. So maybe they’d like Liz’s version of how do I get better at list building. Maybe they want Pete’s version of how do I get better at bass fishing, whatever that is, right?

That’s it, Liz. Yeah. What you got?

Liz WIlcox: Okay. I really like that last idea. I mean, if you could figure out how to do it technically, you know, something that I teach in email is that personalization, is giving that time and attention to your subscriber. So I love this. And then right before that, Pete mentioned the email me this.

That actually is a thing. It is huge in the food blogger world, and so it’ll be email me this recipe. So there are, like, WordPress plugins that can email the actual blog post to people. So that is a thing, and I know I love food bloggers. I geek out over them. They’re some of my favorite customers, and they get literally thousands of email subscribers from this, and I’ve seen it work in other, it works really well in the food industry, right? ‘Cause people love recipes, and I’m, I’m starting to see it in, like, travel industries and, you know, uh, like, even, like, language learners, people that wanna learn Spanish, they can download the lesson that’s on your blog, teacherpreneurs. Uh, I’m really geeking out, um, over that.

I’ve got one more thing I wanted to say. Oh, the, the short uro- URLs. Yes, absolutely. So I have something called WatchLiz.com, and that gets you not to my email list, but it subscribes you to my YouTube channel. And so, you know, it could be EmailLiz.com, and then that would take you to my landing page, right?

It’s so easy at the end of an episode like this to say, “Oh, just go to WatchLiz.com. Just go to EmailLiz.com,” right? So love, love, love it. And you gave me the best idea for the pop-ups. I’m gonna try a pop-up. Like, why not? Why not? Like, why not say, “Oh, get all, you know, get 15, 25, 50% off, uh, you know, this workshop”?

Right? I, I love that idea, actually. Why not try it? I’m really excited. Okay, that was a lot, a lot of goodness. Go back, not in a bad way, though. Like, I’m j- I literally took notes. I’ve got sticky notes. I am gonna see which ones I’m not doing and which ones I can bring back, not only to LizWilcox.com, but SmartPassiveIncome.com too.

I’m really excited about it. All right, Pete, if we wanna join your email list, what is the best way we can do that?

Pete McPherson: Yeah, you can go to DoYouEvenBlog.com, and it’s right on the homepage. Yep. I send out maybe two emails a month. At this point, it’s not my full-time job anymore after 10 years of doing it, but I still have things to say when it comes to online business and creatorship or whatnot.

I mostly just share cool stuff I find, share interesting ideas that, when I think of them, and, uh, usually show off all the really weird and fun apps that I’ve been building for myself over the months. And yeah, DoYouEvenBlog.com right there.

Liz WIlcox: Okay, love it. I have been on Pete’s email list for probably almost 10 years.

He’s actually one of the first email lists I ever subscribed to, and it’s really good. Yeah, he… As you can see, he’s an idea guy, right? And so he’s always showing us behind the curtain of what he’s seeing out there, not just for what he’s doing himself, but what other people are doing, and it’s a, it’s a really fun list to get on.

Thanks so much, Pete.

Pete McPherson: Thank you, Liz. Appreciate you having me.

Pat Flynn: Okay, another great list-building strategy from one of our amazing community members. I just love seeing people find ways to grow that I didn’t even think of. That’s something I’ve always loved about being in communities with other entrepreneurs.

It’s just so inspiring and motivating at the same time. If you need that in your list, a group of business peers to help you take what you’re learning here at this event and turn it into real action, come join us inside the SPI community. Not only will you finally have people keep you accountable, you’ll have all the resources you need to make a living online, not just with email marketing, but content creation and monetization as well.

And right now, we’re offering 50% off and some other fun bonuses just for List Building Live listeners, and that’s you. Just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST, that’s 26LIST to grab this special rate. SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST.