My First 1,000 Subscribers — and a Survey

I made a big, bold, scary decision this past weekend.

I decided to set myself a goal of reaching 1,000 email subscribers this year. That’s a pretty big leap for me since my current list is at… (checks MailChimp…) 393 subscribers.

That means I need to earn 607 subscribers. Doable? Totally. A little scary? Yeah, that too. 😉

I also decided that I want to blog about the exact steps I’m taking and how they work.

So, my very first step is going to be taking a survey.

Why?  Two reasons:

1. I’m mainly trying to build my list right now in order to sell a new course I’m putting together, and I can always use more feedback on what people actually want to learn.
2. And when I’ve done surveys in the past and given people the opportunity to opt-in to my list at the end, I’ve gotten a pretty great conversion rate.

Surveys are win/win for me, then!

I create my surveys in TypeForm, because it’s free, gorgeous, and pretty easy to use. I think it makes me look profesh.  😉

And here it is.  If you’d like to take 5 minutes to fill it out, I’d REALLY appreciate it — in fact, I appreciate it SO MUCH that as an ethical bribe to get you to fill out my survey, I’ll give you my annotated template for writing the “PERFECT” blog post. It’s the exact same template I use with all my clients, and it’s yours as a thank-you gift if you complete the survey below! (P.S. It’s been updated since the last time I offered it, so you might want the new version if you grabbed the old one!)

A couple of notes about this survey:

I built my questions based on the ones my business coach, Tommi Wolfe did that was SO EFFECTIVE she got written up by Marketing Sherpa. Pretty cool, right?

You also probably noticed that I’m offering an ethical bribe to get people to complete the survey. The template is something I KNOW people want, but it’s also something that wasn’t too time consuming or challenging for me to create — and it really is the one I use daily to remind myself of all the moving parts when I’m writing for my clients.

What else I’m doing:

I’m going to assume if you’re reading this you probably already have a Facebook business page, Twitter account, etc. all set up. (If you don’t, here’s a good guide to doing it.)  But I’ll list some of the other list-building/promotional stuff I’m doing for total transparency.

• Set up my Google+ page on Hootsuite and scheduled some posts to promote old blog posts.
• Used Facebook as Ghostblogger (instead of from my personal profile) to like and comment on stuff
• Used Google+ as Ghostblogger (ditto) to like and comment on stuff
• Joined American Express’ Open Forum for small business owners and gave some advice
• Answered questions on Quora

I’m going to be trying to do most of those on a weekly basis, to get my name out there!  This is part of my “be as useful as humanly possible to take over the world” strategy—we’ll see how it works!

Got any great list-building strategies you’ve used? Lay ’em on me in the comments!