Being a CEO for over 10 years and managing couple different companies after getting my MBA definitely taught me a thing or two about the business world, but putting the so called safety of the corporate world and biweekly paycheck behind me and taking on the competitive business arena as an entrepreneur and making it within 100 days, is one of my biggest accomplishments in my happy boss-free independent lifestyle that I built for myself.
It was a dream that after years of overlooking it, I decided it was time to make it happen.
I definitely burnt my boat and learned how to swim. No looking back, just courageously moving forward no matter what. It takes conviction but everyone can do it.
When it comes to building any business, trial and error is the name of the game. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and try what you think might work, do a lot of research on the market, competitors and their success recipes, have one on ones with your ideal customer and find out what they really want and give it to them.
It might sound simple, but it's a lot of work and it needs ample amounts of passion to fuel the entrepreneurial fire or else doubts and initial failures will die it down.
Once my experience and research told me that I had to grow my list of potential clients, I came up with different ways of opt-ins (give me your name and email and I give you free content).
Let's go through all my opt-ins one by one and learn from my failures and my successes:
But first, the number one rule: Only give high valuable content! No fluff, but actionable high quality information that people usually pay to get. It's your first contact with your potential client and you want to show expertise, generosity and authenticity.
1. Weekly blog
Writing a weekly blog with great information and hoping people will just find my website and immediately want to sign up for whatever I wanted to offer was an innocent and timid try to put myself out there. I wasn't fully committed at that point and still researching and testing the waters.
I got about 30 subscribers. Friends and friends of the friends.
It took a lot of my time to do it and the payoff was almost non-existent, so I had to move on.
2. Facebook video series
I did a video series on Facebook performance and it showed some potential in attracting potential clients as my list went from 30 to 90 subscribers in 10 days without any ads. But then it died down and this experiment was put on the back burner while I went on trying the next opt-in.
3. Passion-A-Thon free course
One week free course on Passion-a-thon. I thought it was a smart play on words as my business idea was to help women find their passion and then build a business around it and make money. They had to take their time and explore in order to get to the golden idea, so I looked at it as a marathon, not a sprint. Take the pressure off. Passion-a-thon.
I was pretty passionate about this free course, so I was telling people left and right about it.
My list went from 90 to over 200 subscribers in one week with no ads.
The results were good. But I knew there had to be a better, faster way. So, I thought of automating it and making it a video series instead of a course.
4. 7 Steps to Passion video series
It was a video series for the Passion-a-thon that I put behind an opt-in on my website and social media.
This experiment added about 200 potential clients to my business.
I was on to my next experiment.
5. How to webinars -- free
Fairly quickly I moved on to my most successful opt-in that I use to this day: free weekly online workshops or webinars. Based on what my subscribers wanted and the questions I started seeing over and over again in the entrepreneurial groups, I started creating weekly How-to webinars and began trying out
Facebook ads as well, around $100 per week or per webinar.
This turned out to be my favorite opt-in very fast. Not only did my potential customers aka subscriber list grow from 300 to 1400 in 12 weeks -- which is a 400 percent growth, but after offering the replays free for couple of days after the live webinar for those who had signed up for them, I started grouping all these webinars into a membership site, which started to produce a nice income and was a craved bonus for my one on one clients.
Fast forward 100 days and I made my first five figure month, then the growth never stopped.
Passion for Action Entrepreneurs is my free Facebook group where you can find me and where I offer links to my new live webinars.
So, if you are an entrepreneur who is trying to build their business or you haven't even started yet but you deeply want to be financially independent and have your own business, learn from my failures and successes of building a fast growing potential customer list and never give up.