List Growth
- Jay EuDaly
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
Recently I ran a promotion that relaunched the very first lesson series (Triads) that I released over ten years ago. I made the comment that, when I started, my email list was about 300, now it’s over 5,000.
One of my Site Members contacted me and asked,
“What’s the secret to the list growth?”
Answer: A lot of hard slogging and money.
I spend hundreds of dollars a month on ads. A huge percentage of what I make from the website goes back into ad spend. I'm making some money but I'm not really concerned about profit; I still make my living teaching one-on-one and playing 2-5 gigs a week.
I’m not a marketing and promotion guy; I love the content creation and the method (it worked for me!) but I’m not in love with everything else. I’ve kinda been looking for a guy to do the marketing stuff for me. I'm sure a pro in this area who loves analyzing stats all day could get way better results than me with the advertising budget.
Another major growth factor - my mentor (Kenny Salter) in the online lesson download thing had been doing it since 2006. In 2021 he told me he was getting out of the biz and offered to sell me his list.
I don’t usually talk about this because normally buying a random list is considered unethical, or at least not best practice. It can be very risky because you don’t know how the list was obtained.
A lot of scammers sell and resell the same lists to different people. And the lists are bloated with bad emails and non-engaged subscribers.
But in this case the seller was someone I trusted. His concern was that he wanted his list taken over by someone HE could trust to do the best for his list.
He was one of my very first site members. He had purchased my method book and then studied privately with me via Skype. He said I had the best guitar method he’d ever seen. He had referred to me on his social media accounts - he called me his "personal guitar coach.”
This was a guy who had over 7,000 subscribers to his guitar lessons.
He assured me that I was his first choice to trust with his subscribers, and wouldn’t sell his list to anybody else if I accepted. He had scrubbed his list for me - that means he had deleted all bad emails and had deleted his non-engaged subscribers.
That knocked his list size down considerably from 7000, but it guaranteed that I was getting an engaged list with no filler. Statistically, a smaller list is a more engaged list.
The short story is I accepted and more-or-less doubled my list with one whack. He sent his list a series of emails explaining what was going on and that I would be contacting them. They would then be free to unsubscribe from me if that's what they preferred.
Of course, only a percentage of Kenny's list has signed up to be Site Members, but I continue to include all of them in the monthly newsletter, so they have an opportunity to sign up every month.
There have been other, smaller bump-ups, like a couple of joint ventures with local music stores, and when the music store where I had my teaching studio closed for good during Covid the owner there gave me his list.
These music store deals aren’t as lucrative as you might think; those are customer lists, not student lists. The idea being, if you’ve bought a guitar, maybe you’d want some lessons. Every little bit helps.
My goal is always to move people from these various lists to my Site Members list.
Not everyone on my “Total Subscribers” list that receives the monthly newsletter is a Site Member. For instance, anyone who downloads the free 5-Lesson Foundational Series is automatically on the main list but is not automatically a Site Member.
Anyone who downloads anything is automatically on the main list but is not automatically a Site Member.
You can subscribe to this blog but that doesn’t make you a Site Member.
You have to opt-in to become a Site Member.
It’s the Site Members that get all the benefits of the Members-Only area of the website. It’s the Site Members to which I primarily market and sell.
Honestly growing a list is a tedious and frustrating thing. I work my social media sites, I spend the money on ads. I gain new folks week by week. But with every mailing that goes out, there are always a few emails that bounce, there are always a few people who unsubscribe, and occasionally, in spite of me following all best practices to avoid it, someone marks the email as spam.
All these things deplete the list and cut into the gains made every week.
Meanwhile, all I want to do is play the guitar and share what I've learned with those who are interested.
The website is a legacy project as well. Among other things, I want to preserve what I received from John Elliott. He didn't seem to be concerned with a legacy, even though he created the best system of music theory applied to the guitar I've ever seen; it's totally unique as far as I can tell.
I first started this project as the result of multiple synchronicities. When that happens I sit up and take notice; the universe is telling me something and directing me to do something.
The backstory of Master Guitar School's creation, including Kenny Salter's role, is HERE.
So now, after more than ten years, I’m at the point where a large percentage of my lesson content is up on the website, launched and functioning.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still got plenty of content to put up, but I’m thinking I need to flip my focus from content creation (which I dearly love) to marketing and promotion (which I don’t love that much).
We’ll see how that works out for me.
Speaking of marketing and promotion:
How About 5 Lessons?
The 5-Lesson Foundational Series teaches the Circle of Keys as an organizational mechanism by which you ensure that whatever you learn is drilled in every key in all possible positions. It also gives you a method to find any note, anywhere, without memorizing note names on every string. That is a beautiful thing!
Almost every lesson I teach presupposes these 5 lessons.
You can download the 5-Lesson Foundational Series right here with no further obligation or commitment:
Check out Master Guitar School!
Sign up as a Master Guitar School site member and get access to over a hundred site-based lessons, a monthly newsletter that contains a brand-new lesson, and DEEP discounts on lesson series downloads - plus more!
For more information on site membership see: Why Become a Site Member?
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