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March 30, 2016

Why it's not ok to purchase your email list, fans, or social audiences

By Kate Ellis
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(This is a follow-up blog to our weekly #MagnetMarketers session with Jessika Phillips and Mike Gingerich)

We all know the emails. They say something like you too can get to the front page of Google! For the low, low price of $100 a month, poof! You’re on Google! Or emails saying that they’ll sell you 12,000 valid emails of people interested in your services.

Now, these offers are popping up on social media platforms, too. So what’s the deal? Are these legitimate?

We’re sorry to tell you, but nope. These offers are scams! Let’s be honest, if it worked that well, everyone would be doing it. But it doesn’t work as they claim it does. For one, how do you know these emails, fans or likes are real? They’re probably not the valuable potential customers your are lead to believe, let alone real people.

It’s hard to earn the audience, fans and likes you want, that can be true. But we want to earn them organically because naturally interested persons will be more likely to purchase from your company. Paid for audiences won’t give you a dime. They can also cause your numbers to look off, which can potentially be more embarrassing for your company, should you buy and then lose the fans, or if someone sees what you’re up to. Nobody would trust a business who bought their fans.

The bottom line is that if you are a good business you will be able to grow your audience naturally. We’ve seen clients go from zero to 1,000 in a month.

Growing your audience, fans, and likes come down to serving your audience what they want. People are looking for quality content and that’s what Google is looking for as well.

Google is trying to give the best and most qualified answers for questions people search. They’re trying to weed spam out and have very specific algorithms to do such. If you allow someone to do something on the back end of your website it looks very bad on your website and social media pages. You might even get blacklisted by Google! That’s the opposite of your goal.

So, how can you actually grow your email in legitimate ways?

As we said earlier, quality content is so incredibly important in order to grow your audience. You need blogs and content that is relevant to your industry, using specific keywords that will get your company found. Once you have quality website content you can begin to use that for your social media pages.

Once you're sharing your own content, you can also begin to share and interact with others content. Curate content and schedule it ahead of time to make this a little easier. Follow others in your industry and begin to talk to others, and use the platform for what it’s made for. Be social!

Once you begin to interact with people, they’ll become your fans. Always make sure you have content that allows them to easily click to visit your website. From there you want to look into lead capturing software, some sort of soft opt-in. Provide free downloadable resources - longer and more valuable than a blog post - and make it available for those who trade their name and email. There you are! You’ve just grown your email list organically by offering valuable content!

It will take some work to get there. It’s day to day thing. Just remember to be consistent and you will begin to see growth naturally. You will be well on your way to growing a dedicated following.

If you missed out on our #MagnetMarketers session and want to hear more of the conversation replay it here.  Join us on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. EST on #MagnetMarketers.

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Tags: inbound marketing

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