Today, I wanted to answer a question that I hear very often from current clients, and that is namely, “Kamila, how can I grow my list and get in front of people if I don’t want to run Facebook ads?”

That is a totally fair question and probably one that you have asked yourself at one point or another. It’s a smart question to ask! You want to be growing your email list and your customer list. So you need to be getting in front of new audiences.

I do recommend using Facebook ads. I do them often, and I do them for clients too. I did that as part of my company for a year and a half. It’s been great. We love it, and our clients love it too.

But maybe you’re a little bit newer in business, and you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads quite yet. Or maybe you have been using Facebook ads, and you want to supplement that with other ways of getting in front of new audiences. And I think that’s awesome too.

Bottom line: you need to get yourself in front of a new audience to grow your list. There are three main ways for you to do that. Well, there’s actually many ways for you to do that, but I want to mention three right now.

First, there’s organic traffic. Organic traffic is from searching, people mentioning you here and there, and people finding you in some way. SEO is kind of a part of that.  

Then, there’s paid traffic. Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Instagram, or whatever. Anything that you’re paying money for, specifically and directly, is paid traffic.

Last, there’s referral traffic. Referral traffic is what I want to talk about today. Namely, I want to talk about partnerships because that’s basically what that is. If you do not have a big list right now, this is the best and fastest way to get in front of a new audience.

This is actually what I did when I was twelve years old. I don’t know if you know this story, but when I was twelve, I started a Manga Scanlation website. This was when I was still living in Poland. I had dial-up internet, and I really loved Manga, which is Japanese comics and anime. I was one of two people in this small town who was really into Manga. My Manga mentor was a couple years older than me, and she would go into another town an hour away and would meet up with some other people who were also into Manga. She would bring me back CDs filled with scalations of comics, and I was able to read them on my computer translated into Polish. And it was the best thing ever.

Then, I got dial-up internet and found all of these websites with manga translated into Polish, and I was over the moon about it. And I’m the kind of person that if I see something that I’m excited about, I want do it too, but want to do it better. So, whether or not it was better, I definitely did it, and I was one of the top websites that did provide free scanlations in Polish, and I actually had five volunteer people on my virtual team back in 2002 that were also supporting me and creating these translations and graphics. We were able to get to 40,000 views on that site within four or five months, and we did that through organic and referral traffic.

We didn’t have social media back then. There was no Facebook or Twitter. There was none of that. So I did all of this by utilizing referral traffic. And namely that was partnerships.

So, it worked back in 2002, and it still works today. It’s something that I use to grow my health blog as well. Referrals were one of the biggest things that I did to grow my traffic for that and get more leads for this. It’s something that I love using, even to this day. It’s what I recommend for my clients, especially if they don’t want to spend a lot of money on a launch, project, campaign.

So think of Maria Forleo’s B-school launch. If you have been around the online entrepreneur community, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Every year, Marie does this huge launch, and she enrolls the biggest names of online entrepreneurship, including everybody who’s been through the school, and they all promote B-school. It’s amazing that she’s been able to enroll partners in this way to support her launch, and she’s able to get herself in front of thousands (maybe even millions) of people, mostly brand new people who have never heard of her before. She gets tons of sales this way. She has a multi-seven figure business because she has really learned how to utilize partnerships.

Several months ago, Russell Brunson did the Expert Secrets book launch, and everybody and their mother was promoting that book launch because he did a really amazing partnership launch with affiliates and giving away a Lamborghini and all that good stuff. (Okay I really don’t know everything exactly) But that was really incredible too because he was able to get himself in front of tons people. Everybody was talking about it during that short time frame. He must have sold a ton. I can’t even imagine how many books he sold.

If you don’t know these two people, then there’s probably someone else that you’ve heard about or someone that you already follow. That’s a partnership. There are a lot of different ways for you to approach partnerships. You can either do an affiliate promotion, a joint collaboration, or even something else entirely. But the point here is that you are partnering with somebody or you’re allowing somebody to share your stuff in front of a new audience. And you can do it whether or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur and you just want to get in front of a new audience in addition to running paid traffic sources, or you want to partner with someone and just have a joint effort on promoting each others stuff (or just promoting your stuff and giving them money). There are a lot of different ways of approaching this.

Partnerships are an incredible way for you to grow your lists and your sales.  They’re awesome because, first of all, they get you exposed in front of a brand new audience that had no idea who you were before.

And number two, it creates a win-win situation for you and that other person that’s promoting you. Very often, they’re getting paid commission off of any sales that you’re making or you can also make it a favor. So if they promote you now, when they’re launching you’re going to promote them too.

Another point that’s really incredible about partnerships is that it provides social proof. So not only are you getting exposed in front of a brand new audience, but you’re also able to use a huge amount of trust by piggy-backing off of the influence of that person. That person that’s promoting you to their audience, people that trust them, they’re telling them, “Hey, here’s this person. You really need to check them out because of x, y, and z.”  Well, of course they’re going to listen, because they already trust this person.

This is so much more powerful than just showing up on Facebook and spending a thousand dollars. It’s gonna be harder to convert those people than a thousand people coming from Frank Kern, for example. His audience trusts him so much. They love him. If he were to promote you, then of course, many of those people would sign up and want to work with you. Because Frank Kern said that you’re awesome.

So, I do want to mention a few things before you do create a partnership online:

Make sure you’ve tested your funnel campaign elements. Make sure that everything is working properly and everything is connected.

Secondly, make sure that you have tested your funnel. Is it actually working with organic traffic? That’s really important.

And lastly, are you tracking your success? And how are you doing that? Are you doing it through sales or are you doing it with leads or both? Or traffic? What are you using in order to track your success?

Just be really clear about that, and then you’re going to be off to the races, and you’re going to be able to get out there in a new way.

Hopefully this helpful. I’m super excited to hear what you think about this episode of Hustle Monday. I hope that you enjoyed this strategy, and if you enjoyed it, let me know. I always like hearing from you, and definitely want to hear more in terms of what resonates for you and how you’re able to grow your business using these strategies and tips that I’m sharing with you.