Last year, I launched a brand-new blog – Growthtext

Since most of the list building content I had been reading online was either outdated or just mumbo-jumbo list articles (listicles) which don’t provide real meat, I headed out to build my list my own way.

I tested countless list building tricks and strategies (over 50+).

#1. I experimented with different traffic sources to see which convert,

#2. Tested different types of content to see what engaged my target audience and prompted them to share,

#3. Experimented with different lead capture forms on different pages of Growthtext to see which work the best and which people hate.

#4. I tested different social media platforms, paid traffic, online forums, online communities, Facebook groups, email outreach strategies;

#5. I even sent cold emails to big name influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Mari Smith, Larry Kim, Sam Hurley and others to find out what makes influencers want to promote me to their audience and what doesn’t.

Six months of effort, of trial and error, grew my Growthtext blog email list from 0 to 5,000 subscribers.

Growing your audience and building your list is not easy.

You must run lots of experiments to find out what works. Most of your experiments will fail.

Of those that succeed, most techniques and tricks are not scalable, meaning they are not methods you can reliably step and repeat.

My best advice-

Don’t just jump in and blindly apply what you read online.

Chances are, you will be angry, frustrated, and not in the mood to keep going.

If you are going to build your list, here are 6 list building mistakes you DON’T want to waste your time on:

Organic reach on Facebook is 6%, and falling every year.

Twitter click through rates average 0.5% across all niches.

Unless you are Gary Vaynerchuk or Guy Kawasaki, your Facebook post and Tweets will surely go unnoticed.

When you are starting out, don’t waste time building your social media followings with the intention of converting them into email subscribers.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is noisy.

People on LinkedIn rarely pay attention to what happens in their news feed. As a result, the engagement is desperately low.

It is not surprising. LinkedIn is designed for networking to find jobs and for B2B collaborations.

It’s pretty useless if you are there to build your email list.

These two platforms can only benefit you if you keep on producing visually appealing content.

Not only that, you need to produce a lot of visuals consistently – like making 5–10 posts a day, for months.

Even after you do that, there is no guarantee that you will have thousands of followers a few months later.

Growing your audience using Instagram and Pinterest is a marathon. A long one.

These places are not likely to be the best choices if you are up for fast and efficient growth.

Overall, Instagram and Pinterest are great. However, chances are they won’t grow your email very fast.

Despite its huge number of daily visitors, Reddit is a difficult place to achieve success.

Reason being? Everyone there hates self-promotion.

Things go great so long as they do not know you are promoting your own content and building your list.

As soon as someone recognizes your true purpose, you are accused of self-promotion and are likely to be banned.

Overall, Reddit is great.

It is perfectly fine to post something on Reddit every once in a while, and attract a few new email subscribers to your list.

However, if you do it too often, their axes fall real fast.

Rule out Reddit if you are looking for a predictable and scalable way to build an email list.

SEO your site to the top of Google and convert part of the site visitors into email subscribers.

Seems like a plan, right?

The truth is – Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is nearly a complete waste of time until you have an aged website which is already loaded with a ton of content.

Performing basic SEO is all that’s needed as you write your pages, not full on optimization.

You can save that for later.

As a matter of fact, since only a few prime pages need to be optimized, you can forget about altogether at first.

When Growthtext hit my 10,000 visitors per month traffic goal, I didn’t go out to get one single backlink to my blog (links from other sites to yours are just one part of SEO).

I just didn’t pay attention to my Google ranking at all.

Google is not really relevant when you’re just starting to build your list.

Here is the fact almost no marketers want to tell you about – guest posting is a terrible strategy for generating traffic to your website to build your list.

Tim Soulo reached out to bloggers behind 239 guest posts that were published on 78 blogs in the marketing niche, and asked them one question:

“What’s the amount of referral traffic that you can get from a guest post?”

The answer?

56 visits!

Yes, on average, 56 visits across those 239 guest posts. Not impressive.

While guest posting on websites with huge traffic numbers can result in a lot of eyes on your post (on that website), it’s difficult to move the readers on over to your own site.

So again, forget this strategy when you’re starting out.