Let’s recap a minute…

Your #1 goal for the next 7 days is to get your first 100 subscribers.

The most effective and quickest way to quickly jump-start your list is to backload your list with Eager Sneezers (people you already know who will tell their friends about you). We’ve worked through inviting folks we know from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, contacts in your phone, people you’ve emailed with and people you’ve had phone conversations with recently.

But what do you do if you still don’t have 100 subscribers?

Two things:

Thing #1: Make sure you aren’t making excuses and that you are doing the work.

It’s super easy to make excuses about why this won’t work for you. Stop it! And start inviting your friends.

In the early stages of growing your business, everything is extremely fragile. Your idea is seconds away from dying. The biggest influencer on your idea could die. You getting discouraged and quitting. You getting sidetracked on another idea. You losing focus. You not getting feedback when you put your heart and soul into content and products.

So...this initial strategy of extending invitations serves a few purposes:

1) It quickly builds your list.
2) It allows you to build a great referral source by leaning on people you know.
3) It allows you to get instant feedback on the content you create because you aren’t starting with a readership of 4) You are starting with 100+ readers.

Which means you’ll get traffic, shares and comments from day #1.

So...if you’ve been making excuses like, “Bryan, I bought this course to learn how to build an email list, not to bug my friends," then I can tell you two things:

1. That’s a limiting belief that you MUST overcome. No strategy will overcome your excuse-making.
2. Get to work. It’s easier than you think.

Thing #2: Reach out to strangers who already have interest in your topic.

But let’s say you are a hermit who lives in the middle of the woods and you have 2 friends and they both joined your list already. What’s a hermit to do?

You need to find people who are already interested in your topic but that you don’t know. (Obviously you don’t know them because you are a hermit, duh!)

How do you find these people?

Easy. Twitter.

This is how it works:

Step #1: Make a list of 5-10 keywords surrounding your industry and exact topic.

Step #2: Go to search.twitter.com, type in your keywords and find people already talking about them.

Step #3: Invite them to join your list.

Quick example...

Let’s say your topic is teaching people how to potty train their kids.

Your keywords will be things like:

• potty train
• pull-ups
• poopy diapers

A quick search for those keywords produces a list of 100s of people in the middle of trying to figure out how to potty train their kids. This is a gold mine.

Here is one example:

Your last step is to individually reach out to each person who’s expressed interest in the topic.

You can use this as a general script:

Message 1: @[username] I’m actually in the middle of writing an article about [keyword you searched for]. Want me to send it over when done?

Message 2: [once they respond positively] Awesome! What's your best email? I’ll send it over in the next few days.

Since these are people you don’t know, it will take more work. It will also be harder to get these folks to quickly refer their friends to you as well. But if you legitimately don’t know anyone and have exhausted your contact lists, then use this strategy to round out your first 100 subscribers.