Here’s How a Brand New Website Built an Email List of More than 1,300 Contacts in Three Days

Today I'm going to share how the website FunThingsToDo.io generated 22,000+ pageviews from a single blog post. The unbelievable part is that the post had zero backlinks and the domain was only three and one-half months old when this happened. (The website went live in December of 2015, while the specific article that gained this much traffic was published Feb.1, 2016.)

In this post, I'm also going to share with you how FunThingsToDo gained more than 1,300 new email subscribers in just three days.

Step 1: Find the right long-tail keywords

In this specific case, the keyword was "best flea markets in Louisiana." The team brainstormed around the topic, then manually typed the search terms into Google, giving it the old eyeball test. When searching for "best flea markets in Louisiana," it was noticed that the results were full of specific flea market websites, Facebook pages, and a few random, low-quality directory websites.

Keep in mind that the goal here was to begin building an email list, not sell a service or market a product. If the goal was to market a product or sell a service, then his keyword would not have been worth pursuing.

Step 2: Produce superior content

The focus was on creating a piece of content that was better than anything else out there.

In the case of the "best flea markets in Louisiana," the No. 1 ranked article was a list of the five best flea markets. So, the Fun Things team decided to put together a list of the 10 best Louisiana flea markets. The overall design quality of the site was also a major upgrade in comparison to the competition for this keyword.

Step 3: Light the fire

Fun Thing's process was simple: They messaged the 10 flea markets on Facebook, letting them know they were featured as "one of the 10 best flea markets in Louisiana" on their site.

Note: Depending on your industry/niche, a large-scale email outreach campaign may give you better results.

Step 4: Implement a strong call-to-action

The team kept an eye on their analytics. As soon as they saw above average traffic, they took note of which pages were attracting the most traffic.

The folks at FunThingsToDo were late in setting up their email capture, which resulted in missing out on hundreds of new email subscriptions. On the flip side, that could be the reason the page caught on in such a strong fashion: Many people enjoy access to a popular piece of content without being asked for something in return.

Here is the email capture the Fun Things team implemented:

And the results:

FunThingsToDo definitely received an amazing return on their investment. But there is something that stands out even more than the sheer number of new subscriptions they received: The conversion rate stayed between 8% and 9%.

The Fun Things team is a big fan of using full-screen email captures (image shown earlier in this post). The fullscreen lightbox in this post is running on Thrive Leads, which is very similar to OptinMonster. The team believes this platform has several benefits that allow their email capture forms to perform better than other types. For example:

1. They remove all distractions from the page because you cannot see anything other than the form.
2. Many people do not understand that you can close these capture forms like normal popups, so they just fill them out.

With a conversion rate over 8%, it is hard to argue with them.

Takeaways

What I really want people to take away from this article is that attaining virality is possible. With proper research, the right opportunity, and a willingness to create solid content, even small brands can win the viral content game.

What are your thoughts? Have you employed a similar approach?