Next step - decide what your offer will be.

Your "offer" is basically what you offer on the Opt-In form on your website where people will subscribe to your list.

If you're not sure what to offer, look around at some other sites. See what types of "offers" are out there and see what appeals to you. What makes you want to sign up to someones list?

Lead Magnet or no Lead Magnet?

Sometimes people use lead magnets. A lead magnet is basically something free that you are offering to give to your subscriber in return for them putting their email into the signup box. This would be some type of value added item that would appeal to your target market or audience.

For example -

If you have a weight loss blog you might give away a PDF of "5 Simple Steps To Reaching & Staying At Your Target Weight".

Ideally, your lead magnet should be something that will solve a problem that your target audience may have.

In my opinion, it's best to create your own lead magnets so that you brand yourself. If you don't want to do that, you can use PLR material (private label rights). This means you can publish or give away content written by others as your own. There are a number of different sources for PLR. If you're not familiar with it, just Google it and you will find all kinds of information. Again, I believe it's best to create your own content. And you can repurpose your own content in many different ways.

If you don't want to use a lead magnet, then your "offer" could be as simple as offering your subscriber VIP access to your content.

Over time, if you're actively working on growing your list, you'll have multiple different offers for different things on your site and you'll also be able to split test them and see what works and what doesn't.

The most important thing to remember is -

List building is not a quick sprint. It's a marathon.

People who have large lists have spent months and years to grow them.

So if you put the pieces in place and you don't have any subscribers your first day, week, or month....don't worry. Just continue to work on your skillset, your tools, and your offers and the rest will come.