Biz Ladies: How to Proactively Grow Your Email List

Today’s Biz Ladies post comes to us from Cristina Roman, the founder and editor of One Woman Shop, a community where female solopreneurs and freelancers can find resources and more. She works with solo business owners to help them increase their productivity, build their brands and establish awesome online presences through digital marketing. Today she’s sharing how she grew the One Woman Shop email list through direct outreach. Thank you so much Cristina for sharing your insight and list of resources with us today! –Stephanie

Read the full post after the jump…

If you’re like most solo or small business owners, you’re constantly on the lookout for ways to grow your community of supporters, clients, customers and collaborators.

At One Woman Shop, a resource hub and community for female solopreneurs and freelancers, we have a secret weapon that we use to proactively grow our community: email. No, not email marketing, just email.

Since adding smart, resourceful solo business owners to our community is one of our top priorities, we decided to take matters into our own hands. Sure, we spend time pinning, tweeting and Facebooking and yes, we set up a pop-up plugin on the site and started offering an opt-in freebie, but one of our biggest initiatives recently has been direct outreach through email.

It’s simple, really. Anytime we see a female solo business owner online, we send them an email telling them about our community and asking them if they would like to join our email list.

Here’s how you can do the same in your business:

Make a list

You know all of those awesome people you connect with on Twitter and follow on Pinterest and see in the comment area of your favorite blogs? Make a spreadsheet with the columns Name, Business, Email Address, Contacted (Y/N), Date, and Status and begin inputting information into the first two columns as you come across new individuals who you’d like to connect with.

Take it a step further by drafting a list of keywords that your target community members would use to describe themselves and their interests, being sure to make note of possible synonyms. Search for these keywords on LinkedIn, Google and FollowerWonk, a handy tool for searching Twitter bios. For example, we search for both