There are 3 important steps in blogging:
- Building your blog/ Upgrading your blog.
- Generating traffic to your blog.
- Monetizing the traffic to your blog.
Without traffic, blogging can be frustrating. So today, I want to expose one of the surefire ways you can generate steady traffic to your blog.
And its called your Email List!
According to Jeff Goins, the international bestseller author of “The Work of Art“, when he approached his publisher about marketing strategies for his next book, they asked him one simple question:
how big is your email list?
When a publicly traded company approached Derek Halpern to buy out one of his popular blogs, he could have asked for 7x to 10x their original offer: If he had an email list!
Why is email so important
- Get more traffic to your site: When someone gives you their email, they have given you the permission to contact them and inform them about the latest posts or product on your website. Research has shown that people who gave you their email are 2x more likely to click on your links than someone who liked your page or followed you on instagram. So if you want more traffic, more pageviews and therefore more revenue (especially for bloggers with google adsense) then you need to start building your email list.
- Its personal: There are no middle-men like Facebook determining whether your email will be seen and when your reader will see it. Its just between you and your reader. No distractions. No new kitty pictures to drag their attention away. And often times, when you send an email to your list, its like beginning a conversation with them and enticing them to continue that conversation by visiting your blog
- Social media messages get swallowed up: I handle two different facebook pages and a twitter account and I have noticed something peculiar: Your updates get swallowed up. Your updates are competing with an ever-increasing newsfeed and most times it does not win that battle. But an email is different. It stands a 42% chance of being seen, unlike social media which has less than 10% chance of your updates reaching your fans/followers
- Gets more clicks than any other social media tool: When your message is seen, it increases the chances of click-throughs. That is why email records more click-through rates than social media.
- Easy to monitor: I run different campaigns on social media and on email. The stats I get for my email list is so detailed and know who (right down to their names) clicked my links, which links they clicked and those who haven’t bothered to check my mail. This is not yet possible with social media. Due to privacy concerns, no social media giant will give you the name and email of people who clicked on links in your updates/timeline.
- Easy to segregate and target specific groups: When a person clicks on a link on your email, you can easily transfer that person to another list, and later target that person with specific sales copy meant to convert that person to a paying customer. Not so with social media.
But I have got news for you. Building an email list is no longer as easy as it was in the golden era of 2001. Terrific content is no longer good enough because everyone is creating wonderful content and readers are spoiled for choice. Pop-ups are so common that many readers now ignore them.
So how do you cut through the competition and build an impressive list in 30 days?
6 surefire ways to build your email list:
1. Run A Giveaway:
Eric of BeardBrand used a giveaway to spike his email list and increase his plateauing sales. Prior to running a contest using Gleam.io, they had 135 subscribers and little sales. After running a week-long contest, BeardBrand had 1001 subscribers. The day they launched the contest, they did about 4x their daily normal sales.
Noah Kagan grew the email list of AppSumo with the first month from 0 to over 30,000 subs with just giveaways! In 10 months he grew his list to 147,973 subscribers; with just giveaways.
Rohan of Wet Shave Club saw how giveaways shot BeardBrand’s email list and revenue. He decided to use it for Wet Shave Club which was a new company he just bought and rebranded.
The results? 2000+ new email subscribers and $100k revenue in 6 months. I don’t know about you but that is pretty impressive. How did they get $100k with their email list?
Simple. By contacting them directly with an discount offer.
Pro Tip: Running a giveaway is an easy way to build your list and increase your blog’s revenue generation. But there is a wrong way to do this and a right way to do this. A wrong way is to offer an iPhone as the prize. Everyone will enter but chances are that most of them are not your target audience. The right way to do this is to give a prize that will appeal only to your target audience. Also promotion of the giveaway is as important as the prize you are giving. Get influencers in your niche/marsupial niches to promote your giveaway and your email list building will skyrocket!
I highly recommend Gleam. I have used them and a few other giveaway software and I completely love their service. You can even start with the free plan.
So if you are too busy to do other methods listed below, a giveaway might be your magic lamp. If you need ideas for a giveaway, drop a comment and I will gladly help out.
2. Guestpost For Influential bloggers/Popular Blogs:
Dan Faggella of CLVboost was able to use guestposting to grow his email list to 10,000 subs in a matter of months. He used guestposting as a watering hose to drive traffic to his site. You can read all about his expert marketing strategy.
Pro Tip: Want your guest posting to result in an avalanche of email subscribers? Then you absolutely must read Henneke’s post on CopyBlogger: Unleash a Surge of Email Subscribers from Your Guest Posts With This Simple Landing Page Strategy
3. Launch Your Website:
When I did my book launch, I made over $3,000 in one day. Launching a product or a service is an effective way of capturing people’s attention.
So why not launch your website and capture emails?
This is exactly what Harleena Singh is doing with her personal website. And her results are spectacular! The traffic to her site must be enough to have spiked her Alexa ranking, even without a single post published.
Ramsey recommends this method and shows how you can do this in this blog post. If you have a tight budget, then you should follow Jon Morrow’s method. While contributing to copyblogger, he was building an email list for his blog. He used a coming-soon software to capture leads. The day he opened his blog for the first time and wrote the first post on his blog, the avalanche traffic was incredible. However, Jon’s method is a slower process of building trust through continuous guestposting/contribution to an influncer’s blog. It might take longer to get 1000 email subs this way but it will be totally worth it in the end.
Tools you can use:
To make this method so much more effective, you can use these tools that will lead to a viral sharing of your launch date and a spike in your email subscription rate.
Launch Rock: A simple tool for launching your website.
SeedProd: I have personally used SeedProd and I absolutely love/recommend them.
4. Content Locking or Article Upgrades:
A article upgrade is an extra material complimentary to the article you just published. If a web visitor loves the article and knows article upgrade will benefit him, he won’t mind parting with his email address, just to get the upgrade. Probloggers like Neil Patel, Bryan Harris have used this technique to increase their email list.
Content locking is more prevalent in subscription sites. A glimpse of the full article is shown (like the first three paragraphs of the article). Then the rest is hidden and only trading an email address will unlock it. This works extremely well in industries where information is not readily available online.
Pro tip: For content locking I highly recommend using OptinLock
For article upgrades consider Optin Monster
5. Free ebook on Smashwords:
This is a smart method and I encourage people to use it too. This is how I found Bryan Harris of videofruit.com and ended up on his email list.
I was simply looking for an ebook on entrepreneurship strategies. In the search results, I saw an ebook with more than 10 contributors who gave great tips on how to upscale your online business. Bryan Harris was one of the contributors. I was sucked in by the practical advice he gave that I immediately clicked the link to his website.
I was not disappointed. His website had more practical advice on how to get customers and build an email list. Long story short, I subscribed to Bryan’s list 3 hours after downloading a free ebook on Smashwords.
Pro Tip: Publishing an ebook on Smashwords or Amazon is great. Making it free is even better. Want to attract 1000s of downloads? Co-author the book with 5 to 20 more experts in your niche.
6. Contributing to another Problogger’s Freebie:
Mary Jaksh optin “The (Nearly) Ultimate Guide to Writing is how I discovered the Freddy Krugger of blogging, Danny Iny and ended up on his email list.
Gone are the days when you see other bloggers as your rivals. If you can collaborate with another blogger, (especially one who has more traffic than you) to contribute to his/her optin, you will be increasing the chances of being found on the blogoshere.
There you have it: 6 simple ways to grow your email list.
Over to you. In the comments, tell me what ways you use to grow your email list. If you are stuck and want to know ways you can grow your own email list, peculiar to your niche, ask me in the comments. I reply to every comment and will gladly help you out.