When you initially launch your blog or website, it can be difficult to attract people to sign up to your email list. Some experts recommend guest blogging to reach a wider audience and build your email list. Unfortunately, this typically only attracts a few subscribers and isn’t a great return for all the effort put into creating the guest post.
To attract higher amounts of subscribers to your blog on a budget you’ll need to take a slightly different tack. It’s important to implement some practical strategies to really drive the subscriber numbers needed to boost your blogging income.
Once you’ve built a subscriber list, you’ll have to keep email best practices, like segmenting customers, using a tool to check if an email is valid, and personalizing subject lines in mind. Below are some tried and tested ways you can build up your email list this.
Produce an appealing lead magnet or giveaway
To encourage website visitors to share their email address with you it’s helpful to give something away. The give-away product should somehow relate to your main offering and be free in exchange for an email address.
This product doesn’t have to be overly complicated and certainly shouldn’t overshadow your core products. Rather it should be complimentary to your main offerings and work to lead clients to them.
Options include making parts of your paid product free, similar to Survey Monkey or Asana. Each of these businesses offers a basic package which familiarizes customers with their main paid services in exchange for an email address. Once subscribers come to know the product and have grown to see the value, they are easily persuaded to upgrade to paid accounts.
Free subscriptions to basic services is just one option. Creating downloadable resources such as checklists, how-to guides, information packs, and multiple other options can also work successfully. The key is to solve one of your audience’s pain points quickly and efficiently.
Reverse engineer guest posts
Being featured on another website with higher traffic than your own is one way to increase awareness of your goods or services. However, unless you approach this situation a bit differently to common guest blogging advice, it is unlikely you’ll attract huge numbers of subscribers.
You should begin by building your guest post around your lead magnet offering. Make sure the post or interview builds up to the call to action. That way, people are primed for clicking through to your site and taking advantage of that great product you’ve promised them throughout. Include your call to action within the post too, not just at the end or in your bio.
You can make your offer irresistible by setting high expectations at the outset, creating relatable examples, and providing a few links through your post to the offering page of your site. By following a clear guest blogging strategy that reverse engineers the process, you should be able to scale up subscribers far better.
Upgrade your content
Content upgrades are relatively easy and should be used to boost subscribers. They can be as straightforward as turning high performing posts into checklists, downloadable templates, or PDFs.
What’s important here is to make sure the information you are upgrading has already shown a good level of engagement and is tailored to be an exact fit for your audience by only providing relevant information. Brian Dean, SEO expert and founder of Backlinkio increased his conversion rates from 0.54% to 4.82% with this same technique. It’s small changes like these that can reap substantial returns.
Ensuring your subscriber list continues to grow at a good pace requires thinking a little outside the everyday blogging box and considering your audience’s needs in depth. In addition to the above, place your CTA’s prominently on each page of your website so visitors always have the option to sign-up. Well placed CTA’s can boost subscriber rates as much as five times.
Put these solutions in place today to watch your email list grow faster than ever before.
About the author
Rae Steinbach is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course).
