Email list building is an essential part of the online marketing and modern day business development strategies. A number of ways are being used to grow the email list. From bloggers to SEOs, Brands to non-profits, entrepreneurs to marketers, everybody seems to be inclined to grow an email list, which is why I thought to dig in and found the ways to grow an email list.
What is Email List Building?
- Building List Via Regularly Writing on your blog.
- Building List by doing Guest Blogging
- How Linkedin Can help you in List Building?
- Why we need to use Opt-In’s?
- Importance of Choosing the right tools.
- Importance of target audience in list building.
But before going ahead, let me ask you a few questions:
Have you heard about email list building before?
Are you currently building an email list?
Since when you started focusing on the email list?
The point of asking these basic questions is to differentiate the two kinds of audience.
- People who don’t know about email list building
- People who know and building an email list (and need to grow it)
It doesn’t mean this article isn’t for starters who don’t know about email list building. In fact, I want to refer all those starters and beginners who didn’t start building an email list to check out the previously posted article on building an email list.
Once you’re done with the basic understanding, you can quickly jump over to this one and start scratching this one.
6 Ways To Grow Your Email List Without Advertising
1. Write Your Blog Regularly
It might be the simplest advice someone will ever give on email list building and many of us might not take it seriously because everyone who owns a blog write it but no one ever talked about using the blog as an important strategy of email list building.
Here is the part where I come up. Writing a blog isn’t enough. You got to be good at this. Writing regularly might be the key you end up finding. This isn’t that simple. Before you expect people to regularly sign up to your email list, you got to clear with your targeting because it would directly influence your content.
Writing more content would give you a chance to interact with more people through social media as well as search engines. What you need to achieve is something that gets ranked well in the search engines. Once this happens and it’s in line with your content strategy, you’d start getting email sign-ups that would be from your target audience.
For instance, if you have a money making blog, your content strategy must revolve around money making. Just like IncomeDiary. If you analyze this blog, you’ll find IncomeDiary quite focused on money making online and website traffic categories, in fact, most of the articles do reflect the niche “money making online”.
This must be your style of blog posting. You got to be in your niche and you must cover each and every possible topic that anyone would ever try to find about that topic. This will help you develop your blog’s authority and ultimately your blog will bag relevant traffic to your blog, which would lead to the growth of email list.
The point here is, your 20 articles out of 100 won’t go viral, it might be 4 to 6 hardly that will be giving you 75% of your organic traffic, and if those few articles are exactly the relevant articles which are in line with your email list strategy, then we’re good here because you’re collecting the leads that are worth talking to.
2. Guest Post on Others’ Blogs
Guest posting is a good way to bring the relevant audience to your blog. It might not bring a flood of traffic to your blog but specific readers could end up visiting your blog if they liked your guest post on someone else’s blog.
Why would you guest post on others’ blogs?
- To get your face recognized
- To get more eyeballs on your name and picture
- Get a few targeted leads to visit your blog
- To communicate with a new audience
- For Building your authority
- Prove your worth
This is exactly what you should be thinking right now. Gone are the days of guest posting for backlinks. Who would give do-follow links? In fact, if someone does, would it matter if you have no idea how their audience would react to your content?
So, go for a guest post to build RELATIONSHIPS, not BACKLINKS.
There is a strong connection between growing an email list and building relationship with the audience. It doesn’t work for every blog and for every guest poster. You may end up finding a few subscribers from most of the guest posts and then one of the guest posts might trigger the signups for you. Just like every blog post doesn’t go viral, similarly, every guest post doesn’t do well. It is something you figure out by actually trying it.
An article on CoSchedule admits the importance of guest posts. This slideshare presentation helps us understand the right way to do guest posting. Not only does it help to get subscribers, but it also helps us build our online presence.
3. Publish on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has the Pulse network to publish content. It’s free and available for everyone. What it does is, it provides you a chance to help you publish your content on LinkedIn and reach out to your connections and followers on LinkedIn.
It doesn’t require fresh content which means you can repurpose your previously posted articles on your blog to republish them on LinkedIn Pulse.
Now, let’s talk about email list building and LinkedIn Pulse. It’s another opportunity to engage and convert the audience into subscribers. Like other strategies being discussed here, it’s also free to utilize and requires subsequent effort, meaning you may not find amazing results at the beginning. There are two ways get success on Pulse:
Featured Post:
Getting featured on Pulse means Pulse team selects specific posts for every single publishing category on Pulse. If your article is well-written, good-in-shape, and authoritative, the odds are, it could get featured, but it doesn’t happen very quickly. Sometimes a contributor gets his/her article featured within first 10 articles and sometimes it happens between 50 to 100 articles. There isn’t any specific formula for this. You got to keep trying and pushing it harder.
Engage Connections:
Another way of utilizing Pulse network engaging more and more people through your articles. Sharing your articles across social media would help you gather more audience to look at it. Invite friends to check it and encourage them to leave their comments. The more people comments and share your article, the easier it becomes to achieve your goal.
Don’t forget that you’re publishing on Pulse to get email subscribers. Which means publishing great content isn’t enough, in fact, you must have an engagement and click-through strategy in place to get people visit your squeeze page or website to sign up.
Author bio will play a vital role in getting the job done. You must come up with a solid author bio with a few links that are directing towards your certain landing pages or blog pages where people could join your email list.
This doesn’t work very easily. Once you create a great piece of content which tends people to get connected with you for reading future posts or they think you can help them with something, that’s why they would sign up. So you better tell that in the author bio.
4. Use Opt-in Bribes
An Opt-in bribe is a free downloadable product that bloggers and brands offer to get readers email address. They try to provide useful content in a tutorial or guide form which is downloadable in PDF format. All readers need is to sign up and get it for free.
In email list building, this strategy is known as ‘ethical bribe’ whereas the product being offered is called ‘opt-in bribe’.
This strategy is based on two things:
Opt-in Bribe Product:
This is something that interests readers to sign up and get it for free. If people don’t show interest in downloading something useful you’re sharing with them for free, it means either you’re offering the product to the wrong audience or your optin bribe isn’t worth it.
Sign up funnel:
Sign up funnel is a whole squeeze page plan that does work in this process. From reader’s sign up to taking to the download page (where subscriber gets his hand on the PDF). This whole process is a squeeze page funnel that needs to be created through any specific tool. Check out FunnelKit GO for this.
Sue Dunlevie offers her ebook for free on her blog’s landing page. She is offering that ebook as an opt-in bribe. It is exactly what you’ve been told at this point.
Hubspot does the same thing. It’s not necessary that you have to create ebooks all the time. You can come up with anything that interests your audience. Hubspot offered free business templates that could help businesses in the communication.
5. Choose the Right Tools
Whether you’re creating a website or setting up the whole squeeze page funnel, make sure you come up with premium and paid tools.
You can use any email marketing service to create the automation funnel in order to do that. Mailchimp and Aweber are good with simple, sleek, and affordable email marketing service.
LeadPages and Wishpond are best known for their good quality landing pages and squeeze page building services.
Try OptinMonster and MailMunch for creating optin boxes for your website and blog.
Remember that you’re not spending money on advertising yet. All money you spend on the products will help you develop the authority. Advertising does bring visitors (if done rightly) and then converting them into leads is another job to ponder.
Using the righteous tool, the email list building is achievable. It’s true that content strategy does play a huge role in this but the plan can collapse if any of the elements being discussed doesn’t function properly.
6. Target Specific Audience
As discussed at the beginning, this plan does work but on many conditions. The purpose is not to share a shallow concept that may work or may not work, the idea behind is that you can step up to build your email list even when you don’t have a budget to get it started. This is exactly why this article is being written.
Similarly, one of the key elements of building an email list is that targeting must be very clear. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, you may end up frustrated. From creating content to idealizing the audience, solving problems to sharing resources, everything should fall into the circle of your target market.
For instance, if your blog is about blogging tips and you start publishing content on electronics, people won’t sign up to your email list because the audience would arrive on your blog would be looking for information and advice about electronic and why would they sign up to get their blogging to the next level.
The more specific you get in targeting, the simpler it becomes to get relevant people arrive on your blog.
Additional Resources
Conclusion
These six methods underlay the base for your email marketing plan even when you don’t want to spend money on your advertising for email list sign up.
Please, be advised that this method may take some time to start working for you. The more you work on this, the better.
Because at the end of the day even when we fail at something, we end up learning a lesson about that.
The key behind this strategy is that how well you create useful content and develop a funnel for readers to get engaged in a long-term relationship with you.
Will you prefer to start applying this method to build an email list?
