5 Tips to Grow Your Email List on Autopilot

When I first got started blogging, every website or blog that I read always harped on starting and building an email list, but very few of them actually gave you realistic tips to actually do that. Crazy right? But a healthy email list is critical in your success as a blogger and I’ll tell you why. Because your email list is solely yours! It doesn’t go away or change its algorithm every few months like Instagram and Pinterest. For me as a lifestyle and college blogger, I’m in the business of providing information and helping people with their problems, and the only real way for me to communicate to the right audience is through my email list. My email list is full of people who are interested in the kind of content that I write about, which means they are interested in the products that I have to sell. Growing a good email list takes time, patience, and a little bit of effort on your part, especially when you’re first starting out. In today’s post, I’m going to share with you some tips that will help you grow your email list on autopilot.

Tip #1: Create target freebies for your audience

A freebie is a piece of information, like an e-book, checklist, or worksheet, that you give to your subscribers in exchange for their email address. Nowadays, people are tough cookies about giving up their email address so your opt-in (or freebie) has to serve a purpose and solve a problem for your targeted audience.

When you’re first starting out, look on your Google Analytics and create freebie for your top 5-6 blog posts and tailor it the audience that you want to reach. Freebies have been my bread and butter when it comes to growing my email list.

Don’t know what you could use as a freebie? Here are some examples of opt-ins that you could create for your website:

Worksheets
Email course or challenges
E-book
Pintables
Webinar or audio recording
Resource library (a library filled with tons of freebies)
Presets

Overall, there are two types of incentives that can provide your audience free and valuable information. One type is attached to a blog post and was created with that blog post in mind. For an example, I have a blog post dedicating to teaching people how to make money on Poshmark, so my freebie was a checklist of how-to set-up your Poshmark account for success. For the second type, these aren’t attached to a particular piece of content and are typically larger. An example may be an email course or e-book that you can promote anywhere on your blog. I created a free 7 day email course to help my fellow college students improve their studying, which is perfect for my audience.

Here are a few of my blog posts and landing pages that contain different types of opt-ins (or freebies):

My advice for you, especially if you’re just getting started, create both types of content upgrades to see what works best for your audience. Write a few that are blog post specific and one that is general enough to be used on any page of your website. The point of creating these freebies is once you start attracting people to your website, you want to give them a reason to subscribe to your blog and stick around for a while.

Tip #2: Create consistent content (with incentives)

I’m sure if you’ve heard this plenty of times all over the internet about how important consistency is for any website or social media platform. People want to be able to come to your blog on a regular basis and find new information that either helps them solve a problem or get to know you better as the writer. As you’re creating new content each month, you should be adding new content upgrades on a regular basis whenever one naturally fits in.

I recommend creating one content upgrade per month that it can fit in with multiple different types of blog posts or just a general one that you can promote on social media. This way you always have fresh freebies to incise your readers, but you won’t get burned out by consistently thinking of new ways to reinvent the wheel if you get what I’m saying.

Tip #3: Promote your freebies

Now that you’ve created your first freebie and got it uploaded to your website, the next step is to promote your freebie like a crazy person, especially if you’re just getting started in the blogging world. The easiest way to promote your freebie is by increasing your overall website traffic. People can’t sign up to your email list if they don’t know who you are.

I get a lot of my traffic from Pinterest and Google through a little something called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. To give you a quick overall view, both of these platforms utilize SEO to rank each piece of content based on most helpful to least helpful. So say you type into Google or Pinterest “ways to study more effectively”, both platforms are going to give you a ton of search results based on your search question.

Magic, right? Nope! It’s just SEO at its best. The goal is to have better SEO filled with searchable keywords that will allow your website to pop-up first in the search bar. To be honest, SEO is a beast in itself and it can take a little work/research to get it right. I’m by no means a master at SEO (even though I wish I were), but here are a few general tips to help you improve your blog post SEO:

Use searchable keywords that your readers may be using to find your article
Insert those keywords throughout your blog post, the title, your blog post url, and in your image file name and description
Link to your other blog posts if they are relevant to the topic

Tip #4: Send a welcome email sequence

You’ve snagged the email address, but now you have to send quality content to your subscribers if you want your subscribers to stick around. This also means that you need to baby your list, nurture them, and build trust with your new email subbies. A really good way for you to start building that trust and nurturing your list is to introduce yourself to your subscribers with a welcome email sequence.

A welcome email sequence is a set of emails that you set up in your email list host to automatically send out every time a new person signs up for your email list. In this series, you can tell your subscribers about a personal story, share expectations, ask questions to your subscribers, or tease them with another freebie that solves a problem in their lives.

When you’re growing your email list, you have to remember that the people on your email list are real people and that you want to strike up a conversation with them on a regular basis. It’s okay to be vulnerable and to share personal stories with them. Don’t forget that these people are your biggest fans and are interested in what you have to say.

Tip #5: Send exclusive perks to your email list

Lastly, treat your subscribers like MVPs or insiders of your business! They should be the first to know about anything new happening with your blog (or business), get exclusive content that nobody else has access to, and even receive special discounts on products for being signed up. Your subscribers should feel and be treated as if they were your best friends in real life (which they are but you know what I mean).

Whenever you have a personal, vulnerable story that might help your readers, share it with them. Hosting a free workshop that solves a problem that your subscribers definitely have too, tell your subscribers. Be open, be vulnerable, and let loose when it comes to talking with your subscribers. It’s definitely hard at first because it’ll feel like you’re talking to thin air or a black void on the internet. But once you get your first response to your email, you’ll feel so much relief that someone actually reads your emails that you send out!

Woe! I know that was a lot of information all at once, but there was a lot of tea to spill on how to actually grow your email list without you pulling your hair out. It can be difficult at first because you’re still learning, but once you get started, I promise you it gets easier. Learn what your readers enjoy and keep producing content that keeps bringing them back for more and more! Haven’t started your blog yet? No worries! I wrote an entire blog post about how to start a profitable blog from day one that takes you step by step on how to get started in less than 30 minutes.

Interested in learning more about how to grow your email list on auto-pilot? Download the free 30-Day List Building Challenge guide to learn today about how to set yourself up for success! You can easily gain 100 email subscribers in less than 30 days if you participate in the challenge. So are you ready to get started?

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