How to get your first 100 email subscribers
One of the biggest mistakes when growing a business is not focusing on building an email list.
An active email list is the essential component of any marketer in almost any sort of business.
- Know who is your target audience.
When you have a business / blog / shop is essential to be aware of your target audience.
Before proceeding into building an email subscriber list, it is necessary to know those who will benefit the most from your content of blog post. The email sign-ups have to be focused on a certain kind of audience.
The aim is not to build an ordinary list just for the sake of building a list, but rather to communicate with people about specific topics which are interesting for them.
Think about what kind of people you want to join your list and how to can give them value.
- Create high-quality content.
Quality content is what will make your potential readers be interested in your brand.
Keep in mind these points while working on your content:
- Use images, videos, infographics or other visual resources.
- Take care of the spellings, the coherence and the tone used.
- Easy understanding of your text.
- Format of your text.
- Have enough knowledge to deal with the issue.
- Use relevant external & internal links.
If you are creating content but your email is not growing, you may have a content problem. Think about it, and improve it few by few to attract new readers who want more from you!
- Choose an email marketing platform.
Once your content is ready, choose an email platform. There are several email marketing platforms, as:
The ones I have used and recommend are:
– Convertkit (this is the one I currently use!)
– GetResponse (great pricing!!)
– MailerLite (great options during free trial!!)
Choose the one that is more convenient for you now, there is always time to change! So don’t overthink it 😉
- Set the opt-in form.
Once you are done writing a copy for your opt-in form (where people leave their name & email) and deciding on a template, you can start posting the opt-in form in various parts such as:
- Homepage
- Blog sidebar
- Footer
- Blog posts
- A welcome page
- Top navigation
Show your opt-in forms in your highest-performing web pages, when relevant, to get maximum exposure. Experiment with different setups and see which one gets fit for your blog post.
- Offer an incentive.
Normally people will subscribe if you offer them something in exchange of their email.
That’s where incentives come in. These are the freebies that you will offer back for their email address. They can come in different forms as:
- Mini-email course
- eBook
- A small discount
- Checklists
- Planners
- A video tutorials
Options are endless in the digital world 😉
- Create a landing page.
A dedicated landing page for email marketing can lift your conversion rate by up to 50% in the best cases. Even if you are offering people something for free, treat it as it would be a small sales page.
Tell your audience WHY they need this! Create a catching title and write the benefits they will get with your freebie.
Now it´s time to bring some traffic to your content and landing pages!
- Share your content where your audience already is.
When you are starting, publishing a new blog post might feel like talking to a wall.
If you don’t have a pre-existing audience who knows about your site, you will need to go out and find it!
You can share your content and landing pages with your opt-in on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, or bring people from Instagram or TikTok.
BUT as we don’t have 1000 hours per day, most bloggers (myself included!) suggest starting just with Pinterest, or at least focus on it.
This platform can have a HUUUGE impact on your page views!! If you are new to Pinterest or don’t know very well if you are doing it right, I highly recommend this Pinterest course, which helped me finally understand this amazing platform.
- Learn about SEO and be found on Google
You may have heard about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What what is it?
Is just to optimize your blog posts so that search engines (as Google, Bing, etc) found your content when someone is searching for some specific topic.
This is something that can take longer than Pinterest but is very beneficial in the long term.
You can find a ton of courses about it but I truly understood it reading this book about SEO (click on image to check it on Amazon)
- Guest blogging.
By guest blogging on a site whose audience is similar to yours, you can easily and quickly reach a large number of potential subscribers.
In addition, your page rank increases, when a high page rank sites links to your site as backlink. By doing so you will rank higher on Google search and get more traffic. It is one of the easy and amazing way to get traffic and email subscribers.
