When I first started blogging I had a blog post go viral right off the bat. You may have seen it if you like country farmhouse décor. Well, it went viral after just a couple months of me posting it! And even though I was getting thousands of blog visits each month, I wasn’t getting any email subscribers. And I knew that was bad. I knew early on that building your email list is super important step for monetizing my blog in the future. But I was a little perplexed as to how to get those subscriptions. So I dove into learning all about email list building tips and tips for bloggers.
As soon as I started implementing the 7 changes below I saw results. It was very clear that these changes were working! So hopefully this will help you improve the rate at which you are building your email list.
If you like, you can download the cliff notes of this article as cheat sheet.
I like to keep this list of 7 tips nearby as I write new blog posts.
Grab it here:
But, First! Your Ideal Blog Reader
But remember, you don’t want anyone and everyone to sign up for your email. You really only want a specific kind of person as your blog reader.
You want the kind of person who has the problem that you are solving with your blog and your products and services.
If you’re like me, you may have a ton of interests and hobbies. And it’s easy to start blogging about everything under the sun. The problem is, when you blog for everyone, you’re blogging for no one in particular. You need to really flesh out a specific kind of ideal blog reader and customer and then write specifically to them in your blog posts.
Later on you can expand into different categories, once you’re seeing some success. But I would really caution against going to far and wide in the beginning.
Try to think of that ideal blog reader as we go over these email list building tips.
So We’re On The Same Page…
By the way, if you’re in the dark about what I’m talking about, your opt-in rate is simply the percentage of people who sign up for your email.
Opt-in rate = the number of emails subscribers you got on that page, divided by all the unique visits to that page.
This can also be called your email subscription rate, too, but it all means the same thing.
My first viral post probably got 9 subscribers from several thousand visits. And that’s horrible!
At first I thought, well, my blog post must really suck. Everyone visits and decides not to sign up for more posts like this one.
While that was partly true, there were still some other opt-in elements of which I was totally ignorant, which had the potential to greatly increase my opt-in rate.
Let’s go over the 7 email list building tips that improved my own subscriber rate.
1. Sprinkle Opt-Ins Inside Your Post.
I learned I needed to sprinkle the email opt-ins into the post itself. And not just leave the optin in the side menu and blog footer.
So the next time I made a blog post I tried out this new method of sprinkling the opt-ins into the post. I put one email opt-in in the middle of the post and one at the end.
Right off the bat, my opt-in rate increased.
It makes sense, too, right? I had just made it easier for my reader to sign up. I put the opt-in right in front of them. No longer did they have to go searching for how to sign up for emails.
This is an example of an opt-in right here:
There are many types of opt-ins available.
You can have pop-ups, text links, minimal forms like the one above, or opt-ins with images. You can see my opt-in with an image further down in this article and also at the beginning.
2. Change the wording of your call to action.
“Subscribe to our email newsletter!” is soooo boring, you guys. And that’s what I had as my call to action for the longest time!
You might as well say “Subscribe for our spam letter!”
The problem is people’s inboxes are cluttered with unwanted emails. They need to get a glimpse of why they should take a risk on you.
Make it fun, interesting, different. But don’t say the same old thing that every other blogger out there says.
Try to communicate what your email is about in your call to action, so they can get excited about signing up.
Here are some improvements on the typical call to action:
“Join the sisterhood of dried flower fanatics!”
“get your weekly dose of ____”
“grab your weekly DIY plans here!”
3. Use a lead magnet to attract your ideal customer.
A lead magnet, also known as an opt-in freebie, or opt-in magnet is something of value you give to your reader in exchange for their email.
It’s fun little incentive to make them WANT to sign up for your email list.
When you’re shopping online, the most common one you’ll see is “get 20% off your first purchase when you sign up for email!”
There are so many ways to make cool lead magnets.
Here are a few popular lead magnets:
- Webinar
- E-book
- Templates
- Printables
- Challenge / mini-course
- Coupon
The lead magnet I made for this post is a simple cheat sheet. It makes it easy to reference all these tips as a blogger is writing their blog post.
When you focus on making something with a high perceived value for your blog reader, then you’ll get lots of email sign-ups.
If you already have products for sale, digital or physical, try making lead magnets that are related to the topic of your products. And your blog content should also be related to your products.
Then, because they just signed up for your lead magnet, you can be sure they are interested in that topic.
Remember, you are writing and creating products for one specific ideal blog reader. You are helping her solve her problems and achieve her desired outcomes in life. Your blog exists to make her life better in some way!
Keep that in mind when you are making your lead magnet.
Example:
So if you have a food blog and you sell your self-published cookbook on your blog, your lead magnet could be a set of beautiful recipe card printables. They’d be digital cards, so as soon as your reader signs up for your email, then your digital recipe card would automatically get emailed to them.
You now know that they must like cooking or baking if they just downloaded recipe cards. So you have a good chance that your new subscriber may be interested in your blog content and your cookbook that you sell.
Also, if you’re using a lead magnet, this makes your call to action much easier.
Now you can say something like, “grab your free digital recipe cards!” right next to the email opt-in box.
Or “New digital recipe cards every month! Grab yours here.”
The point is, give them something awesome that’s related to the kind of products or services you sell.
4. Make the opt-in button a contrasting color.
It doesn’t have to be ugly. But make it stand out.
Make it so that it catches their eye and stops them from scrolling. If it just blends in with the rest of the post they may just scan right over it and never even see that you’ve got an email list.
There have been tests that show red does well. Blue also does well because people perceive the color blue as trustworthy. Yes, you read that right. People actually associate meanings to colors, and you can use that to help your opt-in rate.
As for myself, I don’t worry too much about the meaning behind the color, but I do want it to contrast the surrounding area.
5. If you’re using a lead magnet, then make sure it’s also related to the blog post where you insert the opt-in and lead magnet.
You won’t get very many sign ups if you have a lead magnet for free recipe cards posted inside an article about the healthiest microwave meals. The people who want to read about microwave meals are not interested in cooking.
Likewise, don’t post it inside a blog post about your favorite fall fashion picks from Target. It’s too unrelated.
And while you may get some takers, you’ll get so many more if the lead magnet matches the content where you put it.
Yes, you can use the same lead magnet over and over in all your blog posts that are related to it. You don’t have to make a new lead magnet for every post.
6. Try using social proof. Especially if you don’t have a lead magnet.
Social proof is basically using people’s fear of missing out to encourage them to sign up.
An example would be “join the 8,573 women who get free digital recipe cards every month!”
The reader thinks, “wow, a lot of women signed up for that, so it must be good. I should try it out, too!”
It adds credibility to your call to action especially if they don’t yet know who you are.
They think to themselves, “Well, if other people think it’s awesome, then maybe I will, too.”
If this new reader doesn’t know anything about you, then this social proof shows them that you do provide content that a lot of people like. You aren’t just some scammer/spammer.
If you don’t have a list yet, I bet you have some followers on other social media channels, like Instagram, pinterest, facebook, etc. Just add up all your followers on those other platforms, and say something like “join the 3,987+ women who follow us for free weekly recipe cards”
Get creative! I know you can come up with an awesome call to action.
And don’t feel bad about changing it as you learn more about this. You should be constantly improving! Learning something doesn’t work is not a failure! It’s a blessing. Now you don’t have to waste time on that, and you can start testing new things.
7. Now pin the heck out of your blog post images to help it go viral and capture those visitors on your email list.
The secret to pinning a ton of your own content without spamming your followers is to have lots of graphics.
If you have lots of pinnable graphics, that don’t all look the same, then your followers don’t feel like they are always seeing the same thing from you.
You’ll want your blog graphics to have dimensions that are in the ratio of 2:3. For example, I make my graphics 1000×1500, and that’s a 2:3 ratio.
Make the graphics eye-catching and relevant to the blog post content. That way, when people are searching for topics like your blog post, your images will pop up in their pinterest feed.
Use lots of relevant keywords in the pin description and title that would attract someone interested in that blog post information.
I made some blog graphic templates that you can download for free. They make it easy to make great pinnable images for your blog. They are in this blog post here about making blog graphics.
You can insert the graphics into your blog posts or upload them to pinterest directly with your blog post url.
The templates are so easy to use! Just drag your own photos into it and they snap into place.
Change out the words of the text to fit your blog post.
Edit the colors, size, fonts if you want. Or you can leave them the same.
There’s more info on viral pins than I can go into in this blog article.
I do go more in-depth into what makes a pin go viral in my workshop series, Pin To A Million.
Pin To A Million
Pin To A Million is a 3 part workshop that details what you need to know to make great pins, get more views on Pinterest, capture that traffic onto your email list, and then how to prime your email list to become raving fans who love you and your products.
You can check out the workshops here.
I built Pin To A Million with my earlier blogger self in mind. What would have helped me way back when I was struggling with list-building and driving traffic to my blog?
You get a ton of templates, checklists, worksheets, and video series to walk you through actionable improvement.
If you’re reading this, it’s only $37 right now! (Price will be going back up to $97 soon)
Did I mention you get bonuses, too? You can see the bonuses here.
7 Tips Summary
I hope this blog post was very helpful to you and that you found at least a couple ideas to try out on your own email opt-ins.
I used to get about 1 email subscriber a month. No joke!
Now days I get several new subscribers every day! And I haven’t even finished making all the improvements to my opt-ins that I know I should.
To summarize, we went over 7 email list building tips:
- Sprinkle opt-ins inside your post. (not just in the side and footer menus)
- Change the wording of your call to action.
- Use a lead magnet to attract your ideal customer.
- Make the opt-in button a contrasting color.
- If you’re using a lead magnet, then make sure it’s also related to the blog post where you insert the opt-in and lead magnet.
- Try using social proof, especially if you don’t have a lead magnet.
- Now pin the heck out of your blog post images to help it go viral and capture those visitors on your email list.
If you’d like to print these email list building tips so you can refer to it as you are writing new blog posts or going back and improving old ones, then download the 7 Tips to Build Your Email List Faster below…
Remember, everybody you look up to and think of as being so far ahead of you was exactly where you are at some point in their past. They didn’t give up. They kept trying and practicing and improving!
I hope you will keep at it, too!
Try out some of these 7 email list building tips and leave me a comment about any questions or suggestions you may have. And don’t forget to grab your free cheat sheet of this article above!
Thanks for stopping by!
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