Working on growing your email list? Excellent, as an entrepreneur looking for business success you'll love these three strategies I'm going to share with you what's working right now with list building.
I'm going to assume you've tried all the usual strategies, such as offering a freebie through a pop-up or sidebar form, hosting a free webinar, or maybe even running Facebook ads.
While all those techniques can work, they’re not going to produce a tidal wave of names and emails onto your list. This post explores three strategies that you can use for list growth.
LinkedIn Publishing
Not so long ago, good bloggers and writers found success by syndicating their content on sites such as Ezine Articles or with guest blogging. The Google changes of 2014 have put an end to the spammy aspects of these strategies (mostly) but there is one up-and-coming publishing platform that looks promising: LinkedIn.
Their blogging tool allows users to post long-form updates complete with images, calls to action, keyword tags, and more. If your audience is on LinkedIn, it’s well worth checking out. As with blogging, the real key to making LinkedIn Publishing work for you is consistency.
The more specific content you create, the better results you’ll see. For best results, drive traffic directly to an opt-in page. I've built up my list-building challenge through Linkedin Publisher
Content Upgrades
Got a blog? Chances are you have an opt-in form at the end of each post, or at the very least, in the sidebar.
Here’s an even better option: Add a content-specific opt-in form to each blog post. For example, if you want people to sign up for your giveaway event featuring 27 branding experts, and you write a blog post promoting the event, then a content upgrade might include a tips sheet with one tip from each participant. You’ll add people to your email list, plus give them a taste of what they’ll find in the upcoming event. Getting them to opt-in to both will be a breeze when you take advantage of closely related material for your content upgrade.
Speaking of giveaway events, they’re a fantastic way to grow your list, too. If you’ve never done one, definitely consider that to be among the best bets for list building.
Content Lockers
What if you had an epic post of 3,000 words on your site? What if the first 650 words were so good, that you could lock the content beneath it and only show it to those who have opted in? Again, you could always “lock” an upgrade portion, but a content locker would be perfect for truly epic content.
You can also pop the content upgrade behind a social share locker (Sarah's shared extensively on the topic here) and drive more traffic to your blog post. The upside of more traffic is… more subscribers.
Tools to help you implement these 3 strategies
- If you've not got WordPress self-hosted, then Lead Pages is perfect for you.
- WordPress self-hosted? You can still use Lead Pages if you have it. If you don't, you might want to try Thrive Content Builder, this amazing plugin builds good-looking landing pages very, very quickly.
- Content Upgrades can be delivered through Lead Pages or Thrive Leads or the Content Upgrade plugin. And just so you know, we use all of the tools mentioned so far.
- Content Lockers, Sarah swears by WP Sharely, and she's tried a good few of them out over the years. Thrive Leads also has a content locker aspect (so she tells me) and you'll find that there are plenty of free content lockers out there, along with “Pay with a Tweet” and ‘Social Locker'
The only question is which one of these three list growing strategies will you try?
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