10 Ways To Grow Your Email List as a Blogger

Last updated on 26 November 2024

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Having strategies to grow your email list is one of the best moves you can make as a blogger.

Did you know that you don’t own your audience? On Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter … all the platforms that we know and love (or hate!) are full of the all the people that we would love to connect with and are continuing to connect with. They’re your ideal clients, your friends, your like-minded entrepreneurs, your business besties. And that’s good! Social media is a great place to make those connections, book those clients and make new friends.

But here’s the rub: you don’t own your audience. If Zuckerberg decides one day to pull the plug on his empire, you can wave goodbye to all those people you’ve been in touch with on Facebook and Instagram. If the world of Social Media suddenly implodes, that way of connecting with people would be suddenly sucked away.

What you do own is your email list.

And that’s why it is so important that you start your email list today and begin to grow it. Everyone uses email and everyone puts their email into multiple things on the daily to get information, encouragement, inspiration and insight. When you have a list of emails, you get to keep those if Facebook disappears. You can still send information out to your ‘followers’, it will just be in email form.

How to grow your email list

The idea of having an email list is all very well and good, but how do you actually grow your list from zero? How do you start from scratch?

There are a few ways that you can do this.

1. Freebie or lead magnet
2. Content upgrades
3. Sign-up forms
4. Guest posts
5. Promo on social media
6. Sign up button on Facebook
7. Create Pins
8. Host a giveaway
9. Embed in relevant blog posts
10. Insert into pages

Freebie or lead magnet

Having a free downloadable (often called a lead magnet) is one of the best ways you can grow your email list. People are always happy to pop in their emails to get themselves a sweet downloadable that’s going to help them in some way.

When they download the freebie, they’re on your email list! And because they are interested in what you’re offering, they’re more likely to stick around for your future emails and any other freebies you create. You can even pop them into a funnel and offer them a discounted course or guide that you provide.

Content upgrades

A similar way to grow your email list is with content upgrades. These are also downloadable freebies, but they add additional information to a blog post or page. For example, we’ve talked about lead magnets in this blog post. This isn’t something that I could include in this post as is, but it is something that I know is beneficial and would be gobbled up by users wanting to grow their email lists. It’s a content upgrade.

Sign-up forms

Perhaps the most obvious way to grow your email list is with sign-up forms. You can put these in your blog posts, on pages, in your footer, on your sidebar; anywhere that you think people are going to see it. Give it a catchy headline about why they should sign up, and hey presto!

Guest posts

Writing guests posts on other people’s blog is great for your own blog and business anyway, but check in with your host blog and see if you can add a link to where people can sign up to your mailing list. By doing this, you’re expanding your reach online to a whole new audience who will be excited to see what you’ve got.

Promo on social media

While you may not own your Facebook or Instagram followers, you can still use the platforms to promo your email list or your freebie. People need to be told information multiple times before it really sinks in, so schedule a post once every month/fortnight about your email list and make people aware of it.

Sign up button on Facebook

If you have a Facebook Page, you can add a button to it. Make it a Sign Up button and have a link going to a landing page where people can put in their email address. There are 2.7 billion monthly active users on Facebook so it’s a great place to promo.

Create Pins

Pinterest is one of the biggest search platforms on the internet. It is ripe for the taking when it comes to blogging and businesses. People flock to Pinterest to discover things so having multiple Pins with what people can expect when they sign up for your email is a great place to start.

If you’ve got a freebie, make Pins for that too. Be sure to use keywords in your Pin’s file name, title, description and on the Pin itself for greater exposure.

Host a giveaway

People love free stuff (see point 1). If you’re hosting a giveaway, one of the ways you can collect entries is by having them join your mailing list. Just be sure that your emails are going to be relevant to the giveaway you’re hosting; you don’t want to host a giveaway for beauty products and then send them emails about travel.

Embed in relevant blog posts

As I’ve done in this post, you can embed sign up forms within your blog posts. This can look annoying and spammy if you overdo it, but if you’ve mentioned your email list in a post or you’ve got a relevant freebie you want to promo, throw in a signup form within your posts to let people know there’s more where that came from.

Insert into pages

In a similar vein, you can insert them into Pages such as your contact page, your about page, and any other pages that you think people might benefit from knowing about your email list or freebie.

What ways will you try to grow your email list with? Let me know!