3 Powerful Tactics to Explode Your Email List Growth in 2015 http://ift.tt/1HCYyYM @BloggingTipsCom #Blogging

As bloggers, we generally focus on 3 key ways to drive traffic to our blogs. They are:

Social media

However, if this traffic can’t eventually convert into revenue, it is useless.

According to research from Monetate, email is the #1 source of traffic that converts into revenue (email converts at an average of 3.19%) beating search (at 1.95%) and social media (at 0.71%) combined.

That said, one thing every smart blogger will focus on more than anything else this year is on building an email list.

It’s still March, so it’s not too late to start building your email list this year.

If done right, the following 3 tactics will add thousands, if not tens of thousands, of subscribers to your email list by the end of this year depending on your blog size. explode email list growth

Tactic #1. Partner With Others to Grow Your List

This tactic is especially powerful for new bloggers who do not have an already established blog. It is something I learned from email marketing pro Ben Settle.

A few years ago, I effectively leveraged this tactic by partnering with 2 popular internet marketers with a combined email list of at least a hundred thousand subscribers (according to them).

These bloggers have both invited me to contribute a guest post to their blog at a point, so I made them an offer; I’ll write an average of 5 articles each for them in exchange for them telling their email subscribers about me. They agreed.

From this deal alone, I got a few hundred subscribers (I’m estimating around 400+ subscribers).

You can also easily leverage this tactic for your blog; look for a popular blogger/marketer in your niche, and try to understand how you can be of help to that blogger, in exchange for that blogger promoting you to her subscribers.

Just to give you an idea of how someone did this to me; a reader of my blog who contributed some valuable guest posts, and who I at a point invited to contribute to an ebook on my blog, invited me to contribute to a free ebook she was releasing. I did, and she asked if I could promote the ebook to my list. I also did; according to analytics provided my AWeber, my email service provider, my email to my subscribers sent at least 300 clicks to her website, a lot of which I believe converted into subscribers. Definitely not bad.

Tactic #2. Create Relevant Special Incentives to Accompany Different Articles

This is another underutilized approach to grow an email list, especially for bloggers.

Bloggers generally focus on having one main incentive, that they promote all over their blog; unfortunately, this approach is ineffective because readers to your blog are varied in nature. If you talk about blogging, for example, you have people reading your blog for traffic tips, people reading for monetization tips, people reading for social media, etc.

If your main incentive is about social media, then you are not capitalizing on the audience reading for traffic and monetization tips.

By focusing on creating unique incentives for the various key categories of your blog, you’ll be able to get a lot more people to subscribe since they find the offers presented relevant to them.

So, instead of having a site-wide incentive you feature on all pages, have special incentives for key categories and feature these incentives on these categories as well as on posts/pages relevant to these categories.

Tactic #3. Effectively Utilize Content Upgrades

The final tactic is the utilization of content upgrades.

The term “content upgrade” was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko, and I also learned the technique from him.

The idea behind this is that once readers finish reading a good piece of content on your blog, they’ll be more receptive to an incentive that complements that article and allows them to easily implement the advice.

For example, your articles can be accompanied by a free PDF version of the article, a PDF of a resource mentioned in the article, or some other form of content that people need to enter their email address to download.

The content upgrade needs to be relevant to the article the reader just finished reading.

This is something that is fast becoming a trend in the blogosphere today, and my implementation of this in January of this year has already yielded over a thousand additional subscribers. I published a post titled 110 websites that pay writers, and I asked people to subscribe to get a PDF version of the full list in the post.

I also updated two similar posts of that nature with a link to get the same list of 110 websites that pay writers in PDF form; not surprisingly, those 3 posts alone yielded over 1,000 subscribers in less than 2 months. So far, the average open rate of those subscribers is around 55%, and the click-through rate is equally high.

To say I’m impressed will be an understatement.

Content upgrades definitely work, and it’s a strategy you need to start paying more attention to this year.

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