You started a blog but you’re not getting the results you were promised.
Your audience is not engaged.
You never know when they take action on your blog posts or if they ever do.
You know you have little control over whether or not they ever come back to read your stuff.
What if I told you there is a better way to build your connection with your audience?
With email, you have a better measurement of how many people are engaged, opened your emails, and took action on the things you wished they did. There are ways your email address can outperform your blog.
There are three reasons why having an email list is just as important as having a blog, if not more important.
Open and click through rates are more meaningful than pageviews.
This is how your traffic acquisition goes: you either set up and prepare your website for free or paid traffic. SEO, Pinterest, Facebook ads, promoted pins, guest posting, etc. You get a few thousands visitors per day, some love your content and sign up for your emails. Others flee and never come back. For those who never come back, you don’t know if they just forgot to sign up your emails and freebie or your content got in the eyeballs of the wrong audience.
On the other hand, when you decide to send an email to your subscribers, you’re sending it to a warm audience. These people have read at least one of your blog posts and knows who you are. They have opted in and have given you permission to land in their inbox.
At the end of the day, the vanity metrics are meaningless if those aren’t the people who’s going to go out there and speak highly of your brand, services, and products. There are people who are just interested in the topic you speak about. Then there’s those people who are asking for more from you because of your perspective on the topic.
Not from someone else who talks about the same topic, but from you specifically.
Subscribers are more loyal because they have given you permission to email them.
Think about the last time you subscribed to a YouTube channel. The last time you subscribed to a fashion or beauty magazine. The last time you invited someone to your home for tea. Nope, I’m not kidding about the the tea one. And here’s why.
There’s a difference when someone invites you to send them content and when they visit your blog for content. When people visits your blog for content, they’re looking for information on a problem. Let’s say you have a blog posts that says, “5 Ways to Clean Out Your Closet in less than 30 minutes.”
People click on it. Some read it, love your ideas and then implement it. The others click away from your website and feel that your ideas won’t work for them. But for the people who love your ideas opt in, they are in for a ride with you.
For these people who opt-in, it’s proven that they like your ideas, believe you, and it’s the first step to deepening that trust with them via email.
So what does this have to do with inviting someone to your home for tea?
Well, when you invite someone to your home for tea, it means they’re your friends and generally someone whom you trust. The reality is, no one invites strangers to their homes. And if someone trusts you with their emails, then you are on their good side. They invite you to continue to send more content to their inbox.
And people value their inbox because it’s connected to everything they own online. They won’t risk inviting spam inside if they don’t at least connect with you on some level.
Email sequences helps you generate sales on autopilot.
You can’t possibly make sure your blog stays top of mind and that every person will come back to read more.
But you can follow up with people via email to remind them to check out your new blog posts, products, and services.
In email, there’s something called email autoresponders where you can pre-write a series of emails using your email service provider and have it automatically send out to your list when they subscribe. These autoresponders can be email courses or sales sequences. Write it once and have the same information send out to your new subscribers.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”As long as you know what’s your paid offering and ideal client, all you need is one compelling lead magnet to kick off your list building efforts.” quote=”As long as you know what’s your paid offering and ideal client, all you need is one compelling lead magnet to kick off your list building efforts.”]
Here are two routes you can take…
Create a blog and hope that people will remember to come back and read it.
Or create an irresistible freebie (oh hey, it’s still free content!) and have people who are truly interested in having their problem solved flock to your sign-up page.
The truth is that whatever content you write on your blog, you can easily repurpose that through email. If you struggle with writing long-form blog content that’s over 1000 words, guess what?
You can write your message through email. With email, you don’t have to worry too much about the length of your content. You can get away with emails that are shorter — as that’s the industry norm.
With email you can see who are reading your emails and who are taking action. This can be clicking on the email that leads them to a worksheet.
Let’s say you decide to create your irresistible freebie to kick off your list building, here’s what you can do.
Do you need a blog to starting collecting subscribers?
Nope!
All you need is a landing page.
If your freebie is compelling enough to solve a real world problem (not one that you think people will need), you’ll have people rolling into your email list on autopilot.
In fact, landing pages convert at a much higher rate for me than any form of content upgrade or opt-in form on a blog.
I have some blog posts that gets a good number of page views, comments, shares, and engagement. People know it’s helpful as they have said so. But when you expect more subscribers, it doesn’t happen.
Why not?
They love the topic. There is interest. The blog post was helpful.
But they probably don’t have an immediate need to solve the problem so they don’t sign up for your freebie.
But for those people who do sign up for the freebie, they do want their problem solved. These are the people who have an immediate need to use your services, consulting packages, or products. These are the people you want to focus on.
Which comes back to my point. You don’t need to have a blog to collect subscribers. When I started, I felt obligated to give away free information before collecting subscribers, but as I dive into using paid advertising, I realized that if people have a need to solve their pains with the freebie I’m offering, they’ll opt-in regardless if there’s the blog post.
This suddenly made me realize that a blog is a nice-to-have, not a must-have sometimes. When you offer a free blog post, it attracts people who are interested in the topic, but doesn’t always necessarily need a problem solved. And your paid services and products should always target people who need it — hopefully asap. Does this means you should dump your blog?
Well no.
I love writing a blog and building trust through free content, but it doesn’t work as effectively and quickly as you’ll like it sometimes. When I realized that I can spend two hours creating one PDF (be it a workbook, swipe file, or toolkit) and it converts better than a blog post that I spent 5-6 hours on, it really makes me wonder how I should allocate my time.
Final Words
You may feel like if you start an email list, you need to offer many lead magnets at once to build your list. But that’s far from the truth. As long as you know what’s your paid offering and ideal client, all you need is one compelling lead magnet to kick off your list building efforts.
ABOUT JUDY:
Judy helps you with your website and email to get more conversions by writing clear and purposeful copy. She’s obsessed with About pages, sales pages, email sequences, and irresistible freebies as nerdy as that sounds.
