Whether you’re just starting out as an affiliate marketer or you’ve been doing it for a few years, you might be surprised to know: NOW is the time to start and grow an email list. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a single subscriber to your blog or website, if you have no fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter—if you want to have the most opportunities in the future for promoting affiliate links, then you need to start collecting email addresses today.
Why Is It Important To Have An Email List Anyway?
You might think that having an awesome website or setting up a killer YouTube channel are plenty when it comes to affiliate marketing, and these are certainly great components to your online marketing strategy. But an email list is a completely different beast, and it has a tremendous potential for your online business.
Creating content that you publish on a website, promote on social media platforms, or post to YouTube means that you’re casting a wide net into the sea of your readers. Some of them are going to swim into that net and essentially take interest in what you’re promoting; others, though, will be missed. Not all readers check their favorite websites every day, and many others may only refer to an affiliate website when they feel that they’re in the market for something in particular. Social media is fleeting, and tweets and status updates can live for mere minutes before getting lost in the web. Videos are intriguing but often require us to sit down for an allotted amount of time and truly pay attention.
An email list, however, is a step up from these online marketing strategies. The people who are on your list must first agree to join the list in the first place, meaning that everyone you send out a newsletter to has expressed a degree of interest in what you have to say. Your blog content may fall on deaf ears, but your newsletter has a higher chance of intriguing your ideal reader. Additionally, newsletters are simply a wonderful way of keeping the people who enjoy your content updated. They might not have the time to check your website or Facebook page each day, but when you message them to say, “Hey, check out my latest video on YouTube,” you can increase engagement.
As you look for ways to grow this list, keep in mind that you’re seeking quality over quantity. An email list of 100 people who are excited to get emails from you is far better than an email list of 2,000 people who mostly all delete your email upon receiving it. This means you need to sit down and give some careful consideration to your ideal client or reader. Once you know all about them, from their geographic location, age, gender, interests, fears, and challenges, then you can figure out how to curate your content to appeal to them—and once you’ve done that, then you can include a call-to-action. This will be something you put in blog posts, social media updates, videos, or whatever other platform you use to entice people to sign up to receive emails from you.
Tips For Growing Your Email List
Okay, so having an email list sounds like a pretty great idea so far, right? But how do you even get started collecting these valuable emails anyway? Here is some of my best advice to add emails and newsletters to your online marketing strategy.
1. Make Sign-Up Easy
If people have to do a lot of sleuthing to find out how to sign up for a newsletter from you, chances are they’ll give up and not pursue it too much. Instead, make it easy for people to find your newsletter sign-up and consider including sign-ups:
- In a blog sidebar.
- In a blog header.
- In the middle or at the end of a blog post.
- As a pop-up on your website.
- Linked in your Facebook call-to-action section.
- As a status update on social media.
- As a mention at the end of a YouTube video.
- In YouTube video descriptions.
2. Offer Something For Signing Up (Or Even Do A Giveaway)
If you’re able to get together a valuable freebie for your audience, you’ll likely entice more people to enter their email address. People love free stuff! If you can put together something valuable, like a PDF guide to something related to your niche, people will be more interested in joining your email list. We often like to feel like we’re getting something for free, and even if it’s small, it’s better than nothing. A free template, guide, coupon or discount, resource list, or fun printable are relatively easy things to put together that you can then promote as a freebie for new subscribers.
Additionally, you could even run a special giveaway to see a significant boost in numbers. Giveaways run for a specific period of time and, depending on what you offer, can give you hundreds or thousands of new subscribers. The downside here is that you might attract a lot of people who you’re not really targeting in your blog, website, social media, or video content. This means you’re actually not getting as many new sign-ups as the numbers might initially lead you to believe, and if you don’t get a lot of people to unsubscribe after the giveaway is finished, you might be left with a list full of unengaged subscribers.
3. Be Persistent
The great news is, you don’t have to pick just one method only to try and grow an email list. In fact, you could use all of them and it wouldn’t be overkill. You probably shouldn’t jam-pack a sign-up box in a blog post multiple times and have it repeated over and over in your sidebar—but you most definitely should use multiple options. It’s incredibly easy to overlook something as simple as a sign-up box, and the people signing up may be paying attention to different things. A new visitor to your site might examine the sidebar and find it there, while someone who’s been following you on Facebook for a while may finally notice it when you promote it there.
If you think that one post to your Twitter feed and adding in a request to sign up on your most recent blog post is going to cut it, then up your game. As long as you’re putting useful and honest information out there, people generally won’t be bothered by a simple, nice reminder to join you for more amazing content.
