Building Your Email List
If you haven’t established your email list, please revisit the coursework from Day 4, get that completed, and then come back to do this.
***You will need your email list set up and an opt-in form on your site in order to participate in today’s assignment. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can change it later. Just get it started.
If you don’t have an opt-in form on your blog yet, check out this tutorial from Constant Contact.
If you want to make the process super simple, it is best to use a plugin to put the form on your website. Constant Contact has a plugin that will make this process easy.
Also, many of our students love using Constant Contact Forms by Mail Munch which gives you some extra features over the standard Constant Contact plugin. Also, the basic version is free and enough to get you started.
As a blogger that is planning to be successful, you should always be striving to increase the number of subscribers on your email list.
Ideally, you would like to have subscribers on your list that are genuinely interested in your niche and following along with your content.
But, getting a big list will do nothing for you if you don’t put time into nurturing it and building a relationship with those on your email list.
Having an engaged email list will make it easy for you to get traffic to your blog on demand. One well-worded email to your engaged list of subscribers can produce traffic immediately to your blog.
If your subscribers feel like they know you, they will be happy to come read your latest content and will take your suggestions like they would from a friend.
On the flip side, if you are only sending out cold emails notifying them of a new blog post or making a strong pitch for them to buy something, you will lose subscribers and you will lose credibility.
So, how do you go about building a relationship with your subscribers? Here are some ideas for you to put in place:
Educate: If you have a specialized niche, you can give away free information and advice without asking for anything in return.
Add some personality: Try to write your emails like you are sending it to a friend. Keep it light (if that fits with your niche) and in general you don’t want your emails to seem like they are being generated by a robot.
Run fun events: Do you have a blog sponsor that would be open to giving a product away? Run a giveaway to your subscribers.
Send out regular emails: You really should be sending out emails to your list once a week at least. Some experts even recommend daily (although we feel that is over the top). Don’t let them forget you exist.
Add videos every once in a while: There is nothing that builds a connection more to your audience than video.
So, let’s get some subscribers on our email lists! Read on to the next section for today’s assignment.
Day 6 Assignment
Today we are going to be subscribing to each others’ email lists.
One of our major goals with the 10k Challenge is to provide a platform for everyone to get to know each other better. By subscribing to another blogger’s email list, you will get to know them much better. You may also get inspiration from what other bloggers do to create your own amazing content.
Many of the successful bloggers we know have put a lot of effort into building relationships with other bloggers. It’s a great way to bounce off ideas, and see what is/isn’t working.
We are going to be creating an Email Subscription Member Directory.
There will be two parts… the form to enter your information and the spreadsheet that will display everyone’s information after it is entered.
The goal of this directory will be to subscribe to 20 different email lists. In return, you should hopefully receive a good amount of new subscribers.
Step 1: Enter your information into THIS FORM. When prompted, provide a link to a page on your blog that has your email signup form. For most, this will be your homepage (ex. ItsALovelyLife.com).
There will also be a field for niche tags (just like the Day 1 directory). Please limit this to 5 different tags you would like to use to describe your content. For example, niche tags for us would be: Lifestyle, Travel, Family, Disney, Food (if you don’t have 5 tags that is Ok!). These tags will help others subscribe to your list if they have similar interests.
***Please Note: If you do not have your email list set up with a subscription form on your blog, you should not participate in today’s assignment until that is complete. Information on setting up your email service can be found on Day 4 and at the beginning of today’s coursework to get your form installed.
Please make sure your information is correct before adding it to the form. We cannot make any changes.
Step 2: Visit the directory spreadsheet found HERE.
Subscribe to 20 email lists. Subscribe to blogs that sound interesting to you, are in your niche, and/or are run by people you know or would like to get to know better from the group.
Please note: if you do not have time to do this, please do not enter your information in the directory. This assignment should be completed by 2/15/22 (at the latest).
When you are finished with today’s assignment, comment “Done” in the 10k Challenge Day 6 Assignment thread found HERE
Do you have any questions about today’s assignment? Ask in the 10k Challenge Day 6 Question thread found HERE.