The Truth About Growing Your Email List (getting subscribers through your freebie)

Business Tips and ToolsVisibilityWebsite

Jan 30

Written By brandmerry

The Truth About Growing Your Email List (getting subscribers through your freebie)

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Social media is not a marketing strategy. When you’re feeling overwhelmed with social media and marketing your business, it’s time to introduce a different approach. Click to learn more.#femaleentrepreneur #businessowner #marketing #onlinemarketing …

The truth is we're really obsessed with hitting a certain milestone when it comes to our subscriber count, follower count or email list.

Like, “When I have a hundred subscribers, I will write.”

“When I have 10k followers on Instagram, I'll have the swipe up feature and suddenly my business will explode.”

Well, you guys, that's not really how it works and in fact what's happening is so many entrepreneurs are just working on getting to this *magical* number, this email list size, this follower count, that they're putting all their energy and their attention on doing that, and therefore neglecting all the people who have already said, yes!

When you’re doing this, then you're not consistently emailing your community and showing up for them.

Your belief that everything will be better when you have that “number”, is actually keeping you stuck.

So we have to switch our mindset and say, I'm showing up for the people that are already here and I don't care if it's just your cousin and your mom right now.

Showing up and being of service for those people is where I want your energy and your attention to go.

Now, if you’ve been spending all your time on just getting to a specific number, you might be like, “Michelle, how am I supposed to spend all this time showing up for my community and being there for my community? I'm trying to grow my community like it's great if I can show up for two people. But if I'm putting all my energy and attention there, then how do I grow my list?”

The reason you’re concerned about that is because you’re going about growing your list using social media (and social media is not a marketing strategy).

THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR FREE OFFER (OPT-IN)

I see this a lot online. You spend time creating a free offer that is going to be of value to your ideal client. Then you start marketing it, most likely on social media, from the start and you notice that nothing's really happening.

So you say, “Oh, this freebie does not work. I need to create a new freebie.”

And you create a new freebie and you go through the same process and you show up on social media and you're posting as many times as you can post without spamming your audience and you're using all the hashtags on Insta Stories.

And still nothing is happening and you repeat the cycle.

It's not the freebie, it's how you're marketing the freebie.

You most likely lack an understanding of how to create the content to actually sell the freebie and what platforms are going to serve you at the highest level.

So here is the thing with Facebook and Instagram - you should not be relying on these social media platforms to grow your business.

The goal is to grow your community using evergreen strategies so you can show up on social media and be “social” with your audience.

ADVANCED MARKETING STRATEGIES TO GROW YOUR SUBSCRIBERS

Advanced marketing strategies include:

Blogging
Pinterest
Youtube
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
PodcastingGuest Expert Feature (guest blog, guest on podcast, guest interview, interview feature)
Facebook and Pinterest Ads (investment)

The content on these platforms not only lasts longer than social media, but allows your content to consistently be seen and drive traffic to your website, freebie and ultimately paid offer.

The Lifespan of Online Content

Blogging has a lifespan of 2+ years.
Pinterest has a lifespan of 6+ months.
Instagram ONLY has a lifespan of 21 hours.
Facebook ONLY has a lifespan of 5 hours.

It would take you about the same amount of time to write a blog for your website, as it will to post on Facebook and your content will last longer.

Having these advanced systems of marketing in place allow you to consistently create a stream of leads to your business.

Example: My website, every single month, gets thousands of people visiting from Pinterest. I am ranked on page one for multiple keywords in my industry on Google. So I'm getting tons of people from there as well.

I focus on creating one piece of content a week on my blog, which helps with SEO on Google and the content is optimized for Pinterest. As a result, every single day people are finding my content online and my email list is growing.

They're also following me on social media as a way to stay connected with me. So rather than relying on social media to grow my new audience, I get to show up here and have fun with you guys. I get to show up and do a video and post things about my travels and the things that I love that build a deeper relationship with my audience.

All the while, my community is growing without me having to post on social media.

THE GOAL

First, we want to create a free gift, just one, for your audience. An incentive to join your community. Learn more here.

Next, the goal is to use those Advanced Marketing strategies above to consistently lead new people to your website (or landing page) where they can consume your content and grab your gift.

As your email subscribers grow, your social media platforms grow and you switch your focus to building relationships and nurturing your new audience. This is where sales come from!

When you have those marketing strategies in place, you can focus on doing what you do best - serving your audience and making an impact.

Learn more about implementing these strategies inside Brandmerry Academy!

Branding and Business Coach | Michelle Knight of Brandmerry

P.S. Here is a helpful blog on improving your content marketing. Read it here.

P.S.S. Are we connected on Instagram? No? Well lady what’s happening here we’ve got to fix that. Come hang out with me on my favorite social media platform. Follow for inspiration and send me a DM to know we’re connected.