5 Smart Ways Bloggers Can Build Their Email List (Without Being Salesy)

So you've got a blog set up. You're driving traffic, your readers love you, and you're providing tons of value that can't be found anywhere else.

But there's one problem: you're just not making the money you'd hoped for.

If you don't have an email list set up yet, now is time to start.

Email is the best way to promote paid products — affiliate links, info products you created yourself, etc. — to the right people.

But if you started your blog as something that's informational and provides value, you might be hesitant about this.

You don't want your audience to feel like you're “selling out.”

You worked hard to earn their trust, and it's all too easy to lose it with just one spammy-looking email.

In a recent blog post, Blog Tyrant explains how you can start putting together an email list and use it to bring in the income you've always dreamed of — without coming across as some kind of sellout.

It's all about making sure you still provide value to your audience. Value and profit aren't mutually exclusive, but it's a careful balance you need to achieve if you're going to make this work.

Here's their advice:

How to make money from your mailing list

Let’s dive in now and take a look at how you can actually use your blog’s mailing list to make some ethical income. As always, I’d love to know if I’ve missed anything in the comments below.

First, get lots and lots of email subscribers

The first thing we need to talk about is the fact that you want lots and lots of email subscribers on your mailing list.

This might sound obvious, but many bloggers have the idea that it’s better to have a small list of highly engaged followers.

This is a bit of a mistake. While it is important to have an active list, it’s more important to try and set the goal of having LOTS of engaged email subscribers, not just a few.

This is because all subscribers go through a natural life-cycle of being excited and engaged and then fading away and eventually unsubscribing. The graph above, for example, show people unsubscribing as a natural part of the process of signing up to a list.

For this reason it’s vital that you keep adding more and more to prevent the list declining to zero.

So how do we get more email subscribers for our mailing lists?

1. Write amazing content that solves problems

The first thing is to make sure you are writing useful content that helps people solve a particular problem. That means knowing who you’re targeting and what they need help with. Make sure you regularly check to see if you’re hitting the right keywords.

2. Get more traffic to your blog posts

The next step is to make sure you have a strategy to ensure that you are getting new visitors to your blog. This might be from Google or social or advertising, but it needs to be specific and, once again, regularly assessed to see if it’s working.

3. Have a dedicated offer 

When that traffic starts to trickle in to your blog it’s important that they find a dedicated offer that encourages them to subscribe to your mailing list. This might be a free PDF eBook or a training course, but it should be centered very tightly around your blog’s main topic and helping those needs further.

4. Have a specific landing page

When you have the offer all ready to go, it’s important to set up a specific landing page that promotes the offer and shows people why they might like to subscribe and the benefits that they will get. Don’t leave this just to a small little box in your sidebar but really put it out there.

5. Reference that offer and landing page regularly

The next thing you’ll want to do is talk about that landing page and offer in your blog posts and other promotions. If it is targeted correctly, you’ll start to get a nice trickle of people through to the page and signing up to your list.

We’ve talked about this little blogging strategy at length before so it might be a good idea to jump back in and refresh on some of the ways that you can develop this overall picture so as to maximize your chances of success.

You can learn more about how to scale this strategy over time in the full blog post from Blog Tyrant.