One of the things I’m in awe of with the elite level bloggers in the small blog mastermind I’m in is how much traffic they attract. Their traffic is in the hundreds of thousands and here I am with what I regard as a fairly modest traffic flow in comparison, albeit one that is growing.

It’s funny, but one of those bloggers earlier this year confessed how she’s been impressed by how I’ve been able to build a business from my blog – gaining freelance writing projects, launching digital products and running coaching programs. It’s interesting how much we see in each other but miss in ourselves, isn’t it?

I don’t feel like what I’m doing is rocket science. I’m simply working on writing blog posts that solve my ideal client’s problems and growing my email list. What I’m doing seems to be working – so I’m sticking to it.

As well as growing my own list and business, this month I also managed to get a significant amount of search traffic for a client project  after the first day the website was launched. Again, all I did was build a strong blog around that website.

I love blogging and all the opportunities it’s provided me.

If I could only choose one marketing activity, I’d pick blogging (click to tweet)

As you know, I love answering reader questions (feel free to ask me any questions you might have here), so today I’m answering:

How have you grown your list on autopilot?

Firstly, I’m going to be completely transparent and confess this all happened by accident. I wrote a post and gave away a free downloadable on the blog without thinking too much about it. That blog post started getting a lot of attention from Google and the freebie a lot of downloads.

The problem was, I wasn’t making the most of all that traffic. Readers would come, download the freebie and go. There was no opportunity for me to build a relationship with those people.

I quickly realised I needed to put an opt-in form on my freebie to capture people’s name and email. I won’t go into my whole email marketing system (that’s a post for another day), but my goal is to then earn trust and provide as much value as I can over time.

Then, when they’re ready to invest, I’m top of mind.

But back to the freebie. How am I still able to attract a steady stream of subscribers to my list using this one blog post?

At the moment, that one post attracts about 10-20 subscribers a day. Some days it’s more.

Here are the

7 steps to automating your email list sign ups

You can download this free worksheet to further help you automate your email list building too.

STEP 1: Speak her language

If you wanted to look for a planner to organise your life, what words would you use in Google search? I guess, it comes back to your ideal client and what is her problem and how can you solve it? Therefore, to solve her problem, what are the words she would use in Google?

STEP 2: The power of Google search

Google Trends is your next port of call. Click on `more to explore’ on the bottom right of the home page and then search for the words she would use. So, with life planner, for example, it shows me how much traffic that keyword is getting. Although, the numbers aren’t perfect. You can then play around with similar keywords to see how they compare (it shows a graph of the comparison between them). Trends also has a section at the bottom of the page that gives you related words. Play around with those suggested words too. The biggest benefit of Google Trends though is to see whether your keyword is increasing in searches, stagnant or decreasing.

STEP 3: What’s the competition?

Next is Google Adwords Keyword Planner (just Google and the link will come up). Here, you can see traffic volumes PLUS whether there’s high or low competition for a keyword. The lower the competition, the more chance you have of ranking high in Google for that keyword. Then put your keywords into Google search to see who else is using similar keywords. If they’re highly ranked blogs, I know I’ll have a hard time competing, so I might work on a long tail keyword (ie free downloadable life planner, as opposed to life planner)

STEP 4: Start writing

Use a couple of those keywords within the post, the blog post title, the picture alt text and in your SEO plugin. The “key’’, pardon the pun, is to not sound like a robot when you’re writing the post. You need to appeal to human beings, considering they’re obviously the ones reading it. I don’t tend to get a lot of robots reading my blog these days. It’s up to you, but some people find it easier to write the post and THEN do the keyword research to avoid any concerns around “robot writing”.

STEP 5: Do you have a call to action?

Create a call to action within your blog post to draw your ideal client into signing up to your email list. If you’re wondering what my call to action is in this post, it’s to download my free worksheet. The aim of my little workbook is to provide further value and clarity to achieve success by going deeper into your ideal client, ensuring you’re writing the RIGHT blog post, crafting a great opt in and leveraging that post to help it rank faster. You can sign up here (*wink wink*) if you want a system to follow to attract more of the leads you want and less of the leads you don’t want.

STEP 6: Using the word “free”

This is a bit of a tricky one, but I’ve found the word “free’’ helps. Lots of people search for their keyword + the word “free”. I think this was the key with one of my posts. The downside of all that traffic and subsequent subscribers is that a vast majority of them are looking for just that – free, and nothing else. You may want to experiment with this and put systems in place so you can move them past the “free” mindset and encourage them to invest in themselves.

STEP 7: Leverage, baby!

Once the post is done, that’s not where it ends. You need to push that out to your social media platforms and keep linking to that post from within other blog posts you write to give it more SEO juice and keep it ranking high in Google.

Being completely open, I did mention that one client website I launched recently garnered a lot of traffic from search on the day it launched. The thing is, it was a hot topic that day with a public relations campaign built around it too, so there were a lot of people searching for it on the day it launched, which helped.

There are no guarantees – regardless of whether you have a new or established blog – that your blog post will have traffic on autopilot instantly. But if you work it smart and put in the effort, it will happen in time.

You CAN do it – whether it’s 2+, 10+, 20+ or 100+ per day/week/month of your ideal client! Anything’s got to be better than ZERO, right?

What are you already doing to build your list?