Are you growing your list with blogging?

In one of my last posts I told you a little about my entrepreneurial friend who was struggling to find a purpose for her blogging. I know she’s not alone in that. How many of us started a business blog because someone said it was a good idea, with little idea WHY we were blogging or WHAT the purpose of it was? Um, yes, sort of.

So, we blogged aimlessly and to tick something off our never ending to-do lists.

The thing is, finding a purpose for your business blog is so incredibly important – otherwise you’re just wasting time. And being overwhelmed is not the aim of being an entrepreneur.

My coach has really drummed into me the importance of tracking my stats – something I’ve been a bit hit and miss with, despite making it a key focus for clients. Yes, the old “practice what you preach” got a little lost on me there for a while. It really gives me a greater focus on where I’m going and what activities are generating the greatest return.

One thing I noticed when doing my tracking a fortnight ago was 601 new email subscribers during a 30-day period – and I hadn’t even run a Facebook ad, hadn’t done any guest posts and wasn’t launching any products. I was actually wrapped up in working on a $250 million project for a client, so my own marketing had gone a little by the wayside.

It got me thinking…

Where did those 601 people who felt compelled to hit subscribe come from?

Well, to be honest, they came from a variety of sources and to a variety of different areas on my website.

There are many ways you can attract subscribers, but the key is to make sure each blog post will allow you to ATTRACT your ideal client who is prompted to make an action.

For me, the key driver of subscribers for that period was one particular post that generates a steady daily stream of readers from Google. An important element of that post is that it has a clear focus and purpose. When people land on it, it’s hard for them NOT to take the action I want them to take.

What is your purpose for your blog?

What I’m trying to say is: have a purpose for your blog.

• Are you trying to get people to book a free strategy session with you?
• Do you want them to buy something from your site?
• Do you want them to sign up to your email list so you can continue the conversation?

As I said, for me, it’s the latter and the one I have the most amount of success with.

I can try to sell to people on the blog by trying to get them on a call(and this is possible if you tailor your content to the bottom of the funnel – ie people near the end of the buying cycle), but the reality is I can build stronger relationships with people and be of more value when they’re part of my email list.

They may not always see my blog posts – or my Facebook statuses and tweets for that matter – but my emails will always land in their inbox.

How do you grow your list blogging?

There are quite a few ways, many of which I’ll go through in more detail in The Online Marketing Mastermind. However, here are three ways I gained 601 subscribers:

1. A sign up at the end of blog posts. You can use a plugin like Magic Action Box that will allow you to easily pull in one of your opt ins for the end of each blog post without too much effort. You can see a tutorial of how to use the plugin here.
2. Put an opt in or incentive WITHIN the blog post. This has been one of the most effective strategies for me. In the blog post Finding The Gold In Your Blog, I show you how to find the gold within your blog and use this strategy to grow your email list on autopilot. That 601 subscribers from the past 30 days? Well, that’s where the majority of my subscribers have come from.
3. Use the header, footer or sidebar space for a sign up form. You’ll need to experiment with these. I only have mine in my sidebar and it generates only a small number of subscribers. I know Derek Halpern’s Feature Box at the top of a site has proven effective for many and lots have jumped on Marie Forleo’s slim sign up box style underneath their header.

Overall, that’s a pretty simple system for 601 subscribers, right? Nothing fancy here.

Once you can grow your list blogging, you can look at what to do AFTER you have them on your list and where you’re leading them with the Soulful Sales Funnel Map.

DOWNLOAD MY SOULFUL SALES FUNNEL MAP

Can you imagine your list building on autopilot?

The gold within that 601 subscribers was really that I didn’t do any marketing to get them. The traffic and subscribers came to me on autopilot.

It’s not all about creating fresh content, having a spike of traffic and subscribers, and then seeing that blog post fade on down your home page and off into blog obscurity.

You also need to make the most of the content you’ve already created to grow your list. Have you been watching your analytics to see what opportunities you have? Did you even know you actually have blog posts (for those of you who have been blogging for at least six months) that you could be capitalising on?

You have posts that are crying out for you to make the most of them. That’s where a large chunk of my 601 subscribers came from.

In Finding The Gold In Your Blog – The Simple Strategy To Supercharge Your Email List post, I take you inside my blog to show you exactly what I did to generate those 601 subscribers – well, most of them, anyway.

It’s really open and honest and actually reveals one of the posts that’s sending me 20 subscribers a day on autopilot. Yes, from ONE blog post.

Seriously, it’s not hard and you can easily adopt this method in your own blog so you finally have a real purpose for your blog and can attract subscribers effortlessly.

I’m not going to be one of those people who tell you blogging is easy, because the truth is it does take some degree of effort. However, for those of you who have already put in the hard yards by creating awesome content, this particular method will generate fast results. If you do this right, you will see people signing up to your list within days – if not, hours. For some of you, it might not be quite 20 people, while for others you might well and truly blow my figures out of the water.

You don’t have to be a big blogger for this to work

I don’t profess to be a BIG blogger and I don’t have huge traffic – I can be completely honest with you about that. I’m a strategic blogger who makes the most of what I do have coming to my blog. To me, that’s far more valuable than hundreds of thousands of visitors who take no action.

My mission is really to help you stop wasting time when it comes to blogging for business and create a real purpose for each and every word you write and publish (yes, you have to have the courage to press publish too. Now, that’s a whole other blog post!)

If you’d like to learn more about how to build your list, to ultimately grow your business, using simple blogging techniques like this, make sure to download a copy of the Soulful Sales Funnel Map.

DOWNLOAD YOUR SOULFUL SALES FUNNEL MAP

Do you feel your blog has a purpose? What would it mean to YOU to have at least 20 people signing up to your email list on autopilot… every day?