Check this out…
I tweaked ONE thing last week and it produced 523 new subscribers to this blog.
Compare that with the same 7 day period from earlier this month.
That’s a 358% increase in email subscriptions over the last 7 days.
Pretty nuts right?
You can do it too. I’ll show you how.
***
I was mindlessly wandering around Facebook a few nights ago and came across an interesting thread.
Noah Kagan posed this question:
If you don’t have a clear answer (less than 140 characters) to this question then noodle on it until you do.
But what fascinated me more, were the answers.
“My #1 goal for the next 90 days is to get the emails of 850 adults in my city.”
“Email list to 1,000 in 90 days”
“Gain another 300 email subscribers by the end of July.”
Evvvvverybody wants emails.
Over half of the people that responded wanted more email subscribers.
Oddly though there was a certain feeling of “I don’t know how to do it” that surrounded every email related goal.
Today, I’m going to show you the simplest way I know of to grow your email list.
0 to 500 subscribers in 30 days? Very possible.
Are you ready?
.,.
..
.
Here it is: Give your content away.
When you write an epic blog post, don’t publish it on your own site. Give it away.
That is exactly how I’ve had the three largest jumps in email subscriptions in my blogs short history.
Write really good stuff and then give it away to someone with a bigger audience.
It seems completely counterintuitive, but it works. Over 20% of my list came from doing this 3 times.
Don’t believe me? Look at the numbers and three examples
Example #1: Okdork.com
On March 11th of this year I wrote the longest and most extensive paper I had written since High School.
…then I gave it to Noah Kagan (see article).
It took over 20 hours to finish, but look at what happened as a result.
The result was a gigantic jump in my email subscriptions. Over 200 new subscribers in a 3 day period. That was more than I had added to my list in the previous 3 weeks combined.
Result: 20 hours of work for 215 email subscribers.
Example #2: Kopywritingkourse.com
After seeing the results from giving my best content to Noah, I started looking into his network for another good candidate to target (referrals are always the best). That is when I found Neville Medhora.
I knew that Neville worked with Noah and was pretty confident he had seen the article I gave Noah so I emailed him and asked if I could give him something similar.
Here is the email I sent:
Slight tangent: Notice how I started this email chain by replying to a broadcast email that Neville sent to his list.
Then once we had a conversation going I went in for the ask.
Copy this. It works extremely well.
<back to the main point of this post>
Recap: I gave Noah a really good piece of content and then branched out into his immediate network and contacted Neville about doing the same thing for him.
He said yes and I wrote this.
This is what happened:
The results were huge. Over 200 new email subscribers in the 3 days after the post.
After writing for Noah I learned how to get even faster at writing for other people so I was able to cut my total writing time down to 8 hours.
Result: 8 hours of work for 220 email subscribers.
Example #3: Leadpages.net
Noah = 215 email subscribers
Neville = 220 email subscribers
…and that leads us to last week.
I really don’t know why I waited so long to give away more content. But almost 2 months after my post on Neville’s site it hit me that this needed to be a central part of my overall strategy.
So I approached LeadPages and shared an idea I had for a piece of content.
They accepted (see article) and this is what happened:
417 new subscribers!
By the time I wrote the article for LeadPages I had published over 60 blog posts for Videofruit, written everyday for the previous 172 days and gotten better and better and writing (I still suck but I just suck slightly less than I used to).
This enabled me to write the LeadPages article in 5 hours.
Result: 5 hours of work for 417 new email subscribers.
How can you do the same thing?
In total those 3 guest posts have netted Videofruit 852 new email subscribers for 32 hours of work.
The next obvious question is, “How do I do this?”
I’ve broken the process down into 3 parts and created a free mini-course to walk you through the process.
In the video course I’ll show you the step-by-step process of how to:
- Find and create a list of blog to target
- Refine your list so you filter out low traffic and irrelevant sites
- Create a blog post pitch that will catch their attention
- Use other popular articles in the industry to shape your content piece
- Write an email pitch that gets accepted over 50% of the time
Step 1: Find related blogs
Step 2: Write a piece of content that blends you and them
Step 3: Contact them
PS: What types of results have you seen from giving away content? Share your numbers in the comment section below. 🙂