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If you want to grow and monetise your blog, you need an email list. And especially if you want to grow and monetise your blog in a way that doesn’t mean you are working all kinds of crazy hours and never seeing your family or your friends, you need an email list. Read on to find out why every blogger NEEDS an email list.

Your email list is where your biggest fans hang out… They are the ones who don’t just casually follow you on social media or pop over to your blog every once in a while. They are the ones who actually let you INTO THEIR INBOXES… If you grow your email list right, your subscribers will be the ones who support you, champion you, send you lovely comments, really listen to you… AND ultimately BUY FROM YOU!

In fact, one stat that gets thrown about quite a bit is that “for every person on your list you should earn about a dollar a month”

That’s CRAZY right?

I mean imagine if you had 1,000 subscribers…that would be pretty great…

But then imagine if you had 5,000…or 10,000…or more?

Exciting, huh?

But only if you do it right.

In my Email Marketing for Bloggers Mini-Series I am going to share with you exactly how to set up your email list and grow your email list THE RIGHT WAY.

Why every blogger NEEDS an email list

But before we dive into the how to set up and grow your email list, let’s first look at the WHY. Why does a blogger even need an email list? Why not just share your stuff on social media and be done with it? I have 6 AWESOME reasons why you NEED an email list.

Keep your readers coming back

Picture this. A person lands on your blog and LOVES what they’ve found, and they want to remember to come back. What do they do? They could follow you on social media, they could bookmark you (does anyone even do that anymore?), they could pin one of your pins on Pinterest. But the chances of them seeing your stuff again is actually pretty small.

But if they sign up for your mailing list, they will get regular updates into their inbox every single week – they are definitely not going to forget about you!

You own it!

Seriously, you could be getting GREAT traffic from Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram or wherever. You could have a million followers, but do you know…you don’t own a single one! And if they chose to, any one of those social media overlords could just delete your account… just like that – poof! Or they could go bust or fizzle out… (Anyone remember Friends Reunited? One day your favourite social media platform could go that way too…) Or they could just have an almighty algorithm update and you could go from getting really good traffic to tumbleweed overnight. And there is literally nothing you could do about it. Depressing, huh?

But the really great news is that you do actually OWN your email list. Yeah sure the odd one or two will unsubscribe, but they are not all going to all walk out en masse one day!!

You have a lot less competition

Think about it… on social media or Pinterest etc., every time your readers go there they are bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages – from friends, from pages, from groups, from ads – and your little update about your latest blog post gets completely drowned out… and that’s if your readers even get to see your post at all. Seriously, you could have a really loyal reader who really loves your stuff and really wants to read more of it… but due to the way the algorithm works, they just never see your stuff!

Email, on the other hand, gets delivered straight into your reader’s inbox. And unless your subscriber signs up for every bit of email junk mail going, you are going to have a lot less competition for their eyes there. In fact, you may even have the upper hand. Often email is full of boring things like bills and admin and reminders about dental appointments – so when your email pops into their inbox, full of exciting and interesting things… plus a tantalising headline, guess which email your subscriber is going to open first?

It’s passive

With social media a follower has to actually go onto Facebook or Twitter or wherever and actively seek out your stuff. And even more so on search engines. But with email, your latest newsletter just lands in their inbox… and most people check their email at least once a day… because that’s where the important stuff comes!

Sure, they might not read your email, or click on your links (that’s why you have to work hard to write enticing headlines and great copy…) but they will at least SEE your email, and, in fact, your subscribers actively have to do something if they want to GET RID of your email… unlike social media where your post disappears almost instantly.

It’s a lot less work than social media

And I mean A LOT…it takes me, what, 5 minutes for a quick email and maybe 30 minutes for a longer one… and the rewards from that are huge. For the same kind of quality traffic from social media I would have to put a lot more effort in… and a huge chunk of that effort would be wasted on the wrong people. But if you do it right, the effort you put in on your email list will be directed at exactly the right people… who will be much more responsive to what you are doing and much more likely to buy from you, which leads me on to…

You can make good money from your list

As I shared in the quote above… the reckoning is that for every 1 person on your list, you should be making 1 dollar per month. Now obviously that money doesn’t happen by magic. But it is very possible to make good money from an email list… and in a much easier, less stressful and less time-consuming way than making money through leveraging social media etc.

So, I hope you are now sold on the whole idea of email, but it can be a big subject… and a daunting one… so let me show you step by step exactly how to get started with email marketing and get your first subscribers…

Don’t miss a thing!

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