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How I Grew My Email List From 100 to 1,000 Subscribers in Less Than a Year

Published May 24, 2017 | Last Updated April 11, 2024 By Nicole Bianchi 32 Comments

Photo by Christin Hume

Can we throw a party?

Last month, we passed 1,000 subscribers on the blog’s email list.

One Thousand Subscribers.

I can still hardly believe it when I press send on the email newsletter and realize that it’s just landed in the inboxes of more than 1,000 amazing readers.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much to each and every one of you who has subscribed. Since starting this crazy blogging adventure last year, I’ve been overwhelmed by all of your kind comments and messages.

Growing an audience for your writing isn’t easy. At the beginning of last year, I didn’t really know how to find my audience online. My email list grew slowly, and sometimes it felt like hardly anyone was reading my work.

But in late March 2016, I won a contest for a year of blog coaching with bestselling author Jeff Goins. Thank you, Jeff! This included access to a course by email marketer Bryan Harris which I began working through in June when I had about 100 subscribers.

With Jeff’s and Bryan’s coaching and a lot of hard work, I soon discovered the most effective ways to reach a wider audience with my writing.

In today’s post, I’m looking at why every writer needs an email list, and I’m sharing the top five strategies that brought me the biggest number of subscribers.

Note: This is an in-depth guide at over 2,200 words. If you’d like to save it to read later, you can get the PDF version by signing up to my email newsletter for access to the members-only content library.

Why You Need an Email List

Here are four reasons why every writer needs an email list:

1. An email list is 100% owned by you. Your following on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram could disappear overnight if your account gets suspended or the social media site shuts down. Not so with email.

2. Email is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your readers and let them know when you publish a new post. Social media feeds are cluttered with hundreds of updates, and your readers might miss yours. Since email feels more like a private conversation, it’s a great way to build relationships with your readers.

3. If you ever want to promote a book or sell another product or service (like copywriting or editing services), emails have far higher conversion rates than promotional posts on social media or announcements published on your website.

4. Many book publishers will want to know how big your email list is before they give you a book deal. Often, they’ll give you a bigger advance the bigger your email list is. If you’re self-publishing, an email list is essential for marketing your book and organizing a book launch team.

Entrepreneurs like Jeff Goins and Bryan Harris point to 1,000 email subscribers as the base number to start making substantial revenue when selling a book or other product to your email list.

Read New York Times bestselling author Kevin Kelly’s essay on why every creative needs 1,000 true fans.

You Can Grow Your Email List Even If You’re Busy

Now, I know a lot of us writers are short on time. Often we’re juggling our writing with our day jobs or spending time with our families. We don’t have a lot of extra time to spare on growing an audience.

Don’t worry. Depending on how fast you want to grow your email list, the five strategies I’m sharing with you today don’t require a huge amount of time. This past year, I sometimes only posted on my blog once or twice a month, and yet I was still able to grow my list to over 1K subscribers. (If I had posted more frequently, I probably would have grown my email list even faster.)

Without further ado, let’s jump into the five list-building strategies.

(To implement the strategies in this post, you will need an email marketing service. MailChimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers. I use MailerLite (affiliate link) which is free up to 1,000 subscribers. ConvertKit (affiliate link) is an even more powerful service that starts at $29/month. It will be easier to implement the strategies below if you use MailerLite or ConvertKit. Note: these are affiliate links. Check out my guide here for tips on how to get your website set up if you don’t already have one.)

1. Craft a Mission Statement

Technically, I started posting on nicolebianchi.com back in August 2015. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to blog about. I tried writing movie reviews and self-improvement articles and sharing NYC travel tips.

But even though I’d given myself free reign to write about anything I wanted, I found it difficult to come up with new blog post ideas and find an audience. Ultimately, my blog lacked direction. There was no unifying theme tying my posts together, no larger story that they fit into.

Finally, in late December, I realized that I needed to figure out who I wanted my target audience to be. I decided to turn my blog into a website for writers. More specifically, I wanted to write articles about famous authors and the writing and productivity tips I was learning from them.

Defining your target audience is essential to building your email list. Once you’ve defined your target audience, you will know what content to create to attract your tribe (as Seth Godin calls it) who will be eager to sign up to your list.

If you’re not sure how to determine your target audience, Jeff Goins says you should flesh out a worldview for your site. He gives this formula for pinpointing your worldview:

“Every [BLANK] can/should [BLANK]”

Mine, for example, would be something like “Every writer should study the greats.”

All of my posts relate to that theme in some way, even when I’m not writing about a famous writer and am just sharing my writing journey.

After determining your worldview and target audience, you need to craft a mission statement. Think about how you can help your target audience. Try using this formula:

“I help [TARGET AUDIENCE] to [BLANK]”

Just like an essay needs a thesis statement, so does your blog. Your one-sentence mission statement will help you create content that will resonate with your audience and add value to their lives.

Spend some time on this first step. Crafting a mission statement is very important because it’s going to help you with step 2.

2. Create an Opt-in Gift

In this step, you’re going to think about the biggest struggle your target audience is facing. What resource can you create to help them solve that problem?

(This doesn’t have to be a long, in-depth resource. It can be something you put together in a few hours.)

Once you’ve created that resource, you’re going to give it away as a gift to your readers when they subscribe to your email list. It will act as an incentive to make them want to subscribe to your site. I like to call this resource an “opt-in gift” (Internet marketers also refer to it as a “freebie” or “lead magnet”).

For example, when you subscribe to my site, you’ll get my free eBook Famous Writers’ Productivity Hacks. I created this book to solve one of my readers’ biggest struggles: optimizing their time.

Another struggle that my readers face is finding a supportive writing community to help them reach their writing goals. I created a private Facebook group and use that as an opt-in gift too.

An opt-in gift gives your readers a reason to subscribe to your site. After all, even if someone enjoyed reading your articles, they could just bookmark your site and come by to read it occasionally. With an opt-in gift, you prove to them that it’s worth taking their time to type their email into the signup form. (Your email marketing service should have free signup forms you can use on your site.)

What can you create as an opt-in gift? If you’re a fiction writer, you might give away a short story or a book excerpt or even an entire novel. Or maybe you put together a guide like “10 Essential Steps to Writing Science Fiction”. Sometimes you have to experiment before you land on an opt-in gift that is right for your community.

3. Write Compelling Blog Posts with Content Upgrades

After nailing down the focus of my blog in January 2016, I finally put an email signup form on the site and set out to write blog posts that would inspire and help fellow writers. But after spending days crafting a post, I would only receive a handful of comments.

Most of those comments were positive, though, and they encouraged me to keep going. Still, I felt a little discouraged. I wanted my posts to reach more readers.

After a while, it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t with my content but with the way I was presenting it. So I decided to study the rules of copywriting and read every article I could get my hands on about how to write powerful blog posts.

As I started implementing what I was learning, my posts began receiving more and more comments and shares (and more people started subscribing to the website!). I boiled down everything I learned about writing compelling blog posts in this 5-step guide.

Now, not every single one of your posts has to follow that 5-step formula to the letter. But my posts that receive the most shares and comments are almost always the ones that do follow those five steps.

The bottom line is that people will be more likely to subscribe to your site if your blog posts add value to their lives. The 5-step guide shows you how to do just that.

Here’s a bonus tip: Along with your blog’s main opt-in gift, you can also create resources to accompany your individual blog posts that readers have to sign up for in order to download. These resources are called “content upgrades”. For example, with my article about crafting compelling blog posts, I put together a blog post checklist that readers can access by subscribing to the email list.

4. Share Your Website & Blog Posts

Imagine you’ve just opened a new store. However, instead of being located on a busy thoroughfare, your store is way out in the middle of an empty field.

That’s kind of what it’s like when you start a blog. You might get a trickle of traffic from Google search. Usually, though, no one will know your blog exists unless you tell them.

You need to figure out where your target audience is hanging out online and share your blog with them.

One of my favorite ways to do this is by joining Facebook groups. There are many Facebook groups for writers that have designated days when you can share links to your blog posts. You might also be able to share a direct link to a landing page for your opt-in gift.

Of course, you don’t want to just use these groups for self-promotion. It’s best to become an active member of the community. Comment on other member’s blog posts. Help out other members and answer questions. They’ll be much more likely to want to help you out too.

5. Guest Post the Smart Way

Guest posting means writing an article for another person’s website. (For example, I recently wrote a guest post for Jeff Goins’ blog here.) If you’re a fiction writer, you could look for websites that publish short stories.

Like posting in Facebook groups, this is another fantastic way to let your target audience know about your writing. It’s also an excellent way to build relationships with other bloggers. And if you get published on a big authoritative website, it will enhance your credibility as a writer.

However, guest posting can be tricky and time-consuming. Sometimes, you might write an amazing guest post but still not attract very many new subscribers. In order for guest posting to be worth your time, look for blogs with an active community. Often, this will mean that the most recent blog posts receive lots of comments or social media shares.

Additionally, be sure to make the most of your guest post bio and include a link to the landing page for your opt-in gift.

I actually did not guest post on other blogs during the time that I grew my email list to 1,000 subscribers. But I did guest post frequently in publications on a website called Medium. In fact, over the space of three months, I added more than 550 subscribers to my email list just from guest posting there.

And here’s what I really love about Medium. You can republish posts you’ve already written on your blog. This means that you can guest post even if you don’t have time to write new blog posts.

Check out my complete guide on how to use Medium to share your writing and grow your email list.

The Takeaway: Get the Free 5-Step Checklist!

Cover of PDF downloadGrowing an online audience can feel intimidating and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. With these five strategies, you can build your email list quickly and still have time left to devote to your writing projects.

Best of all, I’ve compiled all of these strategies into a super easy to follow 5-Step Checklist that you can get by signing up to my email newsletter to access to the members-only content library.

Have you used any of these list building strategies or have any questions about them? Let me know in the comments.

And if you found this post helpful, please share it with a friend. You can use the picture below to share it on Pinterest.

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Filed Under: blogging, marketing, writing

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Comments

  1. Jathan says

    June 13, 2017 at 11:38 am

    Thanks for documenting and sharing your process Nicole. I’m in the process of “finding my voice”, that part that you struggled with early on. How long did it take before you found your sweet spot on your writing focus “curating the greats”? Also, are you comfortable with limiting your writing to this narrow scope? Do you sometimes want to break out and write about other things?

    P.S. I met you and your mother at Tribe Conference (in line waiting to talk to Jeff). I didn’t know this was your blog until I saw the pic. Congrats and I hope to see you at Tribe 2017. I’ve already got my ticket.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      June 15, 2017 at 12:09 pm

      Hi Jathan,

      Yes, I remember meeting you at Tribe Conference. Glad you enjoyed this post!

      That is an interesting question about how long it took me to decide on this focus for my blog. When I decided I wanted to begin a personal blog, it took me several months to narrow down the topic. However, I actually had another blog before this one where I shared writing tips and study tips for high school and college students. So the journey to arriving at this particular topic had some interesting twists and turns.

      If there’s ever a topic that I want to write about that I think wouldn’t quite fit here, then I’d probably post it to my Medium blog. I’d hate to limit my writing. 🙂

      Reply
  2. Lynn Woods says

    May 31, 2017 at 9:04 am

    These are great tips. I created my mission statement. It was in my head, but never wrote it down. Major aha moment!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      June 1, 2017 at 1:50 pm

      Thank you, Lynn! Love that you wrote down your mission statement. It makes it much more tangible when it’s on paper. 🙂

      Reply
  3. Resh Susan says

    May 30, 2017 at 3:48 am

    Great tips Nicole. I have been on two minds about Medium. I have heard good and bad. I am so glad it worked out so well for you. I would like to try it out some day. Maybe after I can find a bit more time at hand. Thanks for the insightful post. And congrats that you have exploded your mailing list.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      June 1, 2017 at 1:55 pm

      Thank you so much, Resh! It took me a little bit of time to figure out Medium, but I’m glad I finally started posting there. It really helps to get your blog posts seen by more people & it’s great for meeting other writers.

      Reply
  4. Ike Paz says

    May 29, 2017 at 7:54 pm

    These are solid tips for any budding online entrepreneur.

    Build your list and do it the way Nicole laid it out for you!

    Great tips here.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      June 1, 2017 at 1:56 pm

      Thanks for your kind comment, Ike! 🙂

      Reply
  5. Tamara @ Parenting 2 Home Kids says

    May 29, 2017 at 10:37 am

    Thanks for the inspiration! When I read about other bloggers’ success, it helps me to keep going. I think she is making it work so can I. I am working on growing my e-mail list now, but it is slow going. I have tried a couple of different opt-ins and have had some interest with the second one. I am working on a new parenting challenge opt-in that I am hoping hits the mark.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:29 pm

      Hi, Tamara! Yes, reading about other bloggers’ successes keeps me motivated too. Hope these tips help you! All the best with your new opt-in. 🙂

      Reply
  6. Kelvin says

    May 29, 2017 at 9:08 am

    Great tips! I’m going to try Medium next.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:27 pm

      Thanks, Kelvin! All the best with Medium.

      Reply
  7. Sameer says

    May 29, 2017 at 8:48 am

    Insightful content. Thanks for sharing

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:26 pm

      Thank you for commenting, Sameer! Glad to hear that. 🙂

      Reply
  8. Amy says

    May 29, 2017 at 8:44 am

    Great story and very inspiriting! Thanks for sharing!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:25 pm

      Thanks so much, Amy! 🙂

      Reply
  9. Tanya says

    May 29, 2017 at 8:41 am

    Would you consider a similar contest as the one you won? I need a coach!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:24 pm

      Having a coach does make a big difference. 🙂 I’m planning to offer coaching services soon.

      Reply
  10. Lynne Evans says

    May 29, 2017 at 8:38 am

    Thanks for posting this. I’m sure it will be very useful!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 29, 2017 at 12:21 pm

      Thanks for your comment, Lynne! 🙂 Hope you find it helpful!

      Reply
  11. Frank McKinley says

    May 27, 2017 at 7:24 am

    This is fantastic, Nicole!

    Anyone can use this to easily build her email list. What a great resource to share. Thanks!

    I’m not quite at 1,000 subscribers yet. With this, I know I’ll get there.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 27, 2017 at 6:14 pm

      Thank you, Frank! All the best as you grow your email list. Glad to hear that you found these tips helpful. 🙂

      Reply
  12. Louise Foerster says

    May 26, 2017 at 4:13 pm

    Nicole: I found your marvelous blog earlier this year and have been so challenged, informed, motivated, so enjoyed the process! I, for one, think part of your marvelous success is due to your steady, hard work, earnest good-hearted sharing, and all around smart being in the world. Thank you for all that you do to make a daunting lifestyle manageable, meaningful, and a joy.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 27, 2017 at 6:13 pm

      Wow, thank you so much for your kind, encouraging words, Louise! 🙂 I have so loved getting to know you better. And I am so happy to hear that you are enjoying the blog. Thank you for being part of my writing community!

      Reply
  13. Jennifer Roland says

    May 26, 2017 at 1:22 pm

    Great advice, Nicole. I love the idea of content upgrades!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 27, 2017 at 6:09 pm

      Thanks, Jennifer! 🙂

      Reply
  14. Anne Peterson says

    May 26, 2017 at 1:08 pm

    Great article Nicole. So much good information. I also subscribed. I have done some of the things you suggested. I’ve also guest posted on Jeff Goins blog a couple of times. I was a TribeWriter pioneer.
    Still, I have not grown my email list to 1000 yet, although I think the combined number is that. So, that’s what I’m working on.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 27, 2017 at 6:08 pm

      Hi, Anne! Thank you so much for your comment & for subscribing. 🙂 How cool that you were a TribeWriter pioneer. All the best as you grow your email list. I hope these tips help!

      Reply
  15. Kate Findley says

    May 26, 2017 at 2:47 am

    Super inspiring! When I started posting blogs, it was very frustrating because I would put hours of work into them and maybe two people would read them. But I came to realize that I just wasn’t marketing them right and also that growing an audience takes time. Now that I’m about to start an email newsletter, I will definitely take your advice into consideration. Also, I love your Facebook group and have gotten so much out of it!

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 26, 2017 at 10:49 am

      Thank you so much for your comment, Kate! 🙂 Oh, yes, that is the worst — spending hours on a post and then hardly anyone reads it. Hope these tips help you as you grow your email list! I am so happy to hear that you are enjoying the Facebook group. Thank you for being a part of this community!

      Reply
  16. Cynthia Pereira says

    May 24, 2017 at 8:35 pm

    Such a great informative article Nicole! I’ve just restarted my blog, and a lot of your points are so relevant, like having a mission statement for your blog, and giving people a reason to sign up to an email list. Thanks for such helpful content.

    Reply
    • Nicole Bianchi says

      May 25, 2017 at 10:53 am

      Hi Cynthia,

      Thank you so much for reading and for your comment! 🙂 I am so happy to hear that this post was helpful to you. Hope your blogging is going well! I need to drop by your blog and catch up with your IG.

      Reply

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Hi, I’m Nicole! I help creatives, business owners, and writers take their writing and copywriting to the next level and grow their online audience. I’m also a published writer of essays and short stories. As a Christian, I seek to follow in the tradition of artists like Johann Sebastian Bach, dedicating all my work Soli Deo gloria.
Find out more about me here.
•••
“My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.”
– Psalm 45:1

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