You now know where to write, what to write about, and how to write.
Today’s lesson is dedicated to the email list.
Why an Email List?
I wrote for a year and a half before I understood the importance of the email list.
An email list is the ultimate bond between a reader and a writer.
It helps you take your audience with you wherever you go and enables you to sell them stuff if you want to as well.
You should always collect emails even if you are not planning on doing anything with them in the beginning.
How to Collect Emails?
You need to give readers a good reason to give you their emails since everyone’s collecting them nowadays.
The first thing to do is to have a clear call to action (CTA) and a promise.
The simplest form of my own email collection appears as follows:
Bi-weekly bullet-point trend curation.
It tells you everything you need to know about the value you will receive if you give up your email.
And the CTA is clear: it’s about subscribing!
Then I have this form:
It’s a little bit longer and provides more details.
Finally, I have this one:
This is the most advanced form of email collection text I use. I even offer people to check out the newsletter archives so that they can see for themselves if they’d like the newsletter or not.
A lot of people will tell you to create a “lead magnet” to collect more emails.
A lead magnet is usually a “free PDF” with “the 20 go-to AI tools I use everyday to skyrocket my productivity!”
It’s a gift motivating people to sign up.
The truth is that lead magnets don’t work as well as they used to as people are no longer duped.
The best way to collect emails by far is to write great content so that people want to subscribe to you for more great content.
What Email Collection Software to Use?
An email collection software will help you collect emails with forms and often, will also help you send them.
One of the most complete email platforms is MailChimp.
You can build lists, collect emails, segment, and do a bunch of other stuff to get as much as you can out of your email list.
I use MailerLite because their free plan is much more extensive than MailChimp’s .
Many creators use ConvertKit, but it’s too restrictive and expensive for me.
Finally, there’s also Substack and Beehiiv. Beehiiv is a newsletter monetization platform while Substack is suited more for people that write blog posts and want to be paid for it.
I use Substack for my newsletter because everything is free.
What to Do With Your Email List?
The Internet will tell you absolute nonsense when it comes to sending emails.
Some will even recommend sending emails to your list several times per day.
The truth is that people don’t want to receive:
- Too many emails.
- Too long emails.
Send emails once a week maximum and make sure that it contains things people want to know.
I send my list one email every two weeks because more than that would be too much.
I have developed my own newsletter format based on what I thought people liked and got a very high readership (48%) and very low unsubscribe rate (0.5%) as a result.
Stay true to yourself.
If you write about travel, don’t go write a newsletter about tech and business.
I also recommend you separate your newsletter from your writing.
Eg: if you write full-time on Medium, don’t send a newsletter where you write more articles. People won’t sign up for that because they are already reading you on Medium. Offer something different, but related to your niche.
Conclusion
Sign up with an email collection platform and display your email signing forms where people see them.
If you write on Medium, you can add a link at the end of your articles or in your bio.
Same thing on Twitter and on the other platforms we talked about.
Tomorrow, we will talk about scaling and earning money.
See you tomorrow!
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter and I'll send you a list of the articles I wrote during the previous month + insights from the books I am reading + a short bullet list of savvy facts that will expand your mind. I keep the whole thing under three minutes.
How does that sound?
