What are the best ways to build and maintain an email list for your personal brand?

I've studied this opportunity perhaps more than anybody I know. I've interviewed dozens of experts and here's the number one tip by far: Provide insanely good content. That might seem obvious, but let's look at that more deeply. First, many of the tips in this post involve giveaways and funnels. It's relatively easy to trick people into clicking on a link or downloading a freebie, but your whole goal here is create an actionable audience that will make your dreams come true. If you trick them. they are just going to unsubscribe right away. So great content legitimately earns the audience. Second, great content earns organic advocacy -- and that is the most powerful growth driver. People will only share great content, so focus on that!

When you have a clear and targeted niche, your newsletter can create far more added value. That doesn't mean you have to wait. I would recommend putting content out there, learning all along what people respond to. Meanwhile, keep working on your personal brand as you hone it over a period of time. ??

To build and maintain an email list for your personal brand, offer valuable content or freebies (like eBooks), put sign-up forms on your website and social media, collaborate with others, and use webinars or contests to attract subscribers. Once you have a list, send regular, personalized emails with interesting information to keep your audience engaged. Make sure to respect privacy rules and analyze what works to refine your approach over time. An email list is a direct way to connect with your followers and share your brand's updates and offerings.

If you don't yet have a niche or a value proposition, just start building your list and start creating. You'll get a ton of feedback (usually in the form of click throughs, opens, and unsubscribes). You'll also get a sense of what you enjoy talking about. You'll begin to develop your own style and voice. Personal branding is a dance between who you are, who you want to be, and who your clients want you to be. Consistency will eventually become important, but personal branding begins as a journey of discovery.

In my experience, if one is starting it is always beneficial to start with a narrow niche. Most of us have this perception that one would miss out on a lot of customers. But going all out would spread you thin and this would require more work in wide areas of work. Moreover, the competition would be with the big companies and that is a disadvantage in the beginning. Instead, it is very pertinent to start in a narrow niche and dominate that and then one can spread. The resources at hand can be utilized in a much better way which includes Financial Resources, Manpower, and Time. Building authority in a narrow niche takes less time and that really matters in the initial phase of starting the business. Riches are in the NICHES!!!!!!!!!!

If you've built a large, engaged network here on LinkedIn, try LinkedIn's Newsletter feature available when you turn on Creator mode. LinkedIn will invite your entire network, everyone who invites you to connect, and even your followers to subscribe but won't provide you with the email addresses of those Members. Then its up to you to entice those subscribers to join your email list for special offers. Go Grand, Never Bland, Brand to Land & #KeepRockingLinkedIn! Kevin On a Mission to Eliminate Organizational & Personal Blanding?

Many gravitate towards Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or Substack for email management, but my game-changer has been ActiveCampaign. It's not just about collecting emails; it's about building genuine connections. With ClickFunnels, I've set up a streamlined system that captures, segments, and engages my audience efficiently. This combination is a powerhouse for creating impactful email campaigns that truly resonate.

I find LinkedIn as a great platform for sharing newsletters that can be subscribed and that way also one can start building a tribe of followers - In fact, I have a biweekly newsletter series which I started about a year ago, and I now have more than 4500 subscribers to that Newsletter.

In my experience as an Infrastructure / SRE type, I have seen a lot of shoehorning of technologies into a stack for the sake of the technology. Boilerplate setups are good to get started, but in my honest opinion, you should take the MVP approach. Ask yourself what the needs for your first deliverables are. Ask yourself if the platform tools align with your needs. Do you really need a plugin for a technology that can scale to a million users? Or do you need something simple to deliver value faster? If you get stymied on your value driven approach trying to learn a platform when you could be building your business in other ways, it might be better to stick to something simple that you can use easily, even if it doesn't seem as "cool."

One of the most effective ways to build your list through content marketing is to create content using the "Know How with No How" model. If all of your content solves your audience's problems for them, they have less incentive to take a next step with you, which means you risk creating your list with people predominantly interested in free resources. Create content that showcases that you "know how" to solve their problems and highlights your deep understanding of the issue while sharing you have solutions for them, without showing them "how" to solve the problem. Your audience will be more eager to subscribe and more likely to be interested in your paid services.

EVERY single newsletter you send out needs to have value added content vs. just promoting your stuff. Tell stories, share an insight, use your existing content out there and leverage it for a nice summary. Regardless, people are subscribing because they want access to you and your IDEAS. So share those most of all. ??

As an SRE type I get prompted to join newsletters and lists for technologies all the time. Here is what drives me to reach out and keep subscribed to the good ones: 1. Summarized content. Do the reading for me and give me your insights with the source. If your take is good I stay subbed. 2. Don't just offer me products. Offer me efficient workflows or paradigms that use the products. 3. Keep it targeted. Second biggest annoyance is irrelevant content. 4. Do not give me paywalled content sources. First biggest annoyance. Looking forward, make your content easily ingestible by generative AI products. Include a prompt at the end that generates a nice output response summary of your newsletter and its sources.

Write something people want to read. To truly engage readers, writers must prioritize their audience's interests, curiosities, and needs, ensuring that the content is not just well-composed but also relevant and compelling. When you find your format and something you can consistently and repeatedly talk about, eventually you will succeed. It's not magic; it's about trying, making mistakes, and practicing to get better.

Pick a social media platform that reaches the audience you want to engage. Start providing insights that make people smarter, help them do their jobs better, improve their lives, or otherwise achieve some kind of goal they have. Reach out to people to connect so that they see your content. Then start peppering in posts that send them to your blog or newsletter to which they can subscribe with their email. Then keep providing great content on a regular basis and, importantly, regularly monitor and analyze your engagement and sign-ups and request feedback to find out what's resonating.

3 days before each release of my newsletter, I publish a post on LinkedIn to introduce the subject. I usually tease. In this post I talk about the problem I am going to address in the email. I only provide about 60% of the information and add a call to action to register on my list to get the email a couple of days later. That works pretty well as I always get 10 to 30 new subscribers each time.

Growing your email list is a multifaceted approach that depends on your type of business. If you exhibit at craft shows, you want to capture the email addresses of attendees, while if you have an online presence, you can expand on generic social media channels and instead do direct outreach to people you already know and ask them to opt in to your email list. These are warm audiences and you have a better chance of converting them to followers and potential customers.

Email list is your own media invest in it and watch your marketing efforts increase greatly. The aim of an email list is to nurture, grow and promote your business. The more personalised your contents are the better

You can also use videos embedded in your email or as links in your mail. For example, a welcome post that includes a video is much more effective and engaging than just text and images.

One very important thing a lot of people miss in personal branding is the power of consistency. Running emailers and newsletters isn't about 1-2 times, it's about doing it consistently. Can be weekly, fortnightly or even monthly, but it has to be consistent As they thumbrule for newsletters say, u should have at least 6 month content ready before u kick start your newsletter activity. Ensures that kind of a consistency to create impact

Getting an email of your audience or potential prospects is not that hard. You can run an ad or post consistently for some time and collect emails through forms on your website or social media channels. But what matters more is if you can provide them value consistently for a long time. That’s where the real magic lies. Now with so many AI email tools out there in the market, getting an email of your potential prospects has never been easier. But to keep them engaged and interested is what most people, including me, struggle with. At the end, it’s all about doing the work even if you get bored by it and being consistent. If you can do that, people will be happy to learn from you and share their email with you. ???

Email list is like a classroom filled with students ready to write an exam. They know why they are there. To maintain an email list, the owner of the list must share VALUABLE and RELEVANT INFORMATION. You know why they chose to subscribe to your list, you know the type of information that attracted them and brought them in. Don't do a 360° on them. I.e, if sport content brought them in, don't start talking about food content. Even if you have to talk about food, let it be at the background. Email list needs different format of information. E.g - Text content - Video content - Infographics etc.

If your not ready to build and maintain your own email list for your personal brand but want to experiment with running a Newsletter try LinkedIn's Newsletter feature available when you turn on Creator mode. Go Grand, Never Bland, Brand to Land & #KeepRockingLinkedIn! Kevin On a Mission to Eliminate Organizational & Personal Blanding?

Build a strong email list by offering value, using clear CTAs, and staying consistent with quality content. Personalize emails for more personal connection, respect privacy preferences, and regularly clean your list for genuine engagement.