How to Grow Your Email List

Other forms of social media may get more attention in the press. But I strongly believe that for most companies - and most self-employed individuals - building your email list should be of primary importance. In fact, I spoke about this in one of my weekly #DCin2Minutes videos, which you can find here. Blogger James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, is a master of the email list. In the span of just two years, he grew his own list from zero to 100,000 (it's now even larger).

I interviewed James for my book, Entrepreneurial You, and he had great advice on how to systematically develop your audience and grow a dedicated email list. Here are four tips from James to start you on your way to a captive following.

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Here are James' top tips:

Be consistent. When James started writing, he realized that regularity of content was key: “My point is that you show up once a month or once every other month or something like that, the strategies are not going to work that well," he says. "There are a couple reasons for that. The first is every piece of content that you produce is a chance to rank in Google and drive search engine traffic, or people to share it on social media, or someone to email an article to their friends, and so on. I think the more important reason is that if I write two articles a week, that's eight or nine a month. If I write eight or nine a month, then I know two or three of them are going to be decent. A lot of the time we think ‘I just need a better strategy,’ or ‘I just need a better tactic,’ when really what you need is better work.”

Make your website layout clean and straightforward. When you write captivating content, you have your audience’s attention. James stresses the importance of making it as easy as possible to convert that attention into a returning audience member. “Once you're writing consistently, the next thing I would say is design," he notes. "By this, I mean copywriting - the words that you use or the calls to action that you use on your site. The basic idea is that first of all, I want there to be one clear "call to action" on each page. I don't want to confuse people by having them click here to buy my book, click here to sign up for my email list, follow me on Twitter and Facebook, and read this article. That's five things that they should do. When they have five things to do, they're just going to end up doing nothing because they don't know what the most important thing is. It's your job to decide what's most important, and then just give that to them in the easiest way possible.”

More content means better search engine rankings. “You're showing up consistently. You've got a good well-designed website. How do you get people to come now that you've got stuff there?" James asks. "There are a couple of different routes you can take. Obviously you can do search engine optimization if you want to try to rank for a particular keyword. For me, I didn't really think about that a whole lot. I just wrote more. As I wrote more articles, I started ranking higher, simply from having more content for Google to pick up.” 

Pace yourself for the long game. Creating great content is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't think that you have lock yourself away for a year in order to write articles. James says, “Show up consistently, write, and try to do your best job possible. For me, it's twice a week. That is not a magic pace. It can be once a week. Pick whatever pace you can show up to consistently and not burn out. Just make sure you're making yourself write consistently. Once you do that, you'll have a couple of good articles each month and then you can use those articles to try to drive more traffic from social media or build a partnership with a major media outlet. Drive traffic back to [your] well-designed webpage that can capture their attention. From that point, just stick with the process and repeat.”

With a consistent output of quality content and a clear path to join your mailing list, you will be able to organically amass your audience. (You might also enjoy this article I wrote for Harvard Business Review about How to Get People to Subscribe to Your Newsletter.)

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Wishing you health and success,

Dorie