How to Grow an Email List in 5 Simple Ways

In today's issue, I'm sharing 5 simple ways that you can increase your number of newsletter subscribers and grow your email list from scratch.

I've gone from 0 to 21,163 subscribers since I launched my newsletter publicly on January 25th.

That's roughly 235 subscribers per day for 90 days.

But this isn't my first attempt at growing an email newsletter. I tried a year and a half ago and grew to only 8k subscribers in those 18 months.

So, what changed?

I started using multiple approaches to capture potential newsletter subscribers everywhere that I'm active online:

• X (formerly Twitter)
• LinkedIn (been the easiest)
• My personal website

Now, I want to share the five approaches that have worked most effectively, plus one bonus that I'm excited to try in the future.

Let's dive in.

5 ways to grow your email list and newsletter subscribers

1. Revue to newsletter export from X
2. Use Hypefury autoplugs
3. Put it in your LinkedIn Profile
4. Leverage the LinkedIn First Comment
5. Clean up your mobile site
   

1. Revue to newsletter export from Twitter

Twitter (X) acquired the newsletter platform Revue. This allows people to start a newsletter on Revue and easily embed it on their X profiles.

But many people miss this massive opportunity because they don't use Revue for their newsletter.

For example, I use Kajabi to run my newsletter, but I can't feature that on my Twitter profile in the same fashion as a Revue user.

Good news! There's a simple workaround.

I created a duplicate newsletter with the same name (The Saturday Solopreneur) on Revue and then integrated it into my Twitter profile.

Each Saturday morning I export my Revue subscribers into Kajabi before my newsletter goes out.

Note: You used to be able to automate this with Zapier, but it looks like Revue has recently changed its API access, so my Zap was automatically turned off.

So far, that's helped me capture 1,814 subscribers directly from my X profile and grow my email list. 

2. Use Hypefury autoplugs

Hypefury is a publishing tool for your social media content.

One of my favorite features is their "autoplug" feature. This feature automatically adds an extra post onto an already high-performing post to plug my newsletter.

It's pretty simple.

You just choose the number of engagements needed on a post and Hypefury adds the autoplug, which you can customize. You can see I've chosen 800 engagements.

So whenever a post reaches 800 engagements, Hypefury automatically adds another post to the bottom and plugs my newsletter.

Here's an example:

So far, my plugs have 167.5k impressions and have generated over 1,570 new visits to my newsletter page.

3. Put it in your LinkedIn Profile 2x

If you're active on LinkedIn and you want to collect newsletter subscribers, make sure you're sharing your newsletter URL on your LinkedIn profile in two places.

A. Your "Featured" section

To add it to your featured section, you simply head to your profile, scroll down to your featured section, and click the plus button. Next, click "Add a Link".

Note: Don't click "Add a newsletter" as that's for LinkedIn Newsletters only.

Simply paste in your newsletter URL and you're done.

The image that they pull through is whatever image you have attached to that page of your website.

B. Your Profile header

This is in beta, but many users just received access a few days ago, and can now feature their website at the top of their LinkedIn profile.

You simply head to your profile, click the "edit profile" pencil and scroll down to the bottom.

If you see a "website" section, you can add a website link and link text to showcase your newsletter.

You can't measure exactly how many newsletter subscribers you get from these two sections, but with 50,000 profile visits each month, I can hypothesize that a big chunk of subscribers come from here.

4. Leverage the LinkedIn First Comment

LinkedIn has a reputation for throttling content that includes links to outside websites.

The workaround is to call attention to the first comment, and then plug your newsletter there.

I love using a tool called Publer.io, which allows me to write my content, but also the first comment. I can choose what the comment says, add my newsletter URL, and even add an attention-grabbing picture.

5. Clean up your mobile site

Most sites that I visit on mobile make it very difficult to subscribe to a newsletter because they are crammed with way too much information.

My mobile site looks entirely different than my desktop website and it's focused on being clean, minimal, and moving the reader to subscribe to my newsletter.

I make it easy to subscribe to my newsletter in 2 places on my mobile website.

Here's what my mobile website looks like:

Bonus Tip: Install compelling exit pops

This last option is something I'm excited to try. Why?

Because I've read about the effectiveness of compelling exit pops written by people like Harry Dry, who runs the excellent site, marketingexamples.com.

An exit pop is simply a pop-up that encourages readers to enter their email address if they start to move their cursor towards closing the window.

You can see how Harry jams his exit pop with compelling information that makes it almost impossible to skip.

This is something I plan on testing on my website in the very near future.

That's all for today!

5 ways to grow an email list and newsletter subscribers (plus one bonus).

TL;DR

1. Export from Revue
2. Hypefury autoplugs
3. Add it 2x to your LinkedIn profile
4. LinkedIn first comment
5. A better, cleaner mobile site
6. Compelling exit pops