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Hey ,
Email lists are vital for bloggers.
But growing them is a fricken pain in the ass.
Everyone says "have an opt in freebie". So you make one, slap it on your site, and then go ... now what??
Opt ins are well and good, but you need to be getting organic traffic for a freebie on your site to do anything.
And when you’re just starting out, that’s hard!
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So I accidentally started conducting an experiment. Once I realized I was doing it, I started taking detailed notes to see how 3 types of popular list building (that require 0 audience already) can impact a site.
The three I compared are: Bundle (Lizzy’s Christmas Party), Summit (Blogger Breakthrough Summit), and podcast (Niche Pursuits).
Yes, these aren’t travel topics. BUT people with travel sites participated in all of the above and have hyped their travel site only on all of the above before.
But I was promoting She Knows SEO on all of these platforms.
There are a couple areas we need to compare for each of these to determine which is most successful.
To me, success = $$ from these.
Email subscribers are well and good. But what’s the point if you’re paying for them to be on your list if they don’t make you money? (Money can be made from affiliate sales, course/product sales, and site views for ad revenue. This site doesn’t have ads so I’m looking at the first two here).
So I’ll be comparing: total email subscribers, number of unsubscribes, open rates, click through rates, and course sales (since it’s really hard to track affiliate sales per person and I didn’t have UTMs set up in time).
Let’s look at each one before we compare them.
1) Bundle
Lizzy’s Christmas Party (Elizabeth Goddard) ran for a few weeks in December, but people could sign up until January.
It had a free and paid bundle. I contributed to both with 2 different products.
Total subscribers: 1602
Unsubscribes: 206
Average open rates: 39.30% from the regular, 39.63% from the premium
Average click through rates: 5.2% from the regular, 3.82% from the premium [These were much lower until 2 weeks ago. I believe once people started getting fewer emails from all the participants]
Income earned: $147 (from 1 sale of a course)
2) Summit
Liz Stapleton ran the Blogger Breakthrough Summit at the end of January. I led a 30 minute section on Google ranking AI content and how to write it with Jasper. My session was above average for attendance, comments, and engagement rates.
I submitted a freebie but no paid course to the VIP pass.
Total subscribers: 169
Unsubscribes: * I’ll be honest I forgot to track this. That’s my bad. I didn’t see a lot around this time so I believe it’s under 20.
Average open rates: 44.65%
Average click through rates: 5.34%
Income earned: $885 from course sales + 2 sign ups for Jasper (I can see the emails so that made this easy to track). This isn’t including the $200 and change I made in sales of the VIP pass (which surprised me since I didn’t really promote it until the end when I saw people were buying it from me)
3) Podcast
I was on Niche Pursuits in December – legit a dream come true since it’s my favorite podcast of ALL TIME! (well, outside of Redhanded for my murder fix and Off Menu for my comedy/food fix).
I was mostly on this for the thrill, not for any benefit. But then, bam, it turned into an email growth magnet! That’s what really prompted me to do this comparison.
Total subscribers: 245
Unsubscribes: Under 10 (I also didn’t track this super well tbh. But I did have to block 3 people so that makes this a bit higher)
Average open rates: 64.65%
Average click through rates: 14.81%
Income earned: Over $15k so far (courses + 1:1 sales) + tons of affiliate income
So which one reigns supreme?
Pretty clearly Niche Pursuits.
Sure, the bundle got me a ton of email subscribers, but they’re not nearly as engaged as the rest of my audience and actually bring down my averages a lot.
I also had to start paying for my email list because of them.
And they don’t really bring me any income.
BUT Niche Pursuits brought in less than ¼ of the subscribers, but over 10x as much income!
Join me next week where I’ll talk about why I think this is and how to use this info for your own site.
Cheers,
Nina
My 6-figure blogging recommendations:
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