Interact is an awesome tool that allows you to create quizzes that capture emails and it connects with many of the popular email service providers. You can share the quizzes directly on social media if you’d like, eliminating that step of needing someone to come to your blog first before they have access to the quiz, and your email list.

The best part about it all is the vast amount of quiz templates ready to be shared. I’ve already created one that asks the question, Do You Have The Blog For Profit Mindset? It was an entrepreneurial mindset quiz that I simply tweaked a few of the questions to tailor it to what I know the blog-for-profit mindset needs and I was able to launch the quiz in just a few minutes!

Here, give it a go! It’s a really fun, quick and simple way to interact with your audience and to ask questions that can funnel them towards something you’d like them to opt into! For instance, this quiz funnels into my how to start a money-making blog email series if you decide to enter your email before revealing your results.

Related: How to Start a Self-Hosted Blog on WordPress – Simple and Detailed Tutorial

There are loads of different types of quizzes inside the interface too! And you can request a quiz template if you have an idea and you don’t see anything quite like it. Of course, you could also just create your own quiz from scratch.

A Snapshot of their Fun Free Quizzes

Just a handful of the many quizzes inside the dashboard that you can customize and use to create your lead generating quiz. It’s connected to Unsplash.com so you’re able to search free stock photography to make your quiz pop or upload your own photo to make it even more unique.

Create a Data-Driven Marketing Quiz

With the tens of thousands of quizzes created on the Interact platform, both free and paid, they have a vast amount of data at their fingertips that tell them things like what type of quizzes do best, what type of headlines and images you should include and so on. Therefore if you’re really stumped on coming up with quiz content, their premade quizzes are awesome jumping off points for you.

I find that the Interact blog is superbly helpful with information about best practices, how to come up with quiz questions and general helpful tips on using the quiz generator.

Free and Paid Quiz Generator Plans

Though on their free plan you’re not able to collect email addresses, give it a try and decide if you like the idea of using quizzes before signing up for the paid plan. The benefit of the free quiz is the ability to use them on Facebook to grow your page’s engagement. And we’re all trying to find off-the-wall free options for growing our Facebook page reach. We’ve all done a quiz or two on the platform so it’s safe to say that your audience may be into Facebook quizzes. Try Interact’s Quiz Generator here.

They also have polls and giveaways included in their premium plans and I’m excited to dig in and see how I can use those tools to grow my email list.

Here’s another quiz I created for my lifestyle brand. I’m currently hosting a 30-day green smoothie challenge on this blog and used this quiz to make people really think about just how healthily they eat in hopes that they decide to check out the challenge.

You can ask people anything you want! What type of celebrity personality do you have, how much do you know about Star Wars, whatever you think will appeal to your audience. I’ve already gotten 14 leads from the quiz and I haven’t done a good job of promoting it to be honest since I launched it just before Christmas and who has time to think about blogging during Christmas!

I’m very excited about the possibilities. I’m thinking of using it to help me to figure out what blogging problems my readers have so I can create more content and even some courses as well. Blog for profit!

Have I piqued your interest? Do you think a quiz is something that you could use to capture emails for your blog?

Related: Why Every Blogger Needs Email Marketing – The Money is in the List

Why You May Want to Segment Your Email Marketing List

On my lifestyle blog, some of the main themes are travel, natural hair and fashion. As I’m diving into email marketing to grow my blogging business, it dawned on me that some of my readers who are interested in fashion may not be interested in my natural hair posts any at all. Other readers who came for my travel or Jamaica posts may not be interested in anything to do with fashion or hair.

But I still wanted to find a way to get everybody on my email list and to keep them all engaged there without sending them information they may not be interested in.I found two ways to do this really simply, depending on how you’ve chosen to set up your email sequences. Keep reading to find out how ConvertKit can help you to do just that super easily. If you haven’t even begun to build your email list as yet, then you may want to sign up for my free email list-building course.

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Why I Chose ConvertKit As My Email Service Provider

Once upon a time, I used Convertkit on my lifestyle blog and Mailerlite on this blog. I kept both going to be able to compare them both since the blogging community goes hard for Convertkit even though Mailerlite is cheaper.

I get it now. Mailerlite is still very easy to use and you can’t beat free. But you get what you pay for. The features offered by Convertkit are so much more robust and honestly, the cost is paid for multiple times over if you’re using your email list to make money, as you should. (Even if you have no product to sell, sending your favourite affiliate links to your email list with honest feedback about the product should make you some dough.)

Convertkit also has an even higher percentage of making it to your subscriber’s email inbox as opposed to spam or promotions tab in Gmail and that’s where you want your emails to end up. I find that once my emails are stylised any at all with Mailerlite, meaning if I want to put an image or use a template for my emails, they end up in the promotions tab. I’ve been able to add my beautiful blog banner to all my Convertkit emails and still land in inboxes instead of spam and promotions tabs.

The bottom line is that Convertkit is very simple to use with much more powerful features and has an amazing support team. It is a beginner or middle-tier blogger’s dream. These features will be discussed further as we go along in this post.

How to Get Started With Your Email Campaign

This is the dashboard inside ConvertKit. Don’t you love how simple it is? Yes, I know, my subscribers were pitiful on my lifestyle blog. I couldn’t figure out for the longest while how to grow my email list there or what to send them until I realised I could simply segment my audience and send them each what they wanted to hear more about.

At the top of the dashboard, dash for short, you see everything you’ll need for your email marketing campaigns. It’s all laid out in pretty much the exact steps you need to take. There’s even a little drop down there with step-by-step instructions to take you through the whole set up. You can see mine is at zero. I bet if I had paid attention to this feature from the start, I wouldn’t have been struggling all along. It’s now at 100%

Get started by taking these steps:

1. Create a freebie – here, you will first create a thing that your subscribers will receive in exchange for jumping on your email list. Gone are the days of “Subscribe here to get my new posts in your inbox.” Now, if you want to attract subscribers, you’ve got to give them something they want in return. This can be in the form of a checklist, printable, worksheet, even your post in PDF format if it’s a very valuable post.
2. Create a form – This is the actual thing that people will fill out with their name and email address in order to join your email list and receive your freebie.
3. Create an automation – here you’re setting up the response. This is what happens when I join your email list. I should get an email immediately from you with my freebie that I signed up for.
4. Sequence – Here’s where you create all the emails I receive after I’ve joined your email list. You pre-write these emails and set a delay between them so they go out automatically every other day or week or however long you set. Set and forget! You’ve filled them with your product info or your blog posts or your affiliate marketing links so you’re making money on auto-pilot.
5. Broadcasts – These are emails you go in and manually write and send to everyone (or a certain segment of your list) on whatever you want to update them on.
6. Subscribers – Here’s where you’re able to see all your subscribers. You can sort them by the freebie they signed up for, other interests they’ve been tagged into, segments etc.

For detailed information on how to do all of this, please consider joining my free 5-day email course! I walk you through the whys and hows of all these steps.

What Emails to Send to Your Email List

I find that a lot of bloggers struggle with what to send to their list. Some bloggers put off email marketing because they’re not yet established and others are simply scared, thinking they’ll be bothering their subscribers.

I however think you should get started on your list right away. The last thing you want to do is get comfortable as a blogger and then begin fumbling around with email marketing and come off as a newbie to your list. Get it right along with everything else you’re working on on your blog.

Remember that subscribers signed up to your list because they think you have value to offer. Go ahead and give them all that value in even more helpful and in-depth detail. Here are some emails you could send to your list after sending them the freebie:

• Complimentary information – send them something that’s directly related to the freebie they just received. If you sent them a meal plan then maybe you now want to send them a grocery list or a printable planner.
• Welcome email – welcome your new subscribers, tell them who you are and what kind of information they can expect to receive from you in your emails.
• Survey – You know that they’re interested in information related to whatever your freebie was about, here’s your chance to get to know them even better. Send a formal survey or simply ask them some questions in relation to problems they may be facing that has anything to do with either the freebie or other topics you blog about. This is a great way to get new post ideas and develop products.
• Your most important blog posts – You can package emails surrounding one or two posts that you think they may be interested in reading. Be sure to explain why these posts are helpful and what problems it will help them to solve.
• A link to your Facebook group, video or other resources you may have.
• Of course, you can begin to introduce them to your product if you have one.

Two Ways to Segment Your Subscriber List

If you’re just starting with your blog then the easy way to do it is simply to tag subscribers based on interests that they signed up for. For instance, you can tag anyone who signed up for a blogging freebie in your blogging sequence. Anyone who subscribed to your mommy freebies in a mom segment and so on and so forth.

Then, in your welcome email to these subscribers, you can have people opt-in to other topics they’re interested in hearing more about by simply clicking a link in your email. It would say something like: “Thank you for signing up for my mom planner. Starting a mom blog was one of the greatest things I did to boost my income as a SAHM. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, click here to get more information.”

If they click on the link, they’re tagged within ConvertKit into your blogging email sequence as well.

You could also do this in the reverse. This works well if you only have one email sequence and everybody is funnelled through that sequence but suddenly you need to send a bunch of emails and you want to have people be able to opt-out of them if they want to, without opting out of your whole list all-together.  What kind of scenario could cause this?

• Maybe you have an upcoming product launch and will be sending people emails every day for the next 5 days until the product either launches or closes. In your first email explaining the product, it’s awesome to let people know that you have a product coming out and will be sending them info over the next few days about it. If they’re not interested and would rather not get the emails about the specific product launch, they can opt-out from just the product launch, but will continue to receive your awesome weekly emails.
• Another scenario this works well for is if you do things like send daily emails around Black Friday with the latest deals or have an upcoming event. Anything where the frequency of your emails will increase, I like to give people the option to opt-out if they’re not interested in hearing about it.

You’ll do your full sales push first of course so people know all the details and then get a chance to decide if they want to hear more or opt-out at the end of your email.

I’d show you how to do all of this step-by-step, but Convertkit has more awesome how-to videos than I do so I’ll end here and remind you again that the free course gets your feet fully wet with Convertkit and you’ll be a pro at all this by the end of the course. Sign up below!

Do you segment your email list? How has this helped you out?

You need an email list no matter your blog size, demographics, intent, niche or target audience needs an email list. Every blogger needs creative opt-in forms and lead magnets to gather emails.

Your Love-Hate Relationship With Email Marketing

The psychology behind our emotions toward email marketing is interesting. We get bombarded with dozens of email each day in our own inboxes so it is understandable why we may have negative emotions towards building our own email list. We barely have time to get through our own emails and often wonder how we ended up on some of these lists!

However.

Emails are still the top method of connecting with an audience. In fact, email is 40% more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. Compare that to the fact that only 2% of your Facebook page’s audience is actually seeing your message (unless you want to shell out for ads.)

A tweet has a lifespan of around 18 minutes on Twitter. 91% of US consumers use email daily with anywhere from 10-60 minutes spent browsing marketing emails each week.

Let’s think about how you personally use emails now. How often do you open a company’s marketing emails? How often do you get annoyed enough to unsubscribe?

How often do you click through to check out what they’re yammering about? How often do you actually make a purchase because of an email you received?

My blogging business exploded when I found a good Pinterest strategy. Ready to take your blog to the next level? My new Everything Pinterest ebook will teach you everything you need to know to drive BIG traffic to your blog and MAKE MONEY ONLINE. Grab the book here and let’s make some money with your blog!

Why Bloggers Should Focus on Email Marketing

Whether you’re in blogging to make money or simply to connect with your readers, an email marketing campaign is invaluable to your bottom line.

A reader may come across your blog, read and decide it is wonderful and even decide to go ahead and follow you on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest but algorithms and life causes them to never see a post from you again and they’ve moved on.

However, if you had managed to capture their email, you have an open line of communication to that reader so long as they continue to use that email address and remain on your list. Emails are a crucial part of my affiliate marketing income on this blog.

You own your list. If Pinterest decided to implement crazy algorithms like Facebook and Instagram tomorrow, imagine what could happen to your blog’s traffic!

But with this list, no one controls the communication between you and your reader but you and your reader. It’s been reported that for every $1 spent, your email list’s return on that investment is $38. You need to build your list.

How to Build Your Email List

Hopefully, you have by now realised that even if you have no product to sell, you still need a list if only to keep in contact with your audience. Email, with a 40x higher customer acquisition rate than social media, is the crux of building your die-hard tribe.

You will turn your list into raving fans that look forward to your content and will buy anything you sell eventually. Or at least click through to read your post and then share it on social media.

But how do you even begin? The first thing to do is to sign up with an email service provider. I will be giving you two professional options below, one is paid and one is free to begin with.

Convertkit

Convertkit is a premium email service provider that I use on my main blog. What I like about them is how easy it is to use as a newbie, how great their sign-up forms look, how easy it was to embed these sign-up forms into different areas of my blog plus how smooth the email automation process is.

They have a WordPress plugin to connect your forms to your blog and they allow you to attach items in the body of your emails to your subscribers. This is helpful when sending digital products or freebies to your list.

They also have great looking landing pages and make it super easy for a reader to sign up to your email list and begin receiving emails that you have pre-written to go out in a sequence.

If all of this sounds like Chinese to you, read their free Complete Guide to Email Marketing Ebook here.

Mailerlite

Mailerlite is the ESP I use on this blog. I heard about them after I had already signed up for ConvertKit incidentally, and decided to try them out since they’re free. They boast the fact that all they’re paid services are included in the free version.

You begin to pay after you hit 1000 subscribers. That was a very enticing offer, however, I ended up continuing on with Convertkit on my main blog because the features are more powerful, more professional-looking and yet, easier to use.

There are a couple of key features of ConvertKit not available on Mailerlite like the ability to add email attachments. This means that your freebies, products, lead magnets will all have to be hosted somewhere else.

You’ll need to send your subscribers a link to the attachment instead of sending it directly. I wasn’t a fan of having to host my products elsewhere, susceptible to security issues.

ConvertKit’s segmenting of your list and tagging of your list when they click links in your emails are another reason I prefer their more robust suite of features. I manage multiple blogs and wanted to be able to control who gets what email easily.

This is a superb feature if you have just one blog but write about different topics, for instance, mommy bloggers who teach their readers how to start their own blogs. Not all of your audience may be interested in that information so this makes it easier for you to tag them into different email sequences.

Just a couple of advanced features for you to consider when deciding between free and paid. ConvertKit is pretty affordable so if you intend to make money blogging, you’ll want to go with their features from day one or switch to them soon. It will pay for itself very quickly even if you have no product to sell. You’ll find out more on this further in this post.

On the contrast, I won’t discount Mailerlite’s features. They do have lots of features that are perfect for new bloggers and some that are even comparative to Convertkit. 

I still use it on this blog so now I have good experience with both and I must say that while it takes quite a few more clicks to perform the same function in Mailerlite than it might in Convertkit, I’ve gotten over this and looked on the brighter side. FREE!

Not sure how to build an email list? Take my easy and FREE 5-day email list-building course below. I take you through all of this step by step using Mailerlite. You can of course also reach me in the Help a Blogger Out Facebook group if you have any questions.

Creating an Opt-In, Lead Magnet, Landing Page and Email Sequence

I won’t go into incredible detail here as I teach you how to do all of these things in my free list-building course. However, let’s go into what all of these things are. An opt-in is the form used to capture emails. You can easily place one anywhere on your blog or within a blog post, like the one above for my free course.

This opt-in also demonstrates the need for a creative, compelling lead magnet. A lead magnet is a fancy name for a product or service offering, usually free, that is given away in exchange for an email. In the above form, I’m offering to help you build your email list in return for your email.

The point is that you need to come up with a such an attractive lead magnet (also called freebie) that makes me feel compelled to hand over my email address so that I can get my free product or service. It’s not enough to have an opt-in that simply says “Subscribe to our newsletter” or “Get new posts here” or something similar. That evokes absolutely no response from me and is likely to result in much fewer signups than creating a convincing lead magnet.

Landing Page

A landing page is a stand-alone page that has one purpose and one purpose only. That purpose is to capture emails or to sell a product. A landing page is important to help market your freebie or product separate from a blog post.

For instance, though I have created an awesome blog post telling people why they need email marketing, I also have a landing page set up for it for the sole purpose of selling the course.

The landing page is hosted by ConvertKit but uses my domain name thanks to their plugin. As you can see, there’s no other navigation or distraction on this page. You can either sign up or close out the page.

With my blog post, there are lots of other distractions to take you away from the signup form. We see pretty, shiny new things in the sidebar or elsewhere in the post and forget all about why we were there.

Therefore marketing my landing page gets my point across without distraction and converts better than a blog post that also has the promise of Facebook groups and Pinterest strategy in the sidebar.

Email Sequence

If you do sign up for my Pinterest strategy or any other freebie on this blog, you will immediately get your email with a link to download your freebie. Then, you’ll begin to receive other emails I have set up within my ESP to go out after certain days have passed or if you clicked on certain things in my emails.

The type of emails you should be sending, how often and other specifics is something you’ll need lots of research to perfect because what works for one may not work for the other. However, there are some basic sequences to play around with.

For me, I send out your freebie and a link to the post that explains it in detail so that you can refer to it if you need. I also include an invite to join my Facebook group and then wrap up, keeping things pretty succinct.

A few days later I will send out an intro email with my name, my picture, what kind of info is available on my blog and maybe another freebie. I’m offering up so much value here that it’s hard to resist opening. That’s what you’re after.

Then a couple days later a follow-up is sent with an offer to help with any issues encountered using the freebies or for us to connect over a coaching session. The sales people call this a soft-sell, warming you up for the kill…er..the sale.

If they haven’t clicked on my offer to connect, they are moved over to what I call my evergreen sequence where they’re sent snippets of my most valuable posts once per week with the link to click through if they’re interested.

This is all done automatically inside ConvertKit, I haven’t even sent a manual email to my subscribers yet and already I have connected with them in a valuable way.

Email Marketing for Bloggers Made Easy

The point of this all is that you can set up all these emails one-time and forget it. There’s no need to keep sending the same kind of email manually, over and over, everytime you get new subscribers.

Each time you write a cornerstone post or have a new product/freebie, you add that email to your sequence. This is passive income at it’s best since as more people get added to your list, more opportunities for a sale are happening and you didn’t do anything new.

This type of sequence with your best posts, your old freebies and products is important for sales or marketing your best material. It’s not enough to simply gather emails and begin sending them the latest posts on your blog. Bring a constant flow of traffic to your best performers and sell things that you’ve long stopped marketing in lieu of new, higher priced products.

If you have no products yourself, you can link to your best-performing affiliates in your emails. Yet another way to make money from your list and you can tell which links are doing better than others. This kind of data is invaluable.

Recapping this post, if you skimmed:

• You need an email list to grow your tribe and make money with your blog.
• You should begin building your list from day one.
• You need an email service provider that allows you to quickly and easily create opt-ins and landing pages.
• You need an irresistible lead magnet to capture emails.
• You need an awesome sequence of emails that you use to bring attention to old posts, products and freebies.

I truly hope you’ve found this post informative and helpful. I would absolutely love it if you’d join my Facebook Group Help a Blogger Out where we share nuggets of our best blogging tips and resources and inspire bloggers to think outside of the box.

Do you need help building your email list? My free 5-day list-building course will help you to get started. These are the exact steps I used to gain my first 100 subscribers in 30 days. Here’s to you doing that even quicker.

Here to help,

~Mo