How to Create an Email List Building Freebie for your Blog

You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it twice, you probably hear it every day: start building a list. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing it by now but every time you read it and fail to take action is another day that you’re missing out on incredible opportunities to drive more traffic and land more sales for your blog.

This post is going to take you through one of the core items in starting up that list that most people never overcome: creating an email list building freebie.

Why Create a List Building Freebie?

So, we already know that having a list will help you send repeat traffic to your blog and can also be used to spur up sales (your own or affiliates) but the hardest part of the entire list building process is getting people to sign up.

Say what you want but just having great content doesn’t necessarily mean that people will hand over their email; for this reason, you need an additional incentive. In our case, we need to build a list freebie which often comes in the form of a short ebooks, white paper, manifesto, video series or can even be helpful resources such as templates.

The freebie is the icing on the cake; people that find your information helpful and see a bonus in signing up often all over themselves to get on your list because, after all, they think “if this is the stuff they publish, I wonder what secret stuff they’re only sharing with their list!”

Three Methods for Creating a Freebie

Now that you understand the importance of a list building freebie, it comes time to actually put the thing together – this is the part where people have the hardest time but I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve that can certainly help you get this bit together.

• Combine Existing Blog Content – This one is the easiest because you’re just tapping into your existing work. The reason why using your previous content is effective is that you’ll be saving a ton of time and because it’s very rare that an individual is going to read every single article on your blog. A freebie built from existing content pulls together the “best of” related to a topic that people may not discover when they land on your blog or even keep up with it. Take all those great posts you have about a topic you want to cover and compile them; create bridges between each section and boom, you’ve got a freebie.

• Utilize Ghostwriting or PLR – You don’t necessarily need to do everything from scratch and in a lot of ways, you probably shouldn’t. Your best knowledge and skill should be focused on the main element of the freebie but there are other elements that you will need to cover that may be common knowledge. In this case, you could employ the use of a ghostwriter or PLR articles to give yourself a foundation for your work and then go in and add in the parts that you feel are necessary that gives it your own, unique voice.

• Break It Down, Logically – A list building freebie is essentially a really long piece of blog content. If you were to break things down accordingly, you’ll see that it’s essentially like writing 6 – 10 blog posts back to back on a single subject. Think of it like a book: break your freebie into sections and write one of them at a time and before long – you’ll have your freebie.

All-in-all, the list building freebie is going to be the biggest hurdle you’ll face when building a list; it’s where a lot of bloggers get hung up. However, if you use some of these items detailed in the post, you’ll be much closer to getting that list up and running, driving more traffic and sales, than you are from sitting around and wishing. Get started today – it’s not that hard.

Share your own tips and tricks for building a freebie below.