The strategy to grow your email list fast: create content upgrades

You probably heard about content upgrades before? They are booming! Content upgrades are bonus freebie downloads you give away for free as an addition to your ‘free content’ on your blog or social media.

The best content upgrade strategy

Your content upgrade should be packed with useful information, and best if it’s the next step after your article.

So, an example: you just wrote a post about how wonderful Melbourne is.

This post is very useful for people visiting Melbourne (Australia) soon. Now, what you did not write about, is how to save money visiting Melbourne (for example).

You created a mini city guide with that information, that you offer for free as an automated download in exchange for an email address to deliver the guide to. Convertkit (sorry guys, once again! Infusionsoft works too!) can automatically deliver your bonus downloads, so you can just chill, unplug and your visitors still get the download. Everybody happy, this is how you grow your list effectively these days.

You need to get these people on your list because you have a book about Australian coming out later this year, so you want your list very targeted with people who are already visiting Australia, as they are more likely to buy that book!

The trick with content upgrades is to hold back some of the content in the article and offer it as an extra bonus download. Sure, you can give it away all at once, but it’s not the smartest.

Make sure it’s related to your content and realize that it needs to be different than your general newsletter opt-in form. In Convertkit, you can easily label these people as ‘Australian book leads’, so you can easily email them later. Can’t believe how easy email marketing is these days!

Examples of content upgrades

Great examples of content upgrades are email scripts, checklists, tech video’s, income or launch strategies, design templates or previews of your paid content.

Create a few simple content upgrades with Photoshop. If you don’t have design skills, you can still create good-looking upgrades with Canva or Picmonkey. Just pick a ‘document’ design, and copy/paste your content to start with. Download the pdf and upload it to your Convertkit form.

You do this under ‘form’, top right ‘settings’, ‘Incentive Email’ and check ‘Send incentive / double opt-in email to confirm new subscribers’ at the top, so that when people subscribe to your form, they automatically receive an instant email with the freebie.

All you have to do is upload your content upgrade to ‘incentive download’ below, and customize the email content a little bit. You’re all set now!

Add content upgrades (the Convertkit forms!) to your most popular posts from the archives. It’s a lot of work adding all these buttons to your posts, creating the forms, freebies and download buttons, but it will help you long term.

Go to Google Analytics to see how many people still visit your old blog posts, I bet a lot! Start with the ones with the most traffic.

Think about a good bonus download and it’s already half of the work because creating a non-related bonus download does not work. Seems obvious, but it’s more difficult than you think.

The best way to do it is thinking about what your readers need right after reading your article. That should be your bonus download. I hope you write about the same topic all the time, and that’s great because once you have a few downloads, you can add the same to related blog posts, that’s great. Otherwise, you’d be creating content upgrades for days!

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