Explore these 7 creative ways to promote your lead magnet, grow your audience and email list, and get start earning more revenue.

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My piece of advice for almost anyone looking to start a business is to look at their email list as the primary focus. And for your email list to grow, you will need to master how to promote your lead magnet.

Your email list is going to be what truly moves the needle inside your business because unlike social media, this is a group of people that aren’t just interested in your business but interested in staying connected, learning more, and receiving information from you directly to their inbox. 

In this episode, I am going to walk you through how to grow this email list of yours so you can begin growing an audience to serve and promote to. 

I have 7 methods that you can implement today that’s going to grow your list so that you can truly grow your business, and not just a vanity metric. 

What Is Your Email List And Why Do You Need One

Your email list is the list of people who have given you their email in exchange for value. And by doing this, they are saying they want to stay connected further.

Now here’s the meat of it, you are going to be emailing this group of people on a regular basis, serving them with value, sending them to you content, and really establishing yourself as the reliable expert in their lives around this subject. 

So how does this lead to revenue and not just become another vanity metric like the # of Instagram followers? Great question! And the answer is because email marketing can drive sales inside your business more effectively than social media. 

According to our good friends at Opt-In Monster, there is about 3.8 billion email users and 3.4 billion social media users. So not relatively very different.  

However, emails see an average of 23% open rate and almost 4% click-through rate. Meaning 4% are clicking the links and buttons inside our emails. 

Well social media sees about 0.5% click-through or engagement rate. This means our links in stories and link in bio are nowhere close as effective as email marketing is. 

And another thing to consider, your content isn’t showing up in front of your entire audience. And that algorithm magic is not owned or controlled by any of your efforts. But you can control your emails landing in someone’s inbox. 

Therefore, if we are trying to get our point across, get something clicked, and/or make sales, we are statically more likely to find success via email marketing rather than social media alone. 

And growing this list means that we are growing our audience. And for many of us, if we have a larger (true) audience, we can likely see more engagement and more sales over time. 

Promote Your Lead Magnet, Knowledge, and Content

So how do you start to grow your email list? 

To grow your email list you are going to promote your knowledge and expertise, your free content, and a free lead magnet (aka a free resource that you create in exchange for someone’s email address).

If you haven’t yet created a lead magnet for yourself, download my Free Lead Magnet Workbook. This workbook will walk you through how to create this content and will provide you with a variety of Canva Templates to get started.

I’m going to walk you through 7 ways you promote your lead magnet so you can start growing your email list more than ever.  

7 Creative Ways To Promote Your Lead Magnet:

1. Blogging
2. Plug Long Form Content
3. Pinterest
4. Facebook Groups
5. Social Media
6. Virtual Networking
7. In Person Networking

01. Blogging

The first way you can grow your email list and promote your lead magnet is through blogging. 

If you blog for your business, linking to your lead magnet can be a fantastic way people can start landing in your list when they are reading or when they land on your content. 

If you currently don’t blog for your business, go back and listen to episode #12 of Side Checks: An Easy Blogging Strategy For Your Side Hustle. In that episode I break down how blogging can benefit your business and what it can look like for different business types. 

Great ways your blog can begin adding subscribers to your email list is through pop-up forms and inline forms. 

Having a pop-up form appear, presents readers with a task that must complete of opt-ing in or not. And if they don’t, they are unlikely to leave your content all together. If they aren’t interested, most of the time they will just exit and keep going. But if they are, you get a new subscriber like that!

You can also embed a form into your blog post that collects their information in exchange for your lead magnet. 

Both of these forms you can create and plug into your website using your email service provider. 

I do all of this easily with Flodesk. Click here to save 50% off your entire first year and get a 30-day free trial. Plus I include my free Flodesk training videos for anyone who signs up with my link!

02. Any Other Long Form Content

The next way you can start growing your email list is to promote your lead magnet through any other long-form content inside your business. 

This could be blogging, with a podcast, YouTube channel or anything similar. Your long form content is the content you create inside your business that gets absorbed by others and isn’t just social media.

Promoting a lead magnet here is a really natural way to extend a resource to your audience and convert them to your email list. 

You will likely be creating content that your lead magnet already supports. So for your audience, downloading your free resource and getting on your list is just a natural next step from the content of yours that they are already enjoying. 

And when shouting out your lead magnet during your long-form content, you may be using something called a Full-Page Form. This is just a third type of email sign up form like the pop up and embed form we mentioned. But it gives you a link for people to directly land on. 

Additional Tips For Promoting Your Lead Magnet Inside Your Content:

• Always link your free resource inside any description of your free content. 
• Don’t refer to your lead magnet as a lead magnet to your audience. 
• Consider purchasing a domain for your lead magnet. This makes it easier to direct traffic

If you purchase a domain, you can simply create a redirect that directly sends people from that pretty domain to your email sign up form link. 

03. Pinterest

The third way you can promote your lead magnet and grow your email list is through Pinterest. 

Pinterest is not a social media platform but a search engine. So when people search for specific items on Pinterest, the platform acts like a search engine and points them to those items with SEO rich titles and descriptions. 

You can create pins for your long form content like blogging, podcast episodes, youtube episodes, or anything else similar and pin them to Pinterest to drive traffic. 

You can do this on your Pinterest boards and group boards that you join. 

From here, people can click over to your content where you have already embedded invites to download your lead magnet. 

You can also create pins for your free lead magnet(s). My lead magnet pins promote my free downloads and when they are clicked, they go directly to the sign up form. 

Every single week, I see new subscribers added to my list from this strategy alone. And so many of them are from pins that I created months ago and haven’t touched since. 

Pins go on to live a lot longer than social content and they continue to perform during this time for our businesses. 

If you want to start using Pinterest for this, explore my $5 Lead Magnet Pinterest Promo Kit right here. This bundle includes my personal Pin Templates for my free downloads along with a know-how PDF sheet.

04. Facebook Groups

The next method I want to talk about to promote your lead magnet and growing your list is Facebook groups. This one can be tricky because some Facebooks do not allow self promotion. 

But remember, we aren’t trying to really sell or promote ourselves fully. Instead we are really trying to serve and solve a problem for someone with our lead magnet. 

Search for groups that contain your ideal audience. Then examine the group rules to see if you’re able to post about your free download.

If you aren’t allowed to post your lead magnet directly, do this instead. 

Find 2-3 groups where your audience is hanging out. And be sure the group itself isn’t run by an entrepreneur who would be seen as a direct competitor. We don’t want to steal someone elses audience that they have worked for. We want to grow our own. So be sure the groups you find contain your audience but the group isn’t 100% focused on the subject of your business in a way that competes. 

I want you to bookmark these groups either on your phone or desktop. And I want you to pop in 1-2 times a week and read comments, answer questions, and really show up as a resource. A lot of times you can link your lead magnet in the comments as part of your solution if that’s allowed. 

Make connections, grow those connections, truly serve them, and invite them over to partake in your free content. 

05. Social Media

You can also grow your email list and promote your lead magnet through social media. 

Remember, we aren’t using social media and hastaging our way to followers and calling that a business. We want to develop a business first, develop a strategy, and then market to that strategy. 

So this is why I want you to create that beefy lead magnet first and then turn your attention to social media to promote that lead magnet. 

Even if we don’t have our offers built out, we want to grow our email list.

Talk about your lead magnet in your post and in your stories. Remember a very small percentage of people click that link in bio. So we don’t want to just out our lead magnet there and call it a day.

We want to create social media content around our lead magnet. 

And to be honest, I think promoting free downloads on Instagram do a lot better than promoting a paid offer. So once you develop that lead magnet, that’s when you are greenlit for Instagram. 

06. Virtual Networking

Method #6 is virtual networking. This could be making connections virtually as a way to promote your business and free lead magnet. 

Maybe this looks like promoting your lead magnet as a guest on a podcast. Maybe participating as an expert in a virtual event. Or maybe even teaming up with another business owner that can share your lead magnet to their list as a way to continue to give value. 

I actually really like that third idea. So if you do too, try to find businesses that share your audience but don’t compete with your offers. You can present this to a business owner as a way to serve their audience with something that may not have. Or see how you can share that business’s content with your audience.

This allows the both of you to grow your email list and is a nice exchange. 

07. In Person Networking

The last method for growing your email list is to promote your lead magnet via in person networking. 

Your audience is people that you really want to be around, despite how nerve racking in person networking can feel. Therefore be sure to consider the idea fully.

What if you spoke at a small group made up of your ideal audience? Or created that small group for yourself in your local community?

Really think about who your audience is and where they are inside yourl community. 

There are a lot of impressions we can make just in our own backyards. So consider things like school and community meetings, groups and organizations, farmers markets and trade shows, mom groups, and clubs. 

Networking with these types of groups in person or showing up as an expert can be great ways to promote your free offer and introduce your business. Or even easier-  just invite people to get on your email list for more. 

You can convert that “general join my email list” a lot better in person events like this after sharing knowledge than you can on your website.

Start Promoting Your Lead Magnet Today

Growing your email list is hands down one of the best (if not THE best) thing you can do when starting a business and when growing that business. 

Without an email list, we don’t have a true audience. Therefore we are missing out on so many opportunities to connect with our audience, grow them along with our business, and invite them to our paid offers – which in turn leads to our business… well actually being an income earning business. 

And the best way to grow our email list is through our lead magnets and the knowledge we have to share. 

If you haven’t yet created your lead magnet, download my Free Lead Magnet workbook here. I walk you through creating a lead magnet and give you all of my lead magnet templates so all you need to do is plug in your content. I know this step is important for your business so I try to make it as easy as pie. 

And from there, I want you to pick one of these steps and apply it to your business. And once you find success, maybe pick another. And then maybe another. 

It is going to feel so good seeing those “new subscriber” email notifications come your way my friend!