The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 3 Easy Ways to Get More Email Signups this Month

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

If you've been wondering why your email list isn’t growing – or feeling stuck because your freebie just isn’t converting – you’re not alone. We hear this all the time from both beginner and experienced bloggers: “I created a lead magnet, added a signup form to my site… but no one’s joining my email list!” Sound familiar?Here’s the good news: you don’t need to overhaul your blog or reinvent the wheel. This episode of the Ultimate Blog Podcast is the second part of our email series where we share 3 easy and actionable ways to get more email signups this month – even if your current freebie isn’t perfect (or you don’t have one at all!).And if you haven’t heard Part 1 of our email series, check out Episode 188: What to Send Your Email List When You’re Just Starting Your Blog!🎉 Grab our free guide, Your First 500 Subscribers: A Simple Guide to Growing Your List with PurposeCheck out the show notes for this episode!✉️ Try Kit for email marketing🖱️ Try the Hubbub plugin for Wordpress💻 Join Grow by MediavineDo you love this podcast? Say thanks by leaving a positive review and/or rating!  

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinicki. And I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice.

Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. Hey there, it's Jennifer and welcome back. So you might be feeling like your email list just isn't growing. Maybe you're wondering, do I even have the right freebie? It just doesn't feel like it's working. If you feel this way, you are not alone. We definitely hear this from beginner bloggers and even seasoned bloggers. We will hear like, hey, I made a lead magnet, like you said.

I added a signup form on my site, but I'm just not getting people to sign up for my email list. So last week we talked about what to send your email list when you're just starting your blog. And if you haven't yet grabbed our freebie, it is called Your First 500 Subscribers, a simple guide to growing your list with purpose. And you can grab that at the ultimate blog podcast comm slash first 500

But today I want to continue our series with the second of three episodes about starting and growing your email list and What I'd like to share with you today are three relatively easy things you can do this month with you today are three relatively easy things you can do this month to start and grow your list. And this is without overhauling your blog or starting from scratch. So let's dive into three tactics to help you grow your email list. Tactic number one, let's make it about connection. Don't just make it about a freebie. So the thing is freebies do work and they can work. But what people really want is a reason

to feel connected to you. Even a really cool freebie might not work if it's not what your audience is truly looking for. People don't just want something pretty to download. They really want to connect with a person who understands their problem or what they need help with. So if you feel like you're not growing your email list because you don't have the perfect freebie,

what I wanna do is give you permission to just start. So just connecting with people in a different way, you can still grow your email list. So you might just say something like, hey, I send out a weekly email with behind the scenes of what I'm working on, wanna follow along? Or you might say, hey, every Friday, I'll share a quick tip I'm learning as I grow my blog.

You know, that's enough. You are enough. Your voice is the value. And so just letting people inside a little bit, sharing things you might not be able to share in a blog post, giving people a behind the scenes. People wanna feel connected to a real person. So give people a reason to join that feels real

and it feels personal. Even if it's just a really simple promise, it doesn't have to be the best freebie, most beautifully graphically created freebie you've ever seen. It just can be something really simple. It can be something you just put into an email. It doesn't have to be something that they download. They just want a little bit more from you and people are busy. So don't make it complicated. Make it simple and make it a way to connect with you. Take the pressure off yourself and just put something like that out there

and test it out and see how it does. Okay, tactic number two, and this is one that I like. It's be strategic about where your forms go. So let's talk about how people find the signup forms on your website. This is kind of a big deal because just making a few simple changes can actually make a big difference. I think a lot of people just say,

oh, here's my theme, here's where the signup form goes. And typically those are pretty well designed to be optimized. But I think sometimes we just put it on there and then we totally forget about it. And so always be paying attention. Set up your forms in a way when you can do this within kit, set it up in a way that you can know which form people are using to sign up so you can test what's working, what's not working.

So don't just stick it on there. Hope for the best. Hope people will see it and sign up. But test out the words that you use. Test out the language that you're using on that form. Test out the location. So here's a few easy placement things. So go to your blog, double check this,

or keep this in mind as you're setting up your blog. Make sure, first and foremost, that you have a sign up on your homepage and make sure it's above the fold. So what does that mean? That means when somebody gets onto your site they will quickly see. They won't have to scroll to see an email sign up. It will be right there. It will be easy for them to see. Another place would be to go back to your top blog post in terms of which ones are getting the most traffic and make sure those blog posts have a

sign-up form. Better yet, if you have a freebie that goes with one of those, that's even better. But even just putting a really good call to action in your sign-up form there to connect with you could make a huge difference. You can put it at the end of a blog post so that readers have a call to action. Put one on your about page because anybody who takes the time to go to your about page, they wanna know more about you. So that's a great place to say, hey, you wanna connect with me even more,

I send out a personalized email every Friday and put a signup form there. If you do have a great freebie, you could put a signup form in your blog menu. Be sure to have one in your sidebar so that anybody on their desktop reading your blog post, a signup form will be visible there as well. And then a couple of our absolute favorite ways to grow our email list right now are by using two tools. One of them is the Grow plugin by Mediavine and the other one is Hubbub and that is run by NerdPress. We highly recommend these for extra visibility. For the Grow plugin you can

add a spotlight subscribe form so it's similar to a pop-up but it's better optimized so that when somebody's scrolling it will pop pop up, but when they continue to scroll, it will go away. I've had great success with that one. And again, you're just putting a really strong call to action there. Why do you want them to sign up? And the Hubbub plugin is great because depending on what

type of content you have, it may be something that people will want to save and come back to. So you just tell them, hey, put your email address in here and I will send you this post. And then you set it up to automatically send them a link to that blog post. And I've had really, really great success growing my email list that way. So the lesson here is that people aren't going to go looking around to figure out how to sign up for your email list. Make it obvious, make it something they can't miss

and make it something they don't wanna miss out on. Okay, and tactic number three, talk about it more often and in more places. I think as bloggers, we can figure out number one and number two, but tactic number three, and we're like, nope, I put it on my website, I'm done. But let's think outside the box here. You've created something, maybe you've got a great freebie, or you just have a really cool email that you send out every week. Let's tell people about it. We got to be talking about it in

lots of places. People need to hear about your opt-in lots of times and in lots of places. And they'll be like, wow, I really don't want to miss out on this. So talk about it every week. Make it part of your routine to tell people about it. So this could be in a number of places. Post it in your Instagram stories every week so that people know,

because if you don't tell them, how are they gonna know? They're not always thinking about, oh, I wonder if I can sign up for their email list. Tell them, make it easy. Create a clickable, a swipe up, whatever. Make it easy for them to sign up. Make sure you have it in your bio link. If you have a freebie, you should definitely be creating pins and directly linking to your freebie so people can sign up. That's something that could work for you for a long time to come. If you are a guest on a podcast or, you know, an Instagram Live or a Facebook or anything like that, that is a great time to mention your email sign up. And especially if you have a freebie

that really relates to the audience that you're speaking to. Be sure, like if you're just sending out emails to people that are not on your email list, but make sure that you have a way for people that you're just talking to in your normal course of business, making sure they understand that you have an email list so they can stay connected with you. And of course, you can mention it naturally within blog posts, not necessarily having a signup form, but if you're writing something in a blog post and you're like, this is a really good spot to mention my email list because that's when I talk about this more, just put a link in there to that and people will naturally sign up

there as well. So it really doesn't have to feel like a salesy thing to talk about it. You need to get into that mindset like, hey, this is helpful. I'm being generous. I give them a lot of value, so I'm gonna talk about this all the time so that nobody misses out. Okay, so let's recap this. So number one, I want you to start building your list, even if all you can offer right now is connection. Two, I want you to make the forms easy to find

on all the important pages. Number three, talk about your list more often because people can't join if they don't see it. And if you do want help figuring out what to offer, how to attract subscribers who will stick around, don't forget to grab that free guide I told you about, your first 500 subscribers, a simple guide to growing your list with purpose.

Again, you can get that at theultimateblogpodcast.com slash first 500. Okay, you've got this and as always we're cheering you on. See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend,

subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.