Leslies Blogger: How To Build Your Email List Fast With Content Upgrades

Building your email list should be your number one focus if you want to grow your business.

Regardless if you’re a full time blogger like me or you’re just creating strategic content for the purpose to run paid ads to build your list, you should be implementing content upgrades into your business.

I will be the first to admit when I heard about content upgrades from other bloggers I didn’t pay it any attention because 1.) It takes more work 2.) I like simplicity 3.) It takes more work.

95% of the people who read this post will most likely do exactly what I did and say no thanks that takes work, but I’m going to urge you to implement this strategy immediately in your business and you can thank me later.

With a typical squeeze page(one page website) you can get 30% + optin rates.

With your average blog and a sidebar optin people are happy with 2-3% optin rates.

My best optin rates have been from welcome mats and pop up’s, but the problem with pop up’s is that they piss off your regular readers.

So when I started seeing people talk about optin rates of 25% + for their blog posts I decided to put my ego aside and give it a shot.

My very first try at a content upgrade and I got 35% optin rate. In my head I’m thinking WTF why did I not do this earlier.

You will notice I have a main optin course on my homepage and sidebars, but my best optin rates on my blog are from content upgrades and they average 20-60% optin rates depending on the post and content upgrade.

So What Is A Content Upgrade?

A content upgrade is a strategic optin bribe(freebie) that you offer to your readers in return for their email.

Content upgrades are usually additional content or a guide to accompany your blog post or enhance the topic your reader digested and is interested in.

An example of this would be my 71 Ways To Repurpose Content and How To Create Content To Attract Your Dream Customer.

In my How To Create Content To Attract Your Dream Customer the content of the blog post is all about why you should be creating content to build your audience and how to do it.

The content upgrade is strategically aligned with what I talk about in the blog post. I offer a downloadable PDF called “13 ways to figure out exactly what your ideal customer wants”.

If someone spent the time to watch the video they’re going to want to learn how to implement what I just taught them. So instead of offering my generic optin which doesn’t align with the topic they just showed interest in, I created a short PDF showing them how to implement the steps.

In all of my my content upgrades I use an image like the one below to grab the readers attention(The Image Isn’t Clickable).

content upgrade

This image usually goes towards the top of the blog post and bottom.

I also use a yellow box like the one below(not clickable) in the middle of the blog post.

A lot of WordPress themes have the yellow box short code built in to the theme. If not you can make this image in Keynote, Photoshop or just about any free image builder like Canva.

content upgrade yellow box