Welcome to day 8 of Start Your Own Blogging Business! You’re in the home stretch and should be feeling pretty good about your blog. The fear should be gone and you’re probably excited to get going already! Today we’re going to talk about email lists and how to grow them.

As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments or post your questions in the Facebook group. If you haven’t already joined the Facebook group, please do so you can participate in the community.

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**Disclaimer**

There may be links in this blog post, some of them might be affiliate links for which I earn a small amount if you click on them, a really small amount it turns out. Still, full disclosure and all that…

What is an Email List

An email list is a list of email addresses that people have given to you and given you permission to email them. Permission is really important. It’s easy to generate a list of emails, but if they haven’t given you permission to send them emails it’s considered spam. The people on your list are interested in what you have to say, your niche, the products you review etc. The people on your list are highly engaged.

Why Do I Need an Email List

You may be wondering why you need an email list if you don’t sell anything on your blog. It’s a reasonable thing to wonder. You will need an email list because you will want to share your content with new people. If you plan on doing sponsored posts you’ll need to have a list to distribute your content to. If you ever want to create a course – such as this – you’ll need an email list to get the word out. When you become an affiliate you’re going to want to alert your readers to the new content about the products. Of course, you might decide to sell products on your website, and when you do you’ll want to let your audience know about it.

Email List vs Social Media

Social Media is great, but you don’t own Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform. While it is not likely, Facebook could be replaced next week – remember MySpace? If it disappears, all your followers on that platform are gone too and you have to start over. You don’t have any control of those platforms, but you have all the control of your own blog and your email list. When someone subscribes to your newsletter on your website, that information is yours.

Generating an Email List

Growing your email list is both simple and difficult. Installing code on your sidebar to gather subscribers is easy. Whether you use Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Convert Kit or some other email service, the installing is about the same. Generate the code from their wizard and place it in a widget on your sidebar or within the page, or as a popup.

Getting people to give up their email address to you is another thing entirely. Something we’ll cover tomorrow when we talk about Freebies/Giveaways and Lead Magnets.

For today, I want you to install a form on your page where readers can subscribe to your newsletter. Using Mailchimp, Constant Contact or any other platform and generate the form and load it onto your blog. When you’ve done that go to the Facebook group and ask other members of the group to sign up for your newsletter. Be sure to reciprocate!!

If you have any questions about today’s lesson, please feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below, on the Facebook page or you can email me directly at jen { at } redheadranting.com (use the @ sign and no parentheses or spaces).