How to Use Content Upgrades For Email Signups

Having very little success getting people to subscribe to your newsletter? Don’t fret. The market is pretty saturated with newsletters and the like. I can understand why most people don’t want a subscription to random mail showing up in their inbox. That’s partially why content upgrades aren’t just a trend. People want value and they want their questions answered, and when they subscribe to a content upgrade, they know exactly what they’re going to get delivered right to their inbox. Let’s look at how to use content upgrades for email signups:

Disclaimer: I may receive customer referral fees from companies mentioned on this page at no additional cost to you. All data & opinions are based on my experience as a paying customer or consultant to a paying customer.

Building Content Upgrades

First things first, let’s find some of your most popular blog posts. Is it about a subject you can expand on? What you want to do is create even more value by digging deeper and answering even more questions in more specificity or give them a concrete tool to carry out what you talked about in your post. Here are a few examples of solid content upgrade ideas:

• Bonus posts or follow up
• Review tables
• Checklists
• Templates
• Printables
• Cheat lists
• eBooks
• Coupon codes
• Challenges
• Mini Email Courses
• Audio (like songs, podcasts, or audiobooks)
• Giveaways

Naturally, there are other types of valuable content upgrades you can create, but this should be enough to get you thinking. Can you create a bonus post, checklist, template, or printable downloads? You don’t have to write a full eBook, but whatever it is should be valuable and useful, or no one will want it. You’re trying to help your audience and foster trust, not spam them. Remember, all good content serves a purpose to your audience.

Build Content Forms With Convert Kit

There’s a tool that can help you put custom landing pages for your upgrades right in your content. It’s called Convert Kit, and luckily for you, they just launched a free account up to 1000 subscribers to help newbies build up their email lists and become more competitive with Mailchimp. Sign up now, and you’ll unlock 100 subscribers for free. Mailchimp also has some pop-up and landing page options, but they have all of their useful templates behind a paywall.

You can also build pop-ups or welcome mats that offer your content upgrade, but without the context of your post, it will be much less effective. The reason someone clicked on your post is they were looking for an answer to a gap in knowledge, and not everyone may. A good portion of the people on your blog post what to know everything you have to offer about your subject. Give the people what they want.

Publicizing Your New Content Upgrade

Once you have your content marketing funnel and exclusive content built, now it’s time to publicize your page to get subscribers. If you’ve just started your website, your organic traffic won’t start to grow for another 6-12 months, so most of your traffic will be coming for social media and direct referrals.

One of the best ways to do this is through Pinterest. No, it’s not just a social media platform for moms posting recipes and DIY ideas. There are millions of users of all genders who are using Pinterest to look for and bookmark ideas that are relevant to them… just like your content. You just have to make sure they can find it, and simply posting and making sure your Board and Pin have good SEO is enough to be indexed by Pinterest. This improves your reach and the number of impressions that will be seen by fellow users.

That’s where our next tool comes into play.

Tailwind

Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduling platform that also allows lots of opportunities to repost your strongest content, get statistics about your best performing pins, and best of all, it allows you to network with other pinners with their unique Tailwind Tribes feature. Tribes are a fantastic way to promote each other’s posts and reach new areas of exposure that normal sharing just doesn’t allow for. Sharing is a fundamental part of the social culture of tribes, so if you aren’t willing to help others too, don’t expect them to help you.

Best part? If you join Tailwind, you get a month free trial and $15 towards a pro-account when it runs out. Even if you don’t decide to upgrade, you get to use the scheduling tools, insights, and Tribes features for a whole 30 days with nothing lost.

Make sure you also share your content on your Brand’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.

Lead Magnets

Once you have your content upgrade sign up forms in place, you have successfully built several lead magnets. Congrats! Make sure you seed them on Pinterest to get email signups while you sleep. Set them on Smartloop with Tailwind and you can automate your lead signups entirely, or by season.

Go ahead. Give it a whirl and see how this helps your page traffic and your email subscriptions!