How To Build An Email List With Social-Media-Exclusive Blog Offers

Building an audience on social media is like building on rented land.

At any point, the proverbial rug can get pulled from beneath your feet and that’s it. Gone.

It happened with organic reach on Facebook, it happened with Google+ was killed off, and it happened on Instagram.

The solution: 

Use your social media audience to build an audience on a platform you control. Build an email list.

In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to do it.

Let’s get into it.

1. Understand how each social media platform works

Every social media platform is different. So, the way you promote things should look different on each platform.

This includes exclusive blog content you want to promote on social media.

Instagram has some of the most unique ways to promote content:

• Image posts
• Carousel posts
• Reels
• Link stickers in stories
• Swipe up feature in stories
• Bio link

Facebook has stories and reels, and you can also insert links in status posts.

TikTok has videos, carousel posts and a bio link in your profile while YouTube has videos and shorts. You can add links to YouTube video descriptions.

Twitter (X) and its competitors Bluesky and Threads each allow you to create link posts.

Familiarize yourself with each of these content formats. You can do this easily by spending a bit of time “researching” social media platforms, which is just code for scrolling on each social media platform you publish content to until you feel you’ve got the hang of each one.

2. Come up with blog offers for your audience

Smartphones, short-form videos and the internet in general have taught social media users to expect instant gratification from the content they consume.

If they don’t like what they see, they scroll to the next piece of content as fast as they can swipe up. Some stick around for a while longer to throw out a complaint or two, but for the most part, social media audiences expect to see everything they need to see from one post.

This is why it can be difficult to convince your audience to leave social media to read a post on your website, subscribe to your email list or purchase your products.

If you offer them something they can’t resist, something they can’t get anywhere else, you can entice them to leave the familiarity of whatever social media platform they’re on and enter the unknown: i.e., your website.

The only question is how do you come up with an offer that’s that good?

We have a few ideas:

• Consider the products you offer
• Consider the affiliate or sponsorship products you promote
• Find out what your audience’s biggest pain points are
• Use your blog’s most popular posts as inspiration

I’ll elaborate on each one of these strategies in the next few sections, but for now, here’s a list of the types of exclusive offers you can promote to your audience on social media:

• Ebook
• PDF checklist
• PDF cheatsheet
• Workbook
• Webinar
• Course
• Template
• Icon set
• Other downloadable assets that are relevant to your niche
• Resource library
• Free consultation
• Whitepaper

These are known as “lead magnets.”

Consider the products you sell

A common strategy savvy bloggers use to generate more sales is to use an exclusive offer as the entry point for a sales funnel that eventually leads to a subscriber purchasing a product.

So, before you brainstorm ideas for your offer, consider the products you sell and the types of content you can create to sell that product more effectively.

For example, if I own a store that sells bicycles and bicycle accessories, I could come up with the following ideas to use as exclusive blog offers:

• Ebook on bike maintenance
• PDF checklist featuring everything you should do before heading out on a ride
• Workbook to track your rides and progress
• Manual for a particular bike presented as an ebook

Each of these offers can be injected into a sales funnel that’s designed to sell a particular product.

Consider the affiliate or sponsorship products you promote

The offers you create don’t necessarily need to be for products you sell. They can also be related to affiliate and sponsorship products you promote on your blog.

They can even be guides for particular products.

For example, if my bike blog promotes affiliate products from a particular bike brand, I can create a series of manuals that teach my audience how to take apart and maintain bikes from that brand.

I’d offer them as free and premium ebooks, in this case.

Discover your audience’s biggest pain points

If you don’t sell products or don’t want to create content for other people’s products, you can still create content that targets topics that are important to your audience.

All you need to do is figure out what problems your audience faces the most. The offer ideas you come up with can act as solutions to those problems.

If I use my bike blog as an example again and I discover that new bikers often don’t know what bike to buy, I can create a bike buying guide and distribute it as a PDF.

If some of my readers struggle with stamina while riding, I can plan a workbook that trains them to ride for much longer.

Check in with your audience regularly to determine what their biggest pain points are. Your content, lead magnets and products should also target those pain points.

Here are a few strategies you can use to discover what problems your audience is facing:

• Pay attention to your comment section. Make note of any complaints your audience has, however minor
• Pay attention to your DMs and email. Your audience might try to get in touch with you privately about problems they’re facing
• Browse subreddits and forums related to your niche. These are filled with personal tales and questions your audience likely shares
• Check out your competitors’ comment sections, and see if their audiences have any complaints
• Ask your audience to share their struggles with you. You can do this by sending an email campaign or asking on social media
• Get in touch with influential figures in your niche, and ask them if they’d be willing to sit down with you to discuss their biggest struggles*

*This is something Nathan Barry did while he was developing Kit (formerly ConvertKit), a popular email marketing service for creators. He sat down with marketers like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income to discover if they were having the same problems as him with email marketing services like Mailchimp.

Use your blog’s most popular posts as inspiration

A final way to determine what topics your audience cares about the most is by making note of your blog’s most popular posts.

Go through your analytics, and see which posts bring in the highest amount of traffic to your site.

It might also be worth it to see which posts receive the highest number of engagements in terms of social shares and email signups. Although traffic is a big indicator of a topic your audience has a lot of interest in, engagements indicate topics your audience is highly in tune with.

3. Build landing pages for blog offers

Before we talk about strategies you can use to promote your offer on social media, let’s consider the path social media users will take from social media post to a spot on your email list.

Let’s say you add a link to your offer to your Instagram story. What will your followers see when they visit that page?

I highly recommend building dedicated landing pages for lead magnets.

Without a landing page, you more or less need to rely on a simple opt-in form to convince a visitor to take advantage of your offer.

Most opt-in forms feature an image, a headline, form fields, a Subscribe button and maybe a subtitle. This doesn’t give you much space to work with to convince your visitor that your offer is worth it.

Create a dedicated landing page instead.

It’ll still have an opt-in form, but it’ll also list out the features your offer comes with, explain how those features will benefit your visitor, include testimonials from readers who have already used your offer to improve their lives, and include answers to frequently asked questions.

You’ll be able to use storytelling and a cohesive design to truly let your audience know why your offer is worth it and how it’ll improve their lives.

We highly recommend using OptimizePress for building landing pages if you use WordPress.

It comes with templates you can use as starting points, an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, A/B split testing, and funnel analytics.

You can use whatever layout and styles you want for your landing page, but follow these best practices:

• Use the same content styles as you do for the rest of your website
• Consider removing your header and footer to put more of your visitor’s focus on your email list
• Add social proof to landing pages by including quotes and testimonials from visitors who have already used your offer
• Explain each feature of your offer and how it’ll benefit your visitor
• Include a section that lists everything your visitor will receive if they subscribe

Include an opt-in form at the top and bottom of this landing page. Include one in the middle if the page is long.

Consider creating 3D models of your product. For example, creating a 3D model of a book if you’re offering an ebook.

Although your visitor isn’t receiving a physical product, simple design changes like this can do a lot to get your visitor’s attention.

You can even use this model to promote the offer on social media.

4. Add opt-in forms to the rest of your site

If you don’t mind sharing the offer with the rest of your audience, add opt-in forms to the rest of your site.

These are locations where you should consider adding opt-in forms to your site regardless if they promote a lead magnet or not (I highly recommend promoting a lead magnet whenever you can):

• Homepage, at least one
• About page
• Blog page
• Key pages on your website
• Inline and embedded forms in the middle of blog posts
• Sidebar (if you use one)
• Popup that triggers after your visitor has been on your site for a specified period of time
• Exit-intent popup
• Hello bar that sticks to your header or footer
• Footer

Your email marketing service provider should have some sort of form builder. MailerLite includes a drag-and-drop editor in their form builder.

If you really want to enhance the opt-in forms you use for your site, use a dedicated lead generation tool like ConvertBox. It’s what I use to create the opt-in forms here on Blogging Wizard.

Not only does it have unique opt-in form designs, it allows you to use a few unique opt-in forms that trigger in different ways, such as popups that trigger when your visitor clicks a specific link.

It also comes with split-testing capabilities and analytics, both of which will help you optimize campaigns.

5. Connect blog offers to a sales funnel

Again, if you sell products, you can integrate blog offers with sales funnels that are designed to generate more sales for that product.

Email marketing is a common tool marketers use to guide leads through sales funnels.

It’s more intimate than social media, and they can use email sequences and marketing automations to set funnels up automatically.

A typical sales funnel guides leads through the following stages of the buying process: awareness → interest → consideration → intention → purchase → loyalty.

Here’s an example of this sales funnel at work:

1. You promote a lead magnet.
2. A visitor takes advantage of your lead magnet and becomes a subscriber on your list (also known as a lead).
3. You continue the nurturing process by sharing a personal story that relates to your niche and/or product.
4. You share another guide or tip that relates to your product. Mention your product in this email or in the guide you offer at this stage, but don’t outright promote it. Using a phrase like “this is actually something my product [product name] does.”
5. Share another guide or tip, but this time, let your lead know that you’re going to share more information about your product in the next email.
6. Promote your product in the next email. Link to the primary landing page you use to sell that product.
7. Give your lead two or three days. If they still don’t bite, consider offering a limited-time discount to encourage them.
8. Share at least one more guide or tip with your lead after they purchase your product.

You should be able to integrate the ecommerce platform you use with whatever service you use for email marketing. This allows you to collect new customers as email subscribers, and it makes it a lot easier to promote products in emails.

You can also use a checkout tool like ThriveCart. It’s designed for selling digital products and hosting online courses.

Since you’re already generating leads with a digital offer (ebook, PDF checklist, etc.), consider bundling the offer with other digital offers to create a product you can sell to your audience with ThriveCart.

This tool can help you generate more sales by allowing you to design elaborate sales funnels and optimize every part of the funnel with key metrics about your campaign.

6. Promote your exclusive blog offers on social media

You should have these things set up by now:

• Blog offer
• Dedicated landing page for your blog offer
• Sales funnel that integrates your blog offer with a product you offer (if relevant)

Now, let’s talk about promoting this exclusive offer on social media.

Instagram is probably the best option you can use.

Here’s an example of a creator who promoted a free seven-course bundle in an Instagram post:

In the caption, viewers are instructed to comment the word “learn” in order to receive a free email course.

The creator then sends the course via DM to any commenter who comments the word “learn.”

Here’s an example of a creator using Instagram Reels to share a full guide she sent to her email list:

Her followers even raved about the email in the comment section:

Here’s an example of a creator promoting a free cookbook on Facebook:

Adding a link to a Facebook post creates what’s known as a “link post.” This means Facebook grabs a featured image from your page (you can set this up with Open Graph tags) and uses it to add a link card to your post.

The only criticism I have of this post is the length of the link used to promote the book.

It uses a familiar link shor.tener known as Bitly but includes four words after the domain, three of which are two syllables. This is too long for a shortlink.

It’s better to use a branded domain for shortlinks. Not only does it look more legit than a Bitly link, it allows you to leave your brand name out of the text that appears after the domain.

Once again, here are other ways you can promote your free offer on social media:

• Link sticker in Instagram story
• Swipe up feature in Instagram story
• Dedicated bio link that leads to your offer’s landing page
• Link on your link-in-bio page
• Twitter (X) link post (also works for Bluesky and Threads)
• Pinned tweet
• Shoutout in a YouTube video (insert a link to your landing page in the video description)
• Shoutout in a TikTok (add the link to your profile or link-in-bio page)

Final thoughts

Social media provides a way to reach vast amounts of people. But algorithm changes can bury creators.

The solution?

Use your social media following to build an email list of loyal fans that you can’t lose with the next algo shift.

Related reading:

• How To Make Money On Social Media (Methods That Actually Work)
• 30+ Tactics To Grow Your Email List Faster

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