Let me guess…
You desperately want to accelerate your blog’s growth.
But every article you read seems to cover the basics you already know – “share your content on social media” or “email your subscribers.”
These “basic as beans” articles aren’t cutting it – you need specific tactics that deliver results.
Sound familiar?
No problem. I’ve got your back.
In this article, you will discover 10 actionable and unconventional tactics you can implement to accelerate your blog’s growth.
Implementing a few of these tactics will result in more followers, email subscribers, traffic, and revenue.
Sound good? Let’s dive in:
10 unconventional tactics to grow your blog faster
1. Use co-branded giveaways to grow your audience and source prizes for FREE
Running a giveaway is one of the quickest ways to spread the word about your blog.
Depending on how you set up your giveaway, this can result in growing your social following, email list, and traffic.
Why? Free stuff is a strong incentive. Especially when you’re giving away something your audience desperately wants.
But, most people avoid giveaways because of the cost of purchasing prizes to offer.
Here’s the good news:
You don’t have to pay for prizes.
In your niche, there are likely a bunch of brands that would be willing to offer up prizes for a co-branded giveaway.
Here’s how this would work:
Any giveaway will require participants to complete an action. These would typically be:
- Share the giveaway on Twitter
- Follow you on Twitter
- Share the giveaway on Facebook
- Like your Facebook page
- Join your email newsletter
- …. etc.
So you’d just offer the brand the opportunity to have their own actions added to the list. As a result, they’d grow their following and email list in the process.
And they’d get extra visibility from being promoted heavily to your audience, etc.
But which brands should you pitch this idea to?
Start with the brands you have an existing connection with. Those who you promote as an affiliate or have purchased sponsored content from you are all great candidates.
How to run your giveaway
You’re going to need a contest tool or plugin to run your giveaway.
Gleam is a popular option and there are plenty of alternatives on the market.
But overall my favorite contest tool is SweepWidget. The good news is that they have a free plan you can use to get started.
2. Cleanse your list of bad emails and improve your email deliverability
Getting people on your email list is one thing but ensuring people receive your emails, and open them? That’s another thing entirely.
What a lot of people don’t know is that email deliverability can be improved by using an email verification tool such as Mailfloss.
These tools will check that the email is formatted correctly, the domain exists and ping the email to make sure it’s live.
If an email address is no longer active, it will generally return a “hard bounce” notification which is a signal that the email address is no longer active.
Some email marketing platforms filter out hard bounces and remove them from your list – but not all of them do.
Companies such as Gmail, Yahoo and AOL will sometimes turn these inactive email addresses into spam traps. The aim is to catch spammers but sometimes legitimate email senders (e.g. like you or me) can end up with spam traps on our email list.
This can negatively impact email deliverability.
So, by using one of these email verification tools – you can stop this from happening and keep your email list in tip-top condition.
You can use these types of tools on a one-off or ongoing basis. For example, Clearout directly integrates with popular email providers such as Kit – this allows you to cleanse your list without exporting/re-importing your subscribers.
Want more ideas to improve your email open rates? Check out this post.
Related Reading: Average Email Open Rates By Industry (Data + Trends).
3. Deploy category targeted opt-in forms to 3x your email sign ups
A few years ago I became a partner at a digital marketing agency – my first task was to overhaul their lead generation process.
They had plenty of good blog content but email sign ups weren’t where they needed to be.
Best practice is to create individual lead magnets (aka content upgrades) for each article but time and resources were limited.
Instead, I identified 5 core topics that were driving the majority of traffic to the blog. I re-organized WordPress categories to align with these topics.
I created 5 new lead magnets – one for each category.
Then, I installed a WordPress plugin called Thrive Leads and created a new group of opt-in forms for each WordPress category.
This allowed me to create a sidebar opt-in, after post form, and popover that would be assigned to the relevant category.
Note: I also created a hidden page on the website where visitors could download the freebies. I updated the welcome email to include a link to the page too. And, I hosted the lead magnets for free using Dropbox.
The result? A 300%+ increase in email sign ups before any A/B testing.
So, why does this work?
It works for the same reason that content upgrades work.
People are far more likely to subscribe to download your resource if it’s related to the content (or topic) that they are reading at the time.
If you want more email sign ups but don’t have the time (or resources) to justify creating 20 new lead magnets for your best performing content – this is a great option.
Related Reading: The Best WordPress Plugins To Grow Your Email List.
4. Create targeted landing pages for each of your lead magnets
If you’re not creating landing pages for each of your lead magnets – you’re missing a huge opportunity.
Why?
Most opt-in forms convert at less than 1% unless they’re particularly well optimized.
What about landing pages? Landing pages can easily convert at more than 30%.
For example, here’s the stats for my main landing page on Blogging Wizard:
It’s converting at 36% without much effort optimizing it. Not bad, right?
To get the most out of your landing pages, you’ll need to do two things:
a) Build conversion-focused landing pages
First, it’s important we clarify what a conversion-focused landing page is.
This isn’t just another page on your blog with an opt-in form added to it.
It’s an individual page that has no distractions – no navigation menu, sidebar or regular footer elements.
This type of page has one goal – to convert!
Here’s an example:
I’m using a 2-step opt-in on this page so when visitors click the button, they’ll see the opt-in form:
Now, how do you create this sort of landing page?
Depending on the content management you use, you may have landing page functionality already.
Some email marketing tools like Kit and Brevo have this functionality, but I prefer to use a dedicated tool.
And there are plenty of WordPress landing page plugins you can use. And there are also stand-alone landing page tools such as Leadpages (but they’re more expensive.)
Note: Need help optimizing your landing pages? Check out my guide to landing page best practices.
b) Plan a promotional campaign for each of your landing pages
Now that you’ve created your landing pages, it’s time to start driving traffic them.
And there are plenty of ways to do this:
- Share them on your social media accounts.
- Add them to your YouTube videos in end cards, descriptions, etc.
- Leverage online communities such as Facebook Groups (if the group allows