I have a blog where I provide educational materials for Indian high school students. I am not actively working on the blog for more than a year but recently I realized that I have collected more than 15,000 students’ emails — all on autopilot.
Currently, the site receives more than 80,000 page views every month. I haven’t even published anything new for over a year.
How did I collected the emails?
I created several free PDFs or more like cheat sheets for students that would save them hours of their valuable time. Created a simple system for the students to download the PDFs by providing their emails — they’d provide their emails and the materials will automatically be sent to their emails.
Initially, I tested by showing pop-ups on the site but later, I embedded the email capture system below the best performing posts. And, then I became sure that pop-ups don’t work that well.
For this automated system, I used Mailerlite as an email marketing solution and it turned out to be really good for me. I collected 15,000 emails to date.
Why did it work so well?
Because I understood what the students needed and created a robust PDF that students couldn’t resist downloading.
You can see various emails from happy students who downloaded the PDF. By the way, if you’re wondering, I use Zoho for hosting emails for my websites.
If you just show a newsletter subscription box on the site, no one is going to subscribe. They will only put their emails if they’re getting something really valuable.
That’s it.
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