How I Made $876.41 From My Email List With Under 1,000 Subscribers

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I just made $876.40 in the last 30 days from my email list! Plus, my email list grew in 271 new subscribers!

You can check here my last income report.

I’m so excited for this achievement! Mainly because I’ve been procrastinating about switching my email service provider for months. And now I realized I should have done it earlier.

When I first started blogging, apart from sharing my passion for personal finance with the world, I did hope to make a side income along the way. I know that it seems easy to do, but it’s not that straight forward.

It’s not only hard work what you need to succeed with your blog (and make some extra income); you need a strategy. It’s all about having a strategy in place. During my first year blogging, I didn’t have any kind of strategy, I just published articles and hoped to get some money. It didn’t work quite well.

Before ConvertKit, I was with a different email service provider. I worked really hard to grow my list. I got 639 subscribers over the course of two years, that translates into 30 sign ups per month.

The moment I changed to ConvertKit, within my first 30 days, I got 271 new subscribers (that’s is nearly 300 new sign ups per month, 10 times more than before). That’s exactly a 903% increase. This is mind blowing considering the switch to ConvertKit is the only thing I changed in my email marketing strategy.

Below is a screenshot of my ConvertKit dashboard for the last month.

If you are one of my subscribers, I’m sure you already realized that over the last month I’ve become more active about sending emails.

How I Made $876.41 From My Email List

Below I’m including the exact steps I took to make over $800 just by sending emails to my subscribers.

It took me around 5 days to set up the whole strategy and I only spent 2 hours per day.

Related content: Month income report & how I made over $1,400 blogging.

Day 1

Switch From MailPoet to ConvertKit

Time required: 30 minutes

MailPoet was the email list service I was using before I switched to ConvertKit. MailPoet is free and that’s why I was using it, but you get what you pay for.

The migration was very easy, I just exported subscribers and imported to ConvertKit.

It cost me $29/month (I’m below 1,000 subscribers), but the return, in terms of money, was over 30 times my investment.

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Create an Email Sequence

Time required: 1 hour 30 min

An email sequence is a list of emails that are sent to your subscribers during the following days after they sign up.

What I did was to use some of my old posts content to create my sequence. I included a total of 10 emails, which were sent automatically every 2 days to my new subscribers (that’s 20 days worth of emails).

Day 2

Create Forms

Time required: 2 hours

Forms are opt-ins that get the email of the readers who want to subscribe (like the one I added at the end of this post).

I created three different forms, about three different topics of my blog. I placed each of them in the posts with the given category (this helped a lot with conversion rates). If your saving money form is placed in a budgeting post, chances are that people will subscribe because it’s related (they would love to learn more about the subject).

Day 3

Create a Free Email Course (I got 200+ new subscribers in 30 days)

Time required: 2 hours

An email course is, in fact, a sequence. It’s just that for a specific form, you provide an email sequence over a few days, like a course.

What I did was to reformat some of my old content about a particular topic and created the course (sequence in ConvertKit).

This got me so many new subscribers. People love free stuff!

Day 4

Add Affiliate Links to Your Sequences

Time required: 2 hours

On my fourth day, I went through my email sequences and added affiliate links to some of my emails. But only when it was relevant and the link actually provided value.

This step is how I made $876.41 in 30 days. When you provide useful content and you actually help people, they will pay you in return (sometimes with a thank you, other times with a referral).

Important Note: Be careful with this step, don’t just simply leave links for the sake of making some quick extra bucks. Your subscribers are smart enough to realize that you are trying to sell instead of help and provide value. If that happens, your reputation will be damaged and it will take time to gain back your followers trust. Always disclose your affiliate link.

Day 5

Review That The Process Work

Time required: 1 hour

You need to spend some time testing that your forms are working, your emails are delivered and you don’t have any broken links.

If you already did it over the last few days, well done, there is nothing else for you to do during this day.

What’s next?

What I did over the next 25 days was sending broadcasts (emails) every 3 days to my subscribers about my new posts.

I also sent two emails promoting two products I love, the Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing course and my tutorial on how to start a blog with Bluehost.

Every time I sent a new email, I included tags on each of the links. Tags helped me with the segmentation of my list (you don’t want to send emails about blogging to people who are only interested in saving money tips, right?).

Tricks to keep up with your email list

• Focus on adding value rather than in selling. Sales will come eventually.
• Answer every single email.
• Keep adding new emails to your sequences.
• Review, review and review your email before you hit the “send” button.
• Perform A/B testing for your email subjects. This is something I love from ConvertKit!
• Send emails offering help to your subscribers.
• Keep segmenting your followers to improve your emails engagement.
• Delete your cold subscribers every 6 months to reduce your bill.

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That’s all I wanted to share with you today. If you have any questions about ConvertKit or my email strategy, leave a comment or send me an email to francisco@passiveincomewise.com and I will answer asap 🙂

Do you make money from email marketing? How did you do it? What email service provider do you use?