Blogging is often mentioned as the best way to build an email list.

People tell you how they’ve risen from being a “nobody” to fame, built a huge email list, and made a fortune with blogging.

And it’s all possible.

But most people don’t “make it”—no matter how great content they publish in their blogs.

That’s because they don’t know how to use it effectively. If you’re smart about how you use blogging to build your email list, you’ll almost certainly get good results.

But as long as you’re writing your own blog, you’re probably just wasting your time…

How to build an email list quickly with blogging

Transcript…

You’ve been told to start blogging…

If you’ve been in the marketing circles online for a while, you’ve probably been told to start blogging.

People tell you how they’ve risen from being a “nobody” to fame, built massive email lists, and made tons of money—all thanks to blogging.

And there’s truth to that. Blogging is a very effective way to grow your email list and business.

But if you’re writing your own blog, you’re probably just wasting your time.

How blogging is supposed to work

The idea of how blogging is supposed to work is that you write great articles, people come and read them, and they notice how smart you are and that you can help them, so they join your email list and maybe follow you in social media.

When you publish something new, you let them know about it, they come and read it, and share it with their networks, so even more people read your content.

Then those people realize how smart you and your email list grows even more.

When you want to sell something, you send out an email. The people on your list come to check out your offer. And if it’s a good fit for them, they buy it.

This is pretty much how blogging actually works—not just how it’s supposed to work.

But there’s a tiny problem when you’re starting your blog: there’s no one there to read it. And when no one’s reading your blog, nothing else happens.

So, instead of writing for an audience that doesn’t exist (yet), you should do something else. Ideally, you write for thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people right from the start.

What’s the catch?

Guest blogging.

Instead of writing for your own site that no one’s reading, you write for the big sites that accept guest posts that the people you want to attract to your site are already reading.

A lot of people think that guest blogging is some sort of weird conspiracy masterminded by the people who run the big sites—the people who get free content from you.

And I understand that. Most people don’t get good results from the guest posts they write.

But still in almost all cases, you’d be better off focusing on guest posts than writing to your own site. You just have to do it right.

Is guest blogging just another magic bullet?

I don’t like it when people claim to have found some sort of magic bullet. They claim that if you just use a strategy, you’ll be famous by tomorrow and make millions next week.

Guest blogging—just like so many other marketing methods—is sometimes presented as a magic bullet. But it’s not.

It doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s really not enough to write great posts for the biggest sites around.

Usually when people talk about guest blogging, they simplify things too much.

If you’re goal is to build an email list, writing great posts for big sites isn’t enough. You have to write effective posts.

Don’t get me wrong, a guest post is effective only if it’s a great post; it has to be valuable for the readers. But it also has to invite them to take the next step, which is to join your list.

Then again, it’s easy to be too self-promotional.

If your guest post sounds like an advertisement, it won’t be published. And even if it is published, people don’t want to click through to your site.