TL;DR — I wrote a guest article for an affiliate with a large audience. It resulted in 300 new signups to my email list in 5 hours.
My email list has been growing steadily since October 2018 when I launched the first version of Logo Package Express. Until now, my only strategy for growing the list has been to offer freebies as lead gens. I decided to try writing a guest post for one of my most prolific affiliates who has a very large mailing list and huge blog following.
I offered my affiliate to write a guest post for him about logo file formats. This is a heavy traffic topic for my blog, so I thought it would be a perfect article for my affiliate to have.
The article discusses what types of file formats designers need to provide to clients for finalized logos. In it, I link to a free download of my logo file format cheat sheet, which is a lead magnet for my list.
I set up an additional link for my affiliate that redirected to my cheat sheet lead gen landing page. If anyone explores my site further and makes a purchase of Logo Package Express within 30 days, my affiliate will get the commission.
The affiliate gets a highly relevant article without doing any work, a value providing cheat sheet for his audience and an additional path to a commission. I get access to a huge audience to join my mailing list.
My affiliate sent out the blog post at 3:30 AM Central time, and by 8:30 AM I had received over 300 new signups to my mailing list — that's a 10% increase in just 5 hours!
I highly recommend this strategy if you have access to quality content and a network of affiliates.