How To Grow Your Email List To 1,000 Subscribers In 12 Weeks (Or Less) In 2024.

A real-world case study of how I grew my email list from 0–2,700+ subscribers in less than 12 months.

Michael Lim

Jul 23, 2024

Your email list is the most valuable business asset you own.

An article by Foundr found that with a 3,800% ROI, email marketing sits as the king of online revenue.

Here are some other benefits:

You own it forever.
There’s no algorithm to compete with.
You can’t be canceled or shadowbanned.
You can sell directly to your audience.

Any good online business has an email list.

I started building my email list in May 2023 with 0 subs and currently have 2,700+ subscribers with a 40% open rate. But your first 1,000 subscribers can be the hardest to get.

Here’s how to build one and get your first 1,000 subscribers.

Step #1: Find a traffic source

Find a platform with a growing audience.

For me, this is Medium, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I primarily write content on Medium and repurpose and recut my content on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Aim to publish at least 3x per week.
Position your content to be educational.
Make your content valuable and compelling.

Your goal at this stage is to get as many eyeballs on your work as possible.

Once you’ve got organic content, you can add:

Paid traffic = running ads.
Borrowed traffic = leveraging someone else’s audience.

I like to keep things simple, so I’m mainly focusing on building my organic traffic. I haven’t yet run ads or looked into borrowing my audience. I will one day, just not right now.

Find an existing audience to put your content in front of.

Step #2: Offer more value (longest and most important step)

No one wants to sign up for your newsletter.

People only want to solve their problems. So your goal should be to solve their problem through a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is:

A complete solution to one problem.
Used to exchange for their email address.

Let me be clear: free does not equal crap.

Your free lead magnet should be so valuable that people can’t believe it’s free. You want your audience to think:

“Wow, if this is free, I can’t imagine how good their paid stuff would be.”

Here’s how you create a valuable lead magnet:

Map out all your customer problems.
Find a common problem that all your customers will face.
Ensure that the problem naturally flows onto the service or product you offer.

For example, I want to help people create a one-person business alongside their 9–5 jobs through writing and personal branding.

The two most common challenges are:

Not enough time.
Not having an idea where to start.

So I created a lead magnet that goes into specific detail on how to start. This will solve their problem of starting while positioning me as an authority that helped them.

By solving their problems, my audience is far more likely to purchase my coaching and consulting service.

This step alone should get you to 1,000 email subscribers. My digital products have over 1,000 downloads.

Here’s proof:

Create a lead magnet within 48 hours.

Step #3: Choose an email service provider

My email service provider is ConvertKit.

For a complete tech idiot, I find the user experience of ConvertKit the most friendly and easy to use.

Here’s what you need to do:

Create a tag (i.e newsletter) for your subscribers.
Create a landing page to collect email addresses.
Integrate Gumroad with ConvertKit.

Now, start emailing your list:

Choose a frequency (at least once per week).
Choose a theme (i.e 3–2–1 — James Clear)
Make your email newsletter skimmable
Reply to any emails you get.
Iterate with feedback.

Make each email so short and valuable people look forward to opening it.

Step #4: Plug your email list everywhere

Become shameless.

Under every post on your traffic sources, plug your:

Landing page link.
Free lead magnet.
Website (if you have one).
Speaking events.

Use this in your bio, captions, CTAs, Linktrees, everywhere.

You want to create a journey for how someone can move from consuming your top-of-funnel content to being a paying customer.

Not everyone will make the journey, and people will move at their own pace.

But that’s okay.

For every new network I make or contact, I get them to sign up for the email list. I then provide so much value that they refer my newsletter to other people.

If you take all these steps, all you need is time.

Growing an email list is hard.

But will be one of the best things you will ever do for your business growth. It’ll be an enduring asset that will pay off handsomely over time.