The One Important Thing I Did to Grow My Email List Overnight

When I first started building personal my brand, I was primarily using Instagram to market my services and build a community of like-minded individuals. Just like many entrepreneurs starting out, I had found my favorite social media platform and I felt confident using it to get good results. 

I would argue that Instagram is my generation’s favorite app. Snapchat has long won over Gen Z, and the Boomers love Facebook more than their firstborn. Just kidding just kidding. Although yes, I do believe that each of us have likely found our favorite platform--the platform we use to sell ourselves and move the needle for our brands and businesses. 

There’s one important problem with this. 

We don’t own the rights to these platforms. The followers we’ve worked so hard to attract, the bio or summary we’ve spent precious time crafting, the countless hours we spend writing valuable content for our audience… all of this is an important part of building our personal brand. 

But let me ask you this, what if Instagram were gone tomorrow?

The bridge to your audience would be broken. Those 10k followers on Instagram, gone. And all of your hard work along with it. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to take that risk. This thinking is what eventually led me to start building my email list. 

I had a small list back then, and it was nowhere near the size of my audience on Instagram.

However, I was determined to change that. I knew I needed to give my personal brand security that was independent from the success of another platform. 

I decided to create a quiz that showed my followers what kind of brand personality type they had. This would give people insight on how to build their brand and market themselves to the world.

When I found Interact, I knew I had struck gold. It was the perfect platform to help me start building my email list and offer my audience something fun in return.

In this week’s blog post, I’ve partnered with Interact to show you how you can set up your very own quiz right on your website.

Step One: Getting Started

Select a quiz template or start from scratch. While thinking about my quiz, I had a very specific idea of how I wanted to my quiz to look and feel. I opted to start from scratch and designed everything on my own. However, you can also choose one of Interact’s quiz templates which is the easiest way to create a quiz. They have over 1,000 templates which make the entire process super streamlined and painless.

Step Two: The Cover Page

This is where you’ll decide on your cover page. Now, keep in mind that your cover image, title, and tagline must be very engaging. A lot of people choose to use stock images for the cover photo; however, I recommend using a photo of yourself if it’s applicable to the content in the quiz.

Why? Personal photos always perform much better. It’s not about self-promotion, it’s about using content that gets better results.

When it comes to choosing a title for the quiz, try to think about what will inspire action in your audience. I always use this headline analyzer by CoSchedule to determine which headlines will perform better. 

Your tagline needs to be a strong call to action. Why should they move forward?

Step Three: Creating the Quiz Content

This was actually my favorite part of creating my quiz on Interact. Although be forewarned, it’s definitely time-consuming. Get nice and comfortable and cozy up with your laptop, because this is the most critical part of this process.

For starters, keep your quiz between 6-9 questions. Anything under 6 and it feels too short, anything over 9 and it feels too long. I think 7 questions is the perfect sweet spot; it makes your audience work for their results, but not too hard.

I actually recommend writing the quiz results first. This will help you determine the best questions to ask. 

For example, I knew that I wanted to showcase four different brand personality types (these are also the types that represent my target audience, hint hint) so I designed my questions and answers to link to each one of those.

I recommend planning your quiz out in a Google Doc before starting to build in Interact to avoid getting too overwhelmed. 

When it came time to write my quiz questions, I chose topics that felt interesting and thought-provoking. Part of why I believe my quiz turned out so successful was because I structured all of my questions and answers in the exact same way. 

For instance, here is an example of one of my questions:

Do you see how all of the answers are structured in the same way? By doing this, the answering process is made more simple for my audience. They can easily compare answers without any confusion or misunderstandings due to syntax or sentence structure. 

Once you have crafted the perfect questions and answers, you’re ready to plug them in and get building! Interact is extremely user-friendly, so you can plug in each quiz question before linking it up to the corresponding result.

Step Four: Integrating the Quiz onto Your Website

Compared to the other quiz generating software I’ve used in the past, Interact provides an extremely user-friendly approach to embedding your quiz in a place where people can find it. They give you the option to use it a popup, announcement bar, or landing page on your website. You can also set up a Facebook Ad or just get a direct link which you can share with your friends and family to get started. 

Pro tip: embed the quiz in multiple places on your website. Place it both on the home page and in the announcement bar so visitors can see the option to take it no matter which page they’re currently on. 

To promote your quiz off of your website, make sure to include a link to it in your Instagram bio. I get at least 4-5 new subscribers just from my Instagram bio alone. This costs me zero dollars and keeps the stream flowing without a second thought from me.

Step Five: Measuring Your Results 

Once you’ve shared your quiz with your followers, friends, and family, make sure to pay close attention to the results. For instance, which specific answers are people selecting? What is the most popular result? The answers to these questions will give you great insight into your audience and show you which kind of people are interested in you and your business.

If you’re serious about building your personal brand, learning how to build your email list will be invaluable to your success. Don’t let a lack of time or commitment delay your list building efforts. Trust me, you’ll wish you would have started sooner with Interact. Check out my quiz here to see how it all works or build your own free Interact quiz!