As bloggers and business owners we are always looking for ways to drive our traffic and grow our email lists.

Printables can be the answer to both. You can use printables to bring more traffic through search engines, social media, freebie swaps and more.

Below are 5 ways to use printables that will help you drive traffic and get more email subscribers.

Printables that Work with Your Monetization Strategy

Not all traffic or email subscribers are created equally. While we all love eyes on our sites and people downloading our really cool printables and content, ultimately we want people who will buy our products, join our memberships and file into our monetization strategies pretty seamlessly.

Take your current monetization strategies and future product ideas in mind when doing your brain storm. Remember your freebie or opt in should lead into your tripwire and then into your product, service or membership.

Your freebie or opt-in printable should solve a specific part of your reader's problem.

Your tripwire can also be a printable, then not only are your printables driving your more traffic and email subscribers but they are increasing your income.

Find Printable Ideas to Drive Search Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic is some of the most stable traffic you can get to your website. An easy way to validate ideas for your printable is to check and see if it is being searched for. You can use google trends or your favorite search engine tool to see how often it is being searched.

If your printable is going to be a freebie or email opt-in, you can use “free printable X” where X is your printable idea. I just ran “free printable meal planner” and it is being searched more than 4500 times every month, the need is there. You can go wider by dropping free from your list. You can also use template instead of printable.

Writing a blog post with the keyword you validated is a great way to rank for that keyword. You can explain why it is helpful and how to use it and ideas to fill it in with to fill out the printable.

Make sure to upload a jpg of at least one page of your freebie then use your alt tag to write out a description for the visually impaired while including your keyword in it. This means when someone switches to Google Images, your printable comes up in the list.

Grow Your Email List by adding a Printable to Your High Traffic Posts

If you have a blog post that is already getting a lot of traffic but you don't have any way of turning those people into email subscribers, so they read the blog post, maybe they click another post then boom you never see them again.

But what if you could turn that traffic into email subscribers?

Using a printable as an email opt-in or lead magnet is a valuable way to get people to subscribe to your email list and turn post readers into customers.

You can do this in a couple of ways, first is making the blog post into a super easy to digest checklist or printable or you can make a printable with the next logical step from that blog post.

Doing a Freebie Swap

This is one of my favorite list growing techniques out there because not only does it grow our lists but it also helps us grow the lists of other bloggers we know.

Make a list of bloggers you know whose audience has an overlap with your audience. So if you are a finance blogger but you have a friend who is a mental health blogger, a mommy blogger, and an organization blogger, you can all do a month long email campaign that shares a free opt-in once from each person a week  either in a separate email or just a section of their regular email.

During week one everyone shares your printable freebie and you gain email subscribers from the other three bloggers email lists.  The next week everyone shares a different bloggers opt-in and so on until everyone’s email opt-in has been shared with all the lists.

No person is 2 dimensional including everyone one on your email list and on other's email lists. The email subscribers on your friend's email list are used to giving an email to receive something and someone following is recommending your opt-in, so the first two hurdles are already conquered.

Share it in your free Facebook Group or on Instagram

Social media is a great place to get people not only to go to your website but to also to get people on your email list.

You can take a printable and make it into a tracker, challenge or bingo for your community to print out and upload photos to show their progress.   Make sure that printable is on your website as an email lead magnet so that you are collecting emails.  You can also write blog posts that go with the challenge that educate your audience on different aspects of the challenge.

If you are a health coach and you do a water drinking challenge then you can make a monthly water tracker, share it in your group then once a week write up a blog post about the benefits of drinking water, things in your body that change when you drink water regularly, the myth of drinking 8 glasses of water a day and what to do instead.

You can do the same thing with your Instagram followers and direct them to your lead magnet and encourage them to use a hashtag and tag you in their progress photos of the printable. Make sure to engage with people using the hashtag and tagging you.

Meet Cait Blakley

” Cait Blakley is the host of Printables and More Club  (get 50% off the first month when you click this link)and The VA Glow Up podcast.

She's worked for years as a graphic designer, serving online businesses with her unique eye for design and innovative content ideas.

She loves helping other business owners harness the power of printables for growing their lists, building their stores and creating multiple streams of revenue!

When she's not creating, Cait loves spending time on her family's farm in Texas with her husband and two children. “