"One thing that worked well for building my email list was really figuring out exactly what freebie or “lead magnet” appealed to different parts of my audience. This took a bit of trial and error to begin with. In my mind, I had a bunch of ideas that could be turned into freebies, so I created a few to compare which ones got more interest.

Comparing freebies gave me a good insight because there were a couple that I thought people would be interested in, but they got hardly any uptake. So rather than thinking, “Oh, no one is interested in what I have to offer,” I was able to focus on the one that was getting more interest and make another one more aligned with that.

I had two freebies both about running a creative business but focused on different areas, and one had more interest in the other, so I was able to get an idea of what people really wanted to learn about.

The other thing that really helped was creating a range of pins for each free download and consistently sharing them on Pinterest. The beauty of that platform is that it works like a visual search engine, so people are continuing to find those pins and sign up for my mailing list several years later.

A range of static image and video pins seems to work really well."