Note: While this post contains affiliate links, and I was offered to try the premium program for free, my opinions and suggestions are completely my own.
After a few days, weeks, or even months of deliberating and researching, you’ve finally decided to finally launch your very first side-hustle!
Congrats! That’s a huge step. Getting started is half the battle!
If your side hustle involves hosting any information, products or services online, it’s extremely important to build and nurture an email list of loyal followers and customers. There are many reasons why building an email list is important, but essentially it builds down to having complete ownership over your email subscribers, as opposed to followers on social media.
When it comes to Facebook, Instagram, and the other social platforms, you’re always at the will of whatever pesky algorithm change the developers decide to roll out (usually favoring users who purchase ads over organic content). Even worse, the platform could completely shut down! Remember Vine? All of the users who gained fame on Vine were required to move their content and build their following elsewhere. This could be detrimental if the majority of your income and following is dedicated to one single social media profile.
With an email list, you will always own the subscribers you acquire. Even if your email marketing provider decides to shut down, you can still export your full list of subscribers and transfer them to a different site.
While this is great and all, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, I get the importance, but HOW do I actually find subscribers and build my list?”
There are many different ways you can build an email list. First, you’ll need to choose an email marketing provider. I currently use MailerLite and highly recommend it for beginner bloggers!
After you’ve set up your account, the next step is to create a lead magnet for your future subscribers. A lead magnet is simply a freebie you offer to those who sign up for your email list. You can create printables, grant your subscribers access to a resource library, build an e-course, or many other options. One fun lead magnet I highly recommend and have recently created is a quiz from Interact!
Interact quizzes are extremely similar to Buzzfeed, which are always circulating through Facebook and Twitter. As an example, here’s the one I created for my own blog.
Not only are these fun and helpful for your readers, but they’re a blast to create. Plus, they easily integrate with your email marketing provider, including MailerLite!
Once you sign up for an Interact account, these are the easy steps you can take to create and publish your first quiz:
Step One: Log in to Interact and click “Create New Quiz”
Step Two: Choose if you want to create your quiz from scratch or use a template
If you’re just starting out with your first quiz, I’d recommend choosing a pre-made template. While my exact quiz topic wasn’t a part of their template options, I picked the closest one and then just edited all of the content. Having the basic structure already created was a huge time-saver and help for creating my first quiz.
Step Three: Choose the templates that fit your niche
The industries you choose in this step will help Interact choose pre-made quiz templates that best target your audience’s needs. You can choose as many as you want! For example, as a personal development blogger, I chose coaching, career, and a couple other life advice related industries.
Step Four: Choose your quiz type
You can pick between three different kinds of quizzes: assessment, personality, and scored. The descriptions for each version is described in the photo below. I chose personality because the quiz I made describes someone’s personality and life situation. Choosing your quiz type all depends on the subject and the end result you want to give your readers, and it should match your purpose of creating your side hustle and quiz.
Step Five: Select a pre-made quiz template
Now you can choose which pre-made quiz is the closest to the quiz you want to make for your side-hustle. Each one will be similar to the industries you chose in step three. Honestly, even if none of the templates are really what you’re looking for, it’s super easy to delete the content and just use the basic structure to create your own quiz. For example, there weren’t really any pre-made templates similar to mine, so I chose the closest I could find: “What Do You Need More of In Your Life Right Now?” I deleted all of the content in the questions and results and used the structure to replace the pictures and words to fit my quiz.
Step Six: Customize your quiz with photos, questions, and answers
It’s time to make your quiz! Interact has a very straightforward way to set everything up, and you can make it as easy as replacing the questions, answers, and photos from the template you chose! You can navigate through the branding and questions/answers on the left sidebar, and simply write your content right on the quiz. Interact also allows you to switch up the font and colors to fit your brand, and has direct access to Pixabay to choose free stock photos in the quiz builder.
If you’re creating a personality quiz, make sure you set up the correlations between the questions and answers to help generate accurate results for your audience. When you’re editing a question, simply click the blue oval on the top right corner of your screen titled “Edit Result Correlations.” From there you can pick and choose which questions should deliver the answers you created.
In each result window, you also have the option to create a call-to-action button, which can either lead to a paid related product or service you offer for your side-hustle, or a related blog or landing page.
Step Seven: Integrate your email marketing program
If you don’t integrate your email marketing provider, you won’t be able to capture new leads and build your email list (which is kind of the point to creating the quiz, right?). When setting this part up, there’s an option to allow your quiz takers to skip the requirement to include their email address in order to see their results. There are two sides to this option: You may end up receiving more leads if you don’t allow them to skip entering your email, or you might end up with many people who won’t care about being on your list and potentially unsubscribing immediately after. This is completely up to you, but the experts at Interact suggest keeping the “Skip This Step” option in order to gain more reliable leads.
Interact offers many partnerships with most of the popular email marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, ConvertKit, Hubspot, and my personal favorite, MailerLite. You can see all of the ones they currently offer in the photo below.
After you choose your email service, it will ask you to choose where your email leads go to your lists or segments when your quiz takers either choose certain questions or get specific results.
Step Eight: Publish and share!
Now it’s time to share your quiz! There are many ways that Interact offers you to share and promote your quiz. For example, you can offer it as a pop up on your site, share it on various social media platforms, embed your quiz on a landing page on your site (which I highly recommend), and a few others. They even have direct access to create a Facebook ad to promote your quiz as a campaign.
Then you’re done! After promoting and receiving a few leads with your quiz, Interact has a great analytics page to show its progress and the questions/answers your readers are choosing and receiving. I recommend testing different ways of sharing and promoting your quiz to see what works best, as well as taking advantage of the different segments you can lead your new emails into while building your list with your quiz.
If you’re interested in signing up for Interact to kickstart your side hustle and build your email list, you can use my link to sign up and use a 14-day free trial of the full premium features Interact has to offer to create your quiz. I highly recommend starting your account with the free version to get most of your quiz set up first, then activating the free 14-day trial to add all of the finishing touches such as branding and email integration features offered with the premium version to see how the quiz impacts your email list.
Related Reading:
- How to Conquer Your Fear of Interviewing (+ Free Interview Prep Checklist)
- The Ultimate Job Search Survival Kit
- How to Master Work-Life Balance
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