Email List Growth: Tips & Tricks For Creators

Your Mailing List Is The Best Weapon You Have Against Big Tech Algorithms

Big tech is not your friend. It does not have your best interests in mind, and it will not care when your business is destroyed overnight by a simple algorithm update.

All big tech does is serve itself and its shareholders.

The most recent example of just how nasty Big Tech can be when it comes to serving its own agendas was Google’s HCU algorithm update:

It was a Monday morning, December 9th, 2024, when I checked my Google Search Console dashboard and felt my stomach drop.

One of my sites — a project I had poured my heart, time, and money into — had plummeted overnight.

Traffic was down by over 60%.

From more than 2,000 daily visitors to just 600.

A few weeks later, it finally crashed to a point I could only describe as ‘dead.’

To 20 visits/day.

Khris Steven

So, if you think success as a creator is measured by the number of X, TikTok or YouTube subscribers a person has, you’ve got it all wrong.

These are transient, unpredictable things. Proper businesses and brands focus on metrics they can control.

And that is why email has been the focus for many going all the way back to the dawn of the internet.

Your Social Media Followers Are Owned By Big Tech, You’re Just Renting Them…

If you don’t own your audience, it can be taken away at any moment.

This can happen through algorithm changes, your channel could be banned or shadow-banned, or the platform could just become unpopular.

The only way to have proper control over your audience is to make sure you own them, and the only way to do that is by getting as many of them as possible onto your mailing list.

You need to get them subscribed to your email list, and then you need to keep them happy and engaged by delivering tonnes and tonnes of value.

The Most Successful Creators Operate Email-First Businesses

This is the difference between creators that make a few thousand bucks a month and those that make hundreds of thousands.

The smartest creators operating today build with an email-first approach.

Why? Because if someone is on your mailing list, they joined it because they like what you do.

This makes it easier (and infinitely cheaper) to sell to them when you have a product or course.

Get Your Audience Away From Big Tech Platforms As Fast As You Can

Social media platforms and, the world’s biggest search engine, Google, want you to pay to access their audiences.

That’s the goal.

They use you (and your content) to keep people on their platforms and make billions in advertising revenue.

You’re working for them.

Yes, you can have followers on these social platforms but they can be taken away at any point.

There’s innumerable YouTube channels with millions of subscribers that no longer get any organic reach with their content.

Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that reach nobody because they’ve been shadow-banned for commenting on the wrong post.

And even if you do play by the rules and manage to escape the wrath of the algorithm, the entire way social media works is unsustainable and, worse, terrible for your mental health.

You have to pump out content week in week out, jump on new trends like Reels or Shorts to stay current, interact with followers in your DMs, otherwise the algorithm notices and slashes your reach.

How To Escape Big Tech’s Never-Ending Algorithm Game

Take a month or two off and you’re cooked.

Imagine having 1+ million subscribers and ONLY getting a few hundred views on your videos?

Algorithms destroy millions of businesses and brands every single year.

No one cares.

Why? Because there’s always more meat for the grinder.

The only way to beat them is to not need them, and the only way to achieve this is by having your own platform and your own audience.

And that is what your mailing list is for.

Think of it has the central hub of your entire business. It won’t be big at first but as it grows, it’ll drive more and more revenue.

So if you’re just getting started as a creator or a brand, always be thinking about your email list.

It’s the one thing that you can control and it’ll also make you a lot of money if you know how to run it properly.