It isn’t creative but perhaps a bit non-conformity. I hate leveraging freebies as a way of getting the email. You stake the entire value of your newsletter on the freebie and many people would rather just search up the topic of your freebie than give their email address away.
My thing is this: write amazing blogs that people never want to miss out on. Put out fresh insightful stuff that stands above the same’ol same’ol and people will drop their email without you having to promise anything in return.
Obviously, it takes a while to get here but it’s much muuuuuuch better in the long run. Sure you can start a new site and get a few emails by promising some secret ebook thing, but you’ll only get cold leads that’ll buy just your first layer product….think like the folks buying impulse aisle products.
But if you have great content, you’re more likely to attract the loyal fans that’ll stick around long enough to buy your upsell stuff, which is where the real money is at.
The last thing you want is 10,000 weak leads costing money on your email list that never buy anything and then mark you as spam 3 months later. I almost celebrate when people unsubscribe. If they’re not falling in love with your content, they’re probably not going to convert.