See how to drive traffic to your website and convert those visitors into leads to boost your email subscribers.

Whether you're looking to grow your business, promote affiliate products or simply generate traffic to your blog, an email list is a must-have tool for every website. Email is the most effective channel that generates the highest ROI for marketers. It's also 40 times better at acquiring customers than Facebook or Twitter.

In this post, we'll guide you through the process of building an email list step by step to show you how you can generate traffic to your website and convert those website visitors into leads to boost your email subscribers. Let's get started.

1. Start a blog.
Fifty-three percent of marketers say that blogging is their top marketing priority – mainly because it's the most rewarding method of generating traffic to a website for a long period of time with very little investment.

Having a blog will help your website rank on search engines for specific keywords and drive organic traffic continuously to your website. Then you can convert the visitors into email subscribers.

Start a blog and fill it up with amazing content to attract visitors and build an audience. Thanks to WordPress, this process is now extremely easy. You can set up a blog and start publishing content within a few minutes, all by yourself.

2. Research your target audience.
Like every other marketing strategy, blogging requires careful planning to be successful. You'll need to create a content strategy to produce blog posts that not only rank well on Google but also appeal to your audience.

Figure out what kind of topics and content your target audience is interested in. You can use forums, social media and community-based websites to find great topics to write about. Go to a site like Quora and browse categories related to your industry. This will give you access to hundreds of questions posted by real people. These questions often have hundred of comments and thousands of views, proving there is an audience for these topics. Use those questions to come up with blog topics. For example, you may write a post like "50 Ways to Generate 1,000+ Visitors to Your Blog in a Day" if you see multiple people asking how to do that.

3. Find and target low-competition keywords.
More than 82 million blog posts are published every month. Even if you create incredibly valuable content, it's not easy to get Google's attention when you have massive competition from other blogs. This is why it's important that you also optimize your content for keywords to help Google discover your blog posts quickly and rank them higher in search engines.

To find keywords related to your blog topic, use Google Keyword Planner. This tool will give you a list of keyword ideas along with the difficulty of ranking them. Choose keywords with low competition to increase the chances of your blog posts ranking high on Google. Use those keywords when creating your blog post title and description.

4. Come up with effective titles.
The perfect title for your blog post is the key to getting more people to click on your links and get more visitors to your website. According to a HubSpot report, titles with 6-13 words generate the highest traffic to blogs.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a great tool you can use to come up with effective blog titles that attract more visitors. This tool helps you analyze your title and suggest ways to improve its quality by including power words and optimizing the title for search engines.

5. Optimize blog posts for keywords.
Inserting your keywords in the title is not enough to optimize your blog posts for search engines. Google also scans your blog posts to make sure your content matches the targeted keywords.

Make sure to include your keywords naturally in the paragraphs as well. Try to include your main keyword in the first 100 words of your blog post and add secondary keywords in your subheads.

Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that will help you with this process. The plugin allows you to easily optimize your blog posts for keywords, readability and metadata.

6. Convert visitors with email opt-in forms.
After publishing a few amazing blog posts optimized for search engines, you will notice an increase in traffic to your website. Now is the time to convert those visitors into subscribers to grow your email list.

Install an email opt-in plugin and set up pop-up messages on your website to capture emails. Use full-screen welcome mats to grab visitors' attention. Embed opt-in forms inside blog posts. Offer content upgrades. There are so many ways you can generate subscribers.

You'll need to create a few great lead magnets to effectively convert your visitors. Giving away a free e-book, email course, checklists, guides or tutorials is a great way to influence people to give you their email address.

What's next?
By following these steps, you can drive traffic to your website and convert the visitors into email subscribers. However, it's only the beginning.

You now have to keep producing high-quality blog posts, optimize your email opt-in forms to attract more subscribers, and build landing pages to promote your lead magnets. You can use strategies such as A/B split testing to achieve better results through your marketing efforts.

While you build your blog and email list, keep innovating and finding new ways to reach new audiences to grow your business.