- Today
92: Grow Your Email List Without Relying on Social Media (with Kylie Kelly)
- Em Connors
- Email List Growth
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🌟 When Doing Everything Right Stops Working
You post consistently. You make the carousels and the reels, you show your face, you give real value, and you follow every rule the experts handed you.
And your reach keeps shrinking anyway.
If you've started reading your analytics like a report card on your worth, you're in good company. I've been there, and so has my guest this week, my dear Australian friend Kylie Kelly.
I'm trying something different on the podcast. I've said for a long time that I want more guests, and for a long time I've skipped it out of sheer laziness. Hitting record and talking solo for 20 minutes is just easier than coordinating an interview.
So Kylie and I hit record once, had one real conversation between two creators, moms, and solopreneurs, and agreed to share it on both our podcasts.
This post pulls out the biggest ideas from that conversation: what it feels like to outgrow the platform that built your business, how to grow your email list without living on social media, and the small changes you can make this week with what you already have.
Want the main points on one page? Grab the takeaway one-sheet for this episode: https://thecreativebodega.myflodesk.com/podcastonesheet
✨ Six Years, 124,000 Followers, and a Notebook Full of Frustration
Let me paint the picture. I've been in business for six years, and almost all of that time I built on Instagram. I have 124,000 followers there, and it didn't happen overnight. It came from a series of viral reels over those six years.
The big one landed right after I hit 10,000 followers. It was a reel about Canva, which is exactly what I wanted to be known for, and it brought in about 60,000 new followers in a couple of weeks. My business was ready for it. I had smaller-priced products, a website, a newsletter, and freebies for everyone who didn't want to buy. That was 2022, and my husband used to tell people I could slap something together one day and sell 900 of them the next.
That is not my reality anymore.
I'm a data person, so on the first of every month I have a calendar alert that tells me to update my Instagram analytics. I track reach, followers, and my top-performing posts. For two years that line has slid. Four years ago, a YouTube specialist looked at my reels, which were averaging around 75,000 views, and told me he wouldn't even bother with YouTube. Today my account is four times bigger, and I'm lucky to break 5,000 views.
I had a lot of "what is wrong with me" moments. It's hard not to tie your worth to how your work performs, especially when it used to perform so well. Meanwhile my feed filled up with income claims, "do this in 0.3 seconds with AI," and "never lift a finger in your business again."
So I forced a three-week break. Those three weeks showed me how much of my life went into creating posts, overthinking hooks, and bashing myself when they didn't perform. Nothing takes 15 minutes, and anyone who says it does is lying.
On vacation, in a notebook I don't normally use (I'm not a journaler), I wrote "I hate Instagram" four times, in not-so-polite words. That was a scary thing to put on paper when it's what I built my business on.
Then I went looking for someone already doing email well. I searched "email marketing" in Apple Podcasts, and Kylie's show came up first. I knew that name from somewhere. When I typed it into my inbox, there was a conversation from four or five years ago, when she'd invited me into a bundle.
🎯 How to Build on Something You Own
Kylie stepped back from social media years before I did, so I spent a good part of our conversation asking her how it works. What follows is the plan we kept circling back to, plus the changes I've made on my own side.
📊 1. Look at the Data Before You Decide Anything
Kylie and I are both data nerds, which is probably why we get along.
Her moment looked a lot like mine. When she moved from wedding photography to an online business, she built a beautifully curated Instagram feed, because pretty came naturally. Then she checked how many people had clicked over to her website or sales page in the last 30 days. Two clicks.
My advice to anyone doing all the things on Instagram is to start with the same exercise. Add up the time it takes to create the post, write the caption, overthink the hook, engage with comments, and then criticize yourself when it flops. Compare that time to what comes back. If the trade doesn't make sense, cut the time significantly and put those hours into starting an email list on a simple, pretty platform like Flodesk, where it's fun to be.
🌱 2. Pick One Thing You Own and Let It Build
Kylie teaches a visibility framework with two sides. The first side is search and SEO, which is where her podcast lives. Whether she's sick or life gets busy, that episode goes out every week, and after five or six years she now gets a lot of subscribers through it.
Her advice is to pick one thing for this side: a podcast, YouTube, or a blog. It needs to be a place where you're the thought expert, where your opinions live, and where you own the platform. It builds slowly, and it keeps building for years.
I already had a weekly podcast and a weekly blog tied to it, and I had never looked under the hood of either. Spending one full day on both turned out to be one of the best uses of my time in a long while.
🤝 3. Add One Relationship-Based Play for the Quick Wins
The second side of Kylie's framework is relationship-based list building: bundles, virtual summits, podcast guesting, freebie swaps, and guest teaching inside other people's communities. Pick one. This is the side that gives you the dopamine hit of 50 or 100 new subscribers.
Kylie's own story is the proof. She isn't naturally extroverted, and she had no one on her email list. But she signed up for a virtual summit as an attendee, had so much fun that she thought "maybe I could do that," and hosted her own. She built the stage, invited the speakers, and went from zero to 600 subscribers. She hosted a second event in 2022, and from 2023 on she went all in on bundles, summits, podcast guesting, freebie swaps, and guest teaching.
It also made her business feel less lonely. When she moved online in 2020 and 2021 she felt isolated, and the relationship play fixed that too.
✅ 4. Choose Collaborations That Bring In the Right Person
Relationship-based growth can be hit and miss. Kylie has been in a bundle with 30 contributors and walked away with five subscribers, because it wasn't the right bundle.
The question that comes before any yes is: who is my ideal client, and where will she be? Then make sure whatever you contribute, whether it's a resource or a summit talk, attracts that person back into your world.
The common mistake is joining a big bundle with 50 contributors and a reach of 200,000 people, then submitting something broad like how to grow your business in 2026. You'll collect a stack of subscribers, but they're the wrong people, so your list ends up big, quiet, and not buying.
Twenty or fifty aligned subscribers beat a couple hundred random ones. That one is hard for me, because my 2022 numbers still haunt me, and I'm learning to stop comparing now to then.
📝 5. Use What You Already Make
When I decided to pull back on Instagram, I looked at what I was already making: a podcast every week and a blog every week. I wasn't optimizing either one to bring in subscribers.
The change that brought in 150 new subscribers in the last three weeks was adding a takeaway one-sheet to every podcast episode. It isn't a new freebie, because coming up with a fresh freebie for every episode is too much work. I put my transcript into Claude and ask for a one-sheet. My listener is busy, maybe walking or driving the kids around, and she still wants to remember what I said, so I make it easy for her to grab the main points.
Simplicity is the whole point. It's one opt-in form, one workflow, and one Google Doc where I add a new tab each week. I add the tab on the Sunday night before the episode goes live, and if someone downloads it early and sees tomorrow's tab, the world doesn't end.
Kylie has her own version of the idea. At the end of the year she'll pull the transcripts from her guest episodes and a couple of solo bangers, turn them into a PDF guide with Claude, and put it behind an opt-in. Then she'll send it to every guest who was featured. There's no pressure to share, but being featured makes sharing easy.
Both ideas come from the same place: you already made the thing, so make it work harder.
Want the one-sheet for this conversation? Grab it here: https://thecreativebodega.myflodesk.com/podcastonesheet
🔍 6. Optimize the Show Notes You Already Publish
I also took a hard look at my show notes. Every blog post tied to a podcast episode lived at thecreativebodega.com/61, just the episode number and nothing else. That's easy for a listener who wants the show notes, and it does nothing for search or for AI tools trying to find my content.
In the last three episodes I've started adding a longer slug with keywords, like AI and solopreneurs. I'm also moving my whole site, partly because of this.
Before you add anything new to your plate, ask what you're already making and whether it could do more. Go all in on optimizing it, and see what happens.
🎉 7. Find Your Own Fun
Both of us are pivoting this year, and both of us admitted the last couple of years haven't always felt fun. Kylie is moving from high-ticket coaching to low-ticket, high-volume, and she calls herself the goo in the cocoon, about to emerge. She used to keep a Post-it on her computer that said, "What would feel like fun right now?"
Fun can be small. I saw a website designer hide something inside a sales page so the first person to find it would get a prize. Kylie's friend Nadine Nethery ran a treasure hunt across her website for Black Friday.
Then there are the gimmicks. I saw a huge creator, Brock Johnson, suggest hiding an emoji in your story so people have to tap back through it. I can't do it. It feels like tricking people into looking, and that isn't for me.
Choose your own lane and do it your own way. What feels fun for you is probably different from what feels fun for someone else.
🛠️ Resources
💪 Build the Thing You Own
If you take one idea from this conversation, take this: relationships and email are the parts of your business no algorithm can change its mind about.
With one click, I can reach over 10,000 people through my email list, and way over half of them read it. My last three live program launches were multi-five-figure launches, and I never once posted about them on Instagram. I still use Instagram for my DMs and stories, because relationships bloom there. The feed is now a tool for sending people somewhere I own.
The plan, in short: look at your data, pick one thing you own, add one relationship-based play, choose collaborations that attract the right people, use what you already make, optimize it, and bring the fun back.
Kylie, thank you for opening your arms to me when I reached out. You're my email marketing fairy godmother, and I'm grateful.
If you'd like company while you build, my membership, The Content Coven, is always open: https://www.thecreativebodega.com/the-content-coven
If someone you know is pouring hours into a feed and getting little back, send her this post.
What's one thing you could stop doing on social this week to make room for something you own? Tell me in the comments.