Use This Simple Trick to Solve The “Social Proof Paradox”

There’s one piece of conversion advice that drives me nuts.

“If you want more people to subscribe to your email list, use social proof. Show people how many subscribers you already have.”

That sounds great in theory…

But what if you only have 354 people on your email list? How is that going to boost social proof?

It’s what I call the “Social Proof Paradox”.

You need social proof to get subscribers. But you need subscribers to get social proof.

It’s a classic chicken or the egg problem.

So what’s the solution?

Testimonials.

Here’s an example from my newsletter sign up page:

And here’s another example from Nevblog.com:

See that?

You don’t need a 30,000-strong email list to demonstrate social proof. A single testimonial is enough.

(In fact, I’ve found that a single glowing testimonial is often more powerful than “I already have 9,541 subscribers”)