An email list can be one of most powerful and lucrative ways to stay in touch with your blog’s followers, or people who care about your niche. It’s also one of the best ways to make some money on the web. Here are some ways to get your list going.
Offer a Freebie
Give them something for their email addresses. People are handing something valuable over, and they want something in return. Some examples might include a free reports, or how to videos, or providing the answer to their problems. It’s even better if you can put the material in an e-course, which you break them into parts, and send a lesson every week. This gets them to expect emails from you and actually open them, and finally click on the links in the body. Basically you’re training them on a new habit. Make it smooth and natural, and your list will grow and multiply like bunnies.
Make sure you’re offering something relevant. Don’t simply ask people to sign up for your newsletters. People aren’t that interested in simply hearing about updates of your website. It has to be something useful and make an immediate impact to their lives.
Make it Visible
The signup form should be above the fold in your readers’ faces without them having to scroll down and look for it. If they don’t see it, they obviously not going to sign up. It’s location, location, location. Your site is like a real estate. You need to position your signup form in a visible area. This won’t hurt your readership because If you have good content, people will scroll down for it.
Include a Privacy Policy
You should have a comprehensive and thorough privacy policy. This protects both you and anyone who signs up for your emails. If you aren’t sure how to write up a privacy policy, you can visit a number of websites that will either give you tips on how to do so, or there are sites that will generate it for you for free. www.the-dma-com is a popular site which you can use (though you will have to sign up as a member), or you can search for a number of other resources online.
Once you have created your privacy policy, make sure that you post up links to the policy all over your website. Most websites will provide a link at the very bottom of every page. Make sure that this link is also included on the page which will be used to collect your customer’s information.
Use a Popup
Here’s one that’s a bit controversial. We thought long and hard before using it. Put up a popup for new visitors who’ve been there for over 30 seconds. Give them an option to sign up and stay in touch. Make sure the offer is there for them to download the free report or watch that cool video. It can be a bit aggressive, so make sure you do it for first time visitors only. You don’t want to show this every time people revisit your site, otherwise they might annoyed, and stop coming.
It really works. So far it has the best opt in rate of all the methods that we tried. Now aweber, also who we use to manage our email list, makes it so easy to create & customize forms. We’ve tried a lot of companies and think this is the best one. If you’re not using Aweber, go BlogSuccessJournal.com/Aweber to try it one month for only $1!
Self-Installed Software:
In the remote case that you want to host your own list, you can install software directly onto your website that will both help you with list creation, and list management. It’s incredibly easy to send messages out to customers with this type of mailing list manager, and it’s easy to maintain the data.
If you think that you will be having a fairly large list, then you will want to make sure that whatever software you choose will be able to handle a large amount of data. You don’t want to have to be switching over to another list manager due to size limitations (this will cause you a huge headache), nor do you want to lose data. Continue to back up your information regularly to avoid this.
Another consideration you will have to make when it comes to your mailing list is to see if your web hosting service requires that your customers have to do what is called “double opting in” to your mailing list. What this means is that any customer you have will need to reply to an email that is generated by your list manager program prior to them being added to your mailing list. The purpose: to ensure that customers are not being signed onto lists that they don’t want to be on. It’s a form of SPAM protection that many web hosting companies perform now which can make it more difficult for you to build your mailing list.
Landing Page
Another great way to get people to sign up for your newsletter is to create a professional landing page for your website or blog. If you have some web design background, this should be a simple step for you. If not, there are programs available out there that will help you build a fantastic, professional looking page, or you can splurge a bit and hire on a professional web designer.
Once you have people on your mailing list, you want to make sure that you keep them engaged so that they will stay on that list. Have a regular ezine or newsletter go out, and make sure that you’re providing quality material. It doesn’t have to be a long newsletter, but having maybe 2-3 news articles and/or a video and images that are related to your site and what it’s about will keep them coming back and trusting you as a source of valuable information.
So what tips do you have to grow your email list?
