How to get your blog visitors to sign up for your e-mail list

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One of the things people struggle with is getting their blog visitors to sign-up for their e-mail list. I have a little bit of experience with this and thought I would share what I have learned.

Initial traffic

The first thing is that you need to have a decent amount of traffic to your blog. If you only have 1 visitor a day then you are not going to have 10 people sign up for your e-mail list every day. It’s just not possible.

In fact if you have 100 people visit your blog every day you’re probably not going to have more than a handful sign-up for your e-mail list. I’m not trying to be a pessimist here; I’m just being realistic. Most people are not interested in giving up their e-mail address to a stranger.

Focus on return traffic

Return visitors are far more likely to trust you with their e-mail address and sign up for your e-mail list. Because of this you should focus on providing great content and giving people different ways to be notified of new content. These ways include RSS and twitter.

So make it easy for people to subscribe to your RSS and follow you on twitter. Also make sure to respond to all comments that people leave. Doing this will encourage first-time visitors to become return visitors.

Read more about why return visitors are important:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/2262_why-you-need-return-visitors-if-you-want-long-term-traffic/

Give away something free

The number of people that opt in to your e-mail list will be dramatically higher if you give away something for free. This sounds pretty obvious.

But here’s the catch: you must give away something that people want. If your blog is about poodle manicures and you give away a free e-book about mud wrestling then you are not going to get very many people signing up for this freebie.

You need to determine what your blog visitors really want. What do they really care about and what do they need?

I would go so far as to actually ask people. Awhile back I put up a blog post promising to give people a free copy of my next product if they would only ask me 1 question. You can see the blog post for yourself here:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/1964_ill-give-you-a-free-copy-of-my-next-traffic-product/

I have had numerous people ask me questions. Because of this I have a much greater understanding of what my visitors need.

Invite people to join your e-mail list

Once you have the right freebie is targeted to your visitors then you need to place your invitation to join your e-mail list on every page of your blog.

There are lots of discussions about where to place your invitation but I believe that you should put it right above your primary content. You can think of it as if it were an advertisement. Where is the optimal place to put an advertisement? You want to put it right above your primary content.

Google has a fair amount of expertise in where to place ads and this is what they recommend. You can see the recommendation for placement of advertising here:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=17954

Your invitation should get peoples’ attention but not irritate them

You want your invitation to jump out a little and get peoples’ attention but you don’t want it to irritate them and cause them to hit the back button.

What I like to do is just have a short bit of text that describes the freebie I’m offering and has a link to a squeeze page where they can get all the information about the freebie and sign up for it.

Currently my invitation at the top of every page looks like this:

(Note: By the time you read this the ad at the top of every page may be different. I like to try different things.)

To have your ad look like this you simply need to put the following at the top of your layout:

<table align="center" style="border-width: 5px; border-spacing: 5px; border-style: dashed; border-color: red; background-color: white; text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding:10px; ">
<tr>
<td>
<b>Free 68 Page Traffic Guide <a href='http://nickstraffictricks.com/links/68_page.php' target='_blank'>Click Here...</a></b>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

I recommend experimenting with the HTML and CSS to find the look that works best for you.

Thesis theme for WordPress

If you’re using the Thesis theme for WordPress then it is easy to add this to the top of every page:

function make_table($text, $url)
{
$output = <<<END
<table align=”center” style=”border-width: 5px; border-spacing: 5px; border-style: dashed; border-color: red; background-color: white; text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding:10px; “>
<tr>
<td>
<b>$text <a href=’$url’ target=’_blank’>Click Here…</a></b>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br />
END;

return $output;
}

function ad()
{
$text = “Free 68 Page Traffic Guide”;
$url = “http://nickstraffictricks.com/links/68_page.php”;
return make_table($text, $url);
}

function before_post()
{
echo “<p align=’center’>” . ad() . “</p>”;
}

add_action(‘thesis_hook_before_post’, ‘before_post’);

Make sure your squeeze page converts

If you’re going to go through all this effort to get peoples’ attention and send them to your squeeze page for them to sign up, then you must make sure that your squeeze page is set up correctly so people actually sign up.

The best squeeze pages I believe are simple. They have a large eye-catching header at the very top of the page.

I like to have a colorful graphic of whatever freebie I am giving away and also have the sign-up form on the page above the fold. Below the fold I’ll put additional information for people who want more information.

On the squeeze page it’s also important to have plain and simple background. And obviously you don’t want to have links to any other websites on it.

You can see an example of one of the main squeeze pages that I use:
http://free–web-traffic.com/

Feel free to steal/copy the layout, graphics, etc.

Don’t lose your subscribers

Lastly I should mention that you should take great effort not to lose too many subscribers. It takes a lot of work to build an e-mail list and you don’t want to throw it all away by losing all of your subscribers.

So take good care of your subscribers.

Tagged as: email lists, Email Marketing