List Building. Part 3.

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

List Building

 Part 3

In Part 2, I listed 3 easy methods for List Building which cost very little –  Blog Commenting, Forum participation and Article writing.
Here in Part 3, I will go into more detail about List Building on your Blog.

List Building Strategy #1 – Your Blog

One of the easiest ways to grow your list is directly on your blog. It makes sense when you think about it. The readers of your blog already know you a little bit and are more likely to trust you with their email address. They have also shown an interest in the topic, simply by reading your blog. This is why before you do anything else, you should start your list building on your blog.

==>> Opt-in Form on Every Page

Start by adding an opt-in form on every single page of your blog. The easiest way to do this is to add it to your navigation sidebar. You’ll get the best response if you add it to the top of that bar (in the upper right or left hand corner of each page).

Log into your autoresponder account and create a new web form. I recommend using a field to capture the first name of your subscriber and one for the email address. Tweak the form so it’s narrow enough to fit into your sidebar. Include an attention grabbing headline that invites them to sign up for your newsletter or blog updates. Last but not least, grab the code for the opt-in form.

If you are using WordPress to manage your blog and Aweber to manage your list (which I highly recommend), you have two options here. You can either manually add your form via a widget text field, or you can use the Aweber WordPress plugin.

The plugin will walk you through the steps of including the widget, but the text widget option is very simple to use as well. Log into your WordPress admin area and go to the widget page. Drag a new text widget into your side bar, then just copy and paste the code for your opt-in page in the field and save.

Take a look at your blog and make sure your opt-in form is looking the way you’d like it to. Once it does, your readers will have the opportunity to join your list from any blog post or page on your site.

Check this out!

==>> Encourage Readers to Sign Up In Your Content

Of course it doesn’t stop there. One of the things you can do on a regular basis is to encourage your readers to join your list from within your blog posts. There are two different ways you can do this. The easiest way (and often the most effective) is to just ask your readers to sign up from the content of your post. Just work it in there naturally.

The second option is to add another opt-in form somewhere inside your post or toward the bottom. I recommend you only use this on occasion to avoid annoying regular readers. Just sprinkle it in here and there when appropriate.

Doing those two things will greatly increase the amount of subscribers you’ll get directly from your blog.

Hope this has helped and given you enough to go ahead with until next time when I outline more on using ‘Opt-In” pages.
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