How To Add List Building Tools in Your Blog
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
How to Add List Building Tools in Your Blog
In this day and age of internet marketing, having a list of prospects is still the key to finding clients. Imagine having a list of people you may contact who are willing to click on your links, read your newsletters, and purchase your goods online. Without this list, you’ll be lost before you even begin, so list building tools are vital to building your internet business.
Building a list takes more than just putting a simple subscriber box with an email address field on your website. While it’s still useful, you must also find a way to encourage people to “opt-in” or put their email address in order to subscribe to your offers. That’s when you can really start building a relationship with them. The power of a list building tool is that you can do all this automatically without having to personally attend to each prospect.
To add a list building tool, you first should design an opt-in page. This page is where your contacts will “opt-in” by signing up for your offer. It can be an image, some text, Javascript, a combination of these—it’s your choice. The important thing is to include fields for a person’s name and their email address. Of course, you should make it as inviting and attractive as you can.
Second, decide what kind of tool you need. The right tools depend on the kind of blog you’re using. For example, there are tools designed specifically for WordPress, while there are others that will work with all other sites like Facebook and Blogger. Be sure to check out the plugin’s homepage to find out what blogs it’s compatible with.
You may also want to decide if you want a sign up page, a footer, a sidebar, or a pop-up kind of tool. Some types of tools even incorporate all or most of these features. It depends on how you’ve designed your blog, so pick one that works well functionally as well as visually.
Next, after you’ve made your design choices, select the tool you want. You have a choice of what kind of tool you want to use. The excellent ones like Aweber, GetResponse, UFA (Ultimate Footer Ad), and Digi List Builder require that you pay for them, but there also free ones you can use, such as Optin Crusher, Codebanter, and the WordPress plug-in mentioned above. Whatever you choose, make sure to follow the directions and that it merges seamlessly with your blog’s style and autoresponder system.
Download your tool and install it. In most cases, you will download a plug-in for ease of use. Once downloaded, you can install it at the settings menu in the back end of your blog.
For example, in WordPress, open up your Dashboard, and click on the menu bar item on the right marked Plugins. Select Add New. Browse your computer for your plug-in file and select it. From there, you can click on Activate Plug-in. You will likely have to click the plug-in settings and configure it. This is important if you need to define your opt-in page, as well as its dimensions and when or how often it will show up on your blog.
The installation may be different for each tool, so be sure to read the instructions on their website to make sure you got it right. Essentially, you have to download the application, upload it to your blog, copy-paste your auto-responder details, configure your settings, then activate the plug-in.
If you’re using WordPress, you can use its very own pop-up plug-in as an alternative to third-party ones. Once downloaded, you have two choices: to have the pop-up show for all your blog pages, place the plug-in in /mu-plugins/, or to let each individual blog control it by placing it in /plugins/. After doing that, activate the plug-in and go to Settings > Pop Overs. Here you can paste in the code for your ad: size, borders, background color, position, font color, and when you want it to display.
Happy list building!
