Building Your Subscribers List with an Opt-in

Do you have an opt-in on your blog? Do you have a blog more to the point if not you can get one from here.

If you have a blog online and you are not sure what an opt-in is or where to place one? then an opt-in is a place where your readers can become a subscriber to your blog and be kept up to date with all the most recent events and blog posts. By having an opt-in on your blog you have the ability to start building your mailing list, and by building your mailing list you have the following advantages:

• Alerting your readers of new recent blog posts – By alerting your subscribers to your latest blog post, they don’t forget about your blog and the information you are supplying. By alerting your subscribers of your latest blog posts, they will continue to read and comment on your blog. Direct emailing has a much better success rate than simply placing your blog online and hoping your RSS feed, Facebook and Twitter pages update to alert people of your new post. Email is much more direct.
• Sending out an auto responder sequence – Most email collection services allow you to have a follow-up sequence of emails e.g. a reader opts-in to your email list for updates, you first send a welcome email, you can then use the follow-up email sequence to provide your new reader with a further series of emails which are all automated. Some of the emails in your automation sequence could point the reader to some of your more informative posts, or an information loaded email newsletter. Once you have plugged in the auto responder emails it’s ‘set and forget’ all subscribers will get the same sequence of emails. It’s a real hands off approach once you have set the email sequence up. This gives you more time to concentrate on other developments.
• Sending out affiliate offers – Now that you have readers on your email list you can send out offers and updates for new, existing and affiliated products. These offers allow you to make a further income stream. Please remember if you are going to promote offers and/or affiliated products to treat your mailing list with respect. You will sell far more products and make more commissions if the people on your mailing list trust you. This is why it is a good idea to keep your blog up to date and also provide information in your auto responder. Don’t jump right to offers! Earn trust.
• Communication with your subscribers – having an email list allows you to interact more with your readers. By utilizing the auto responder feature mentioned above, you can ask your subscriber’s questions e.g. are you enjoying the content? Is there anything you can help your list of subscribers with? What about opinions? Do you have any specific questions you ask your readers?

What is Aweber opt-in email facility?

My opt-in of choice has always been Aweber they are the best of the bunch. Others include Get Response, MailChimp, iContact and Constant Contact to name but a few. Aweber is the one I have always used; they have a great reputation and lots of tools to use to help you along the way. Please feel free to check out the Warrior forum for reviews and recommendations.

By using an opt-in facility such as Aweber you are open to a lot more options than Rss FeedBurner which is another subscription I will talk about at a later date. Here area some benefits of using an Aweber opt-in subscription on your blog:

• Direct email contact
• Auto Responder service
• Custom email templates
• Subscriber Management
• Custom opt-in templates
• WordPress Webform Plugin

With Aweber you are not just tied into a single broadcast every time you update your blog, you can control what you do with your subscribers as I have already mentioned above. With Aweber you have the power to pick and choose what to do rather than just send out a feed like RSS FeedBurner does.

I have complied a fairly comprehensive video tutorial to show you have to add the Aweber plugin to your wordpress blog. Check it out and let me now what you think:

As you can see by using Aweber opt-in forms you increase your chances of subscribers and cover all the bases for increasing your subscriber levels.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial today, you can also check them out on my YouTube channel which I intend to be building like crazy this year. I have more video tutorials planned for opt-in over the coming weeks. Next we will look at pop-ups opt-in and also some alternative opt-in plugins too.

Driving Incentives

I want to add an addition to this post which was raised Dee Dawber regarding incentives to opt-in. If you take a look on the right hand side of my blog you will see two ways to subscribe. The first is the ‘Connect with me’ button which is completely none incentive driven. The second is the ‘eBook Cycle’ which is incentive driven as it’s a free eBook. The subscriber stats are noticeably different. I have over 1400 (to date) subscribers for the eBook cycle and less than 400 for the ‘connect with me’ link.

It just shows that by giving away a free incentive for readers to subscribe will increase your mailing list dramatically. Ok I hear you saying what if I have nothing to give away? There are a lot of things you can use as an incentive:

• Write a free report about something related to your niche e.g. something you did to influence your business, a traffic tip, changes to your website or business that made it better.
• How about giving a brandable eBook away linking back to an affiliated product? If you don’t have your own product you could use an alternative. Here is a downloadable brandable eBook that you could use.
• You could promote the eBook Cycle via your affiliate link if you wish

Rather than simply placing the subscription box on the site offer an incentive to sign-up. Free reports are usually the best.

Discussion

Do you have an opt-in on your blog? Do you do anything different? Do you have any suggestions? Let me know your thoughts and your questions I would love to hear your opinions.

Also if you have any other tutorials in mind which I can help you with just let me know

Related posts:

1. Building Your Subscribers List with an Opt-in Part 2
2. Building Your Subscribers List with an Opt-in Part 3
3. Building Your Subscribers List with an Opt-in Part 4