Lessons Learned from Building an Email List With 3,000+ Subscribers - DailyBlogTips

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Lessons Learned from Building an Email List With 3,000+ Subscribers Posted: 19 Nov 2012 05:37 AM PST A couple months ago, I launched another blog. Every time I release a new website of any form there’s an interesting mix of emotion that seems to wash over me. Excitement: Who knows what this website might become! If it takes off, I could end up getting really rich or create a nice income stream for myself. Nervousness: It takes time to create a proof of concept for a website. Even if you intend to send paid traffic to the website to speed up the process, it takes time to test and tweak offers before things start humming. What if my model is completely wrong and I waste 3 months? Dread: Argh! I’m launching another website!?! Am I crazy? This is going to be a lot of work. I hope there’s a nice fat paycheck waiting for me at the end of this. But I worry that there won’t be. Fortunately, this is not my first time launching a new blog and I’ve learned a thing or two over the years slogging it out online. One important lesson is how to build an email list with a few thousand subscribers. Since I’ll be trying both duplicate and improve upon the results I was able to generate with a previous website, I will share a few of my own personal insights gained while building an email list with 3,000+ subscribers. Implement a few of these simple simple steps to start growing your own list. Things I’ve Learned Add Email Intake Forms and Landing Pages: This is the simple part that you can always get right. Have an email intake form positioned on every page of your blog. Quite simply, as your content grows so will your email opt-ins because on each new page that is published will be a new opportunity to enroll a new subscriber. I went against my own advice to add an email intake form across all pages of my blog initially and I have not been happy with the results thus far. I will be adding an intake form across all pages of my new blog shortly. In addition to having an intake form located across all pages, I’ve also found it helpful to have a page dedicated to signing up to your list. This landing page should be linked to from your main website navigation to get as many people to visit the page as possible. On the landing page you can provide more detailed information about the benefits of subscribing to your list. Some people are pretty cautious about sharing their name and email address online. Giving folks that are on the fence more a bit information has always helped me squeeze a few more subscribers from my website traffic. Provide a Bonus: This is another no brainer and something you’ve heard before if you’re researching the topic of email list building. Give people a free bonus when they subscribe to a list. I’ve given away a free e-book with strong success and a lot of other internet marketers simply provide a free 65 minute webinar. Free guides, videos, .mp3s, training or software is an easy option for encouraging folks to sign up. Creating Your Unique Benefit: The prior two recommendations for building an email list are simple. You just do them. Creating your unique benefit can be a little bit more difficult and it’s something I’m currently struggling with for my latest blog. I need to figure out what I need to provide my visitors so they will hand over their contact information. For my old blog with over 3,000+ subscribers this process was easy because I was part of the market I was blogging about. My bonus was to provide people that signed up with my list instructions on how to start their own SEO business. If you’re into SEO at all this is a topic is something you would be interested in learning more about. As a result, getting an email list built up was pretty easy. For my new blog, while I’m interested in the topic of creating home-based businesses I haven’t been an active part of the community for very long. As a result, I’ve struggled with putting together a free bonus that people in this market will actually want to sign up for. I’ve tried providing a free video series that teaches home business owners how to outsource work employees abroad… I got a handful of signups, but it was clear that most folks were not interested in having that problem solved. As you can see, creating a unique benefit for people to visit my website and sign up for my list is something I’m still struggling to come up with. However, I know once I do discover that unique benefit it will make building my new list much, much easier. So what have I learned from building a list of 3,000+ names? Getting the technical stuff on right is the easy part. Coming up with a good reason for website visitors to become subscribers is not easy. But it is worth the effort. About the Author: Brett Lindenberg is the founder of 500aMonth.com and is also an internet marketing consultant. Original Post: Lessons Learned from Building an Email List With 3,000+ Subscribers

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ProBlogger: One Essential Characteristic of a Pro Blogger [Not Your Everyday Blog Writing Advice]

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One Essential Characteristic of a Pro Blogger [Not Your Everyday Blog Writing Advice] Posted: 18 Nov 2012 06:02 AM PST Each week, my Content manager Georgina turns away around 20 or so posts for publication at ProBlogger. She tells me that maybe 5-10% of those are of a publishable standard, but they just don’t fit our audience or purpose. The rest aren’t pro-level pieces. Image courtesy stock.xchng user Valsilvae Forget for a moment that these are guest posts—which are supposed to be bloggers’ best content. Instead, I want to think about what that means for the average blogger, toiling away on their blog day in, day out, trying to reach and captivate their audience. What is “pro blogging”? Pro blogging isn’t just about making money through a blog. You don’t need to write a word to do that. But I think most of us would expect pro bloggers to be able to write reasonably well. Why? Because Pro bloggers need to be consummate communicators. Whether they hire others to write for their blogs, or use video, audio, or images rather than text, clear expression is a hallmark of any pro blogger. Clarity doesn’t just mean error-free writing. It means: content that touches readers, showing you empathize with them relevant, helpful content consistent information, in terms of frequency, tone, etc. content that delivers what it promises, and has integrity. A blogger might use writing for a range of purposes, too: to attract readers, and keep them coming back to promote their blog or sell something to approach potential collaboraters to build relationships and networks to make money directly (e.g. through an information product). There’s plenty of great quality advice about writing and content marketing online. Writing tips abound. This week, we want to present a few different takes on writing for your blog. Over the next four days we’ll publish some posts that focus on some nitty-gritty aspects of writing—ideas that go a bit deeper than usual. Writing to make money Our first post will look at writing product reviews that deliver real value. Among other things, the post explores the challenges bloggers face in exposing the negative aspects of a product they’re reviewing and may want to encourage readers to buy (if they’re an affiliate for it). Handling that tension is exactly the kind of thing that pro bloggers work to master. This post will show how showing the full picture supports authority, and can actually encourage more sales than a purely glowing review. Writing to improve One great thing about blogging is that everything we do is practice—each post we publish should be an improvement on the last one. Looking to leaders for advice on writing is an excellent way to develop your skills. Our second post will reveal the thoughts of some of the world’s greatest writers, and provide starting points to help you apply that advice in your own posts. Writing to build your profile When bloggers think about content marketing, we often ponder the question of content reuse. If you do it right, it can be an efficient way to get the most out of the time you spend writing—it can boost your visibility, your publishing schedule, and your available time. Our third post this week explains how freelance writers can best reuse their freelance content on their own blogs. This isn’t a straightforward topic, and this post highlights the potential advantages and pitfalls so that if you’re a freelancer, you know where to start looking into content reuse. Writing to experiment For many bloggers, after high-school or college essays, and workplace emails, blogging is the first focused writing they’ve done. We’ve all heard the advice that if you want to be a great writer, you need to be a big reader. But the final post in our series shows that to be a better blog writer, you need to be a better writer, period. It prompts us to look beyond blog posts for opportunities to write, and topics to write on. It shows that through experimentation, we can learn skills out of context that we can bring back and apply to our blogs. Are you up to the challenge? The advice we’ll cover this week goes beyond the everyday. It assumes you’re already serious about being good writer, and are facing the challenges of becoming a great writer. There’s no hype in these posts, and no write-your-way-to-a-million-dollar-income-in-five-minutes advice. They’re posts that aim to provide a different perspective on post writing. Where are you at as a writer? Are you ready to challenge yourself to become better? Or do you think you’ve reached your limits, either in terms of potential, or interest in writing? Share your perspective with us in the comments. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger One Essential Characteristic of a Pro Blogger [Not Your Everyday Blog Writing Advice]

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