Hey, guys. David Risley here with DavidRisley.com and I wanted to use my own site to demonstrate something to you. I’m not doing this with the idea that everything I do on DavidRisley.com is right because obviously I’m learning all the time just as you are but in this one I wanted to just demonstrate something and that’s regards to building up your list.
Now obviously, if you come to DavidRisley.com, one of the first things you’re going to see in the sign bar is this big white box and it’s got a fairly provocative headline here obviously about “Making over $12,000.00 on my blog in ten days while I was on a cruise” which is all true and the story of that is in this free report on “The Future Blogging Income.”
But my point here is that I’ve got the opt-in list or the opt-in form from our mailing list here on the sign bar and it’s above the fold. We’ve got a big nice yellow bright button to get people’s attention and I’m providing them with an incentive which is the free report. Obviously, this is a very classic tactic to get people on your list is by giving them something of value for free by simply them giving you their e-mail address.
In that case, that’s what I’m doing. Now, how you do that on your particular blog depends on your market but chances are unless your blog is completely personal in nature, chances are there’s some type of report that you could probably write to provide some value to your readers in order get people on to your mailing list. So, I’ll be thinking about what you can do on that if you’re not already doing it. And then of course in terms of design, I’ve got the opt-in form above the fold. I’ve got a yellow button here in order to kind of catch people’s eyes.
Some blogs actually have the opt-in form higher than this and that’s perfectly fine, the closer to the top, the better quite frankly. It just doesn’t happen to fit my particular designs super well. I kind of wanted to have this recommended reading thing here but if I ever changed it around then I do but the idea is to have it above the fold.
Now, if we go down further, again, this is one of my posts, but you’ll notice that right underneath the post, underneath the related articles is another opt-in form. “Subscribe to blog updates, news and more. In the end of their email address and they hit subscribe. And again, it’s another place. The idea here is that they’ve read this content, hopefully they like it and if they find that my blog is now valuable to them, I’m providing them a quick way of subscribing.
In this particular form, I’m actually experimenting with the idea of not asking for the name. Usually I like to ask for your name when you subscribe to my list because then I am able to address you by name later when I email you which is just nice. I like to be able to address you guys personally. However in this case, I’m testing it out with just having the email fill in their name in order to see if it increases the opt-in rate. So that’s subscription form number two was underneath the post.
The next one is underneath the comment itself. Now this one is using the action comments plug-in in order to do. And as somebody is actually submitting a comment to my blog, I ask for their name and email address anyway in order to post a comment. That’s just standard WordPress. All blogs work this way but they have a one-click option of taking that name and email addresses and submitting it to my list as you’re posting a comment.
If you step back for a minute, you’re saying that I have three different places on the same page to opt-in to my mailing list. I might actually experiment with more. For a few days I was experimenting with a pop-up on this page. I went ahead to remove that and then I’ve got another option that I have in the wings and I’ll talk about a little bit later. But the idea is that you want to get people on your list. You want to capture leads with your blog and you want it to be as obvious as possible so that when somebody comes to your blog, they don’t even have to think about, “Oh, where is this guy’s mailing list?”
You want it to appear in front of them and hit them up even if they’re not thinking about it. So I have three different opt-in forms here. Obviously, if you are on my home page, you’re going to see the one with the side bar here. You’re not going to see the ones in the bottom because you’re not actually looking at a post. But again, the idea is if they like the actual content, they have a quick way of subscribing.
So your homework after this video is simply to look at your own blog and be thinking, “Where on my own blog can I put an opt-in form that makes sense so that I can increase the number of subscribers to my mailing list that I get?” Again, if you’re not collecting email addresses, you need to start right away. I’ve already gone over that many, many times but assuming that you are, that you want to always be working to increase the percentage of your traffic that converse in to an email subscriber. Be experimenting with where you can put the forms on your blog in order to optimize that. So this is just an idea for bloggers out there and I will see you guys later.
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