Partner Article

How to get more email subscribers

When it comes to email, I find people tend to fall into one of two groups. Ei- ther they have a pretty good list of customers and subscribers, but don’t use it much. Or, they have plenty to share but no one to send it to. Let’s start with building a list of people to share your posts with. Building your list First things first: collecting emails is collecting personal information. You need to be respectful, add people only with their permission, store and protect the data carefully, and allow people to take their name off your list if they want. The easiest way to do this is by using a specialist service like MailChimp. It’s free to get started, and you can connect Mailchimp to sign up forms all over the web. Whichever service you use, check their ‘getting started’ guide to learn about creating and managing a list so that you stay on the right side of the law. Once you have an email list manager set up, you need to give people chances to sign up. Common places to out a sign-up form include: •Your website footer •Your sidebar •At the bottom of each blog post •At checkout (make this a conscious ‘opt-in’ for newsletters, don’t sneak- ily opt them in by default.) Advanced sign-up forms You can also use forms that slide up/in/over your web pages. These can be effective for grabbing reader attention. SumoMe has a great selection of free plugins so you can try different options and see what works best for your visi- tors. Landing pages Landing pages are a popular way to get people to sign up. These pages usually offer a simple choice: sign up for (or buy) something, or skip. People have to choose one or the other before moving on to your site. Landing pages work well if you know you’ll be getting visitors from a particular source. You can offer something in exchange for an email, targeted carefully at just that group of visitors. Popular bribes include free tools and resources, simple ebooks, webinars, coupons and discounts. You can build a landing page in your website content manager — Squarespace is god for this. Or invest in a specialist tool like Leadpages or Unbounce. Content upgrades You can offer these bribes inside specific blog posts, too. This is known as a ‘content upgrade’. The secret here is to offer a freebie that is highly relevant to the topic of the post. For instance, a printable checklist to help you do the thing described in the post. Creating newsletters Now you have a list, you need to send it something from time to time. Remem- ber, these are people who WANT to hear from you. So talk to them. If they stop wanting your emails in the future, they can and will unsubscribe. If you have blog posts, new products, occasional sales and promotions, you have a newsletter. Go one better, and collect up articles that you think your customers might find interesting. Now all you need to do is put it together. Mailchimp makes this pretty straightforward. Once you have set up your first email, it’s easy to copy or save it as a template so that future emails are quick to make. If you want to create emails with lots of links to articles you find on the web, you might want to look at Goodbits. This tool lets you save links as you read them, and then simply drag and drop them into a newsletter. Syndication Syndication is sharing your blog posts on a new platform. It’s a bit more time consuming than sharing a link. But if people like to read articles in that plat- form, copying over your whole post can make it easier for them to read and recommend your articles. We looked at some good options for this in Chapter 4. I’ve found both Medium and LinkedIn to be successful for my business. Medi- um has an ‘import from URL’ feature which makes it easy to transfer posts, al- though I find it tends to drop headings so check the draft carefully. On LinkedIn, you simply paste in your post. In both cases, you have to reimport any images. You also should tag your article to help it find the right readers. You can go a step further and offer posts you’ve written to publications in need of content. Not all sites will let you submit the exact same content for pub- lishing on their site. But you might be able to tweak an older post and make it

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by darleen .