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AWeber.com • 1-877-AWeber-1 • [email protected]

© 2011 AWeber Communications. All rights reserved. Do not sell or distribute this report.

http://www.aweber.com/

Thanks for picking up this report, and taking a step toward growing your blog and

business.

I'm excited to help you get more blog subscribers.

The idea for this report came about a few months ago, while I was reviewing our blog's email list and statistics. I was checking out where our email subscribers were coming from, and I noticed that large “clumps” of subscribers were coming from a limited number of sources.

Now, if you're anything like me, you want to maximize the return you're getting on any of your marketing efforts, and you love identifying tactics that are yielding disproportionate results. Why? So that you can crank those efforts up and get an even bigger return on them! Basically, taking Pareto's 80/20 principle and turning it into a 90/10 or a 95/5 one. (Who wouldn't want that?)

So I started drilling down into the data to see just how many of our subscribers were coming from our biggest-producing tactics. What I found surprised the heck out of me.

Four simple tactics – so simple that three of them can be 100% automated – were bringing in over half of our subscribers. And I wasn't even actively optimizing those tactics!

I started fleshing out explanations of what we were doing. Initially, these explanations were going to be part of a “for AWeber eyes only” internal strategy document, because I didn't want my counterparts at other email services to know how we were kicking their butts in blog comments, search rankings, traffic and more.

But I realized that if I did that, then blogs and businesses like yours wouldn't get to benefit by implementing these tactics. And you're who we work for. So here we are.

Let's start growing your blog's email list!

Cheers,

Justin Premick

Director of Education Marketing

AWeber Communications

P.S. After you've read and implemented the tactics in this report, I'd love to hear how it's helped you grow your blog's email list and made a difference for your business. Email me and let me know!

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mailto:[email protected]?subject=Feedback%20on%20the%20Double%20Your%20Blog's%20Email%20List%20Report

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Why Is a Blog's Email List Important?

Whatever your blog's ultimate goal or purpose may be, building a following around your blog is a critical step toward realizing it.

Maybe your goal is to:

• Sell more of a product;

• Increase advertising revenue; or

• Spread an important message

The AWeber blog has many purposes, but a couple primary ones are to improve search rankings and increase website traffic.*

The next few pages show how growing our blog's email list has impacted those goals.

* Of course, ultimately we want to make more sales, but the blog isn't a direct response channel for us.

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Exhibit #1: Google Search Results for “Email Marketing Tips”

Above, you'll see search results for “email marketing tips” - a highly relevant term when you're selling an email marketing service.

Notice where we come in - #3, behind About.com (an online juggernaut) and destinationCRM.com (I'm not sure how they're still ahead of us, but I'm working on that). No other email marketing service is even on the first page as of this writing.

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Exhibit #2: Year-Over-Year Increases in Traffic to Our Blog

These are some screenshots from our Google Analytics account, showing year over year traffic increases to the blog, during the time we started to try out some of these tactics.

Here's the first year's increase...

… and then another increase the following year.

As you can see, there are some serious double-digit gains there – about 65% in the first year and 40% in the second – and it's not like the blog or AWeber were new at the time. So those big gains weren't due to us starting with small raw numbers.

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More important than our results, though, are yours. So here's a question: what would that kind of increase in traffic do for your blog and business?

Let's put it in real-world terms. Your terms.

Take a look at your current blog's stats, and then fill in the blanks to complete the exercise below. (If you track your website stats, pull up the data for the last month or two. If you don't track your blog's traffic, it's OK to estimate here, but you should really start tracking traffic today. Google Analytics is a great piece of free software you can use to track your website traffic.)

How many visitors does your blog get per month? _____________

Plus an increase of (circle one) 40% - 50% - 60%

New traffic per month (multiply your current traffic by 1.40, 1.50 or 1.60, for whichever one you circled)

_____________

Compare the number of visitors on the first line (your current monthly traffic) and the third line (potential monthly traffic). How much is that traffic worth to you? How many more potential sales, ad clicks or other profit-generating actions could that many more visits create for you?

Of course, just circling a number doesn't give you that many more visitors. You have to actually take steps to generate that traffic – in other words, you have to start building your blog's email list, and building it faster than you have up until now. But now that you've seen how doing so can potentially improve results, I bet you're eager to get started.

Now, maybe you already knew (even if you hadn't put a number on it) that your blog's email list was a valuable asset. Whether this is a new discovery or old knowledge for you, I have a question...

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http://www.google.com/analytics

Does your blog take advantage of EVERY opportunity to get more email subscribers?

At AWeber, we thought ours did... and then one day, we started trying out a few things to get more subscribers.

What we learned was that we weren't even close to maxing out our blog's potential for growth. (We're still not maxing it out – but we're a lot closer than we were before, and we're continuing to test and try new list-building tactics!)

In this report, you'll:

• Discover what we did to essentially double our blog's email list and why these tactics work.

• See examples of how other successful blogs and businesses are doing the same or similar things to grow their lists.

• Learn how to apply these list growth-accelerating tactics to your own blog and business.

• Get ideas for ratcheting up these tactics so that just maybe you can outperform even our results.

• Find a few extra tips for boosting your blog's email readership so that once you've squeezed all the growth you can from our main tactics, you can keep accelerating your own blog's list growth.

We talk at length about our own experience using these tactics, but don't overlook the other examples and lessons in this report: there's a lot in here to help you make a bigger email list a reality for your blog. After all, chances are you don't sell email marketing software to businesses (like we do). So we've included a lot of material to help you take what you learn here, apply it to any blog and see results.*

OK, there's one small thing we need to address before we start growing your blog's email list. It's a question I've fielded from many bloggers over the years, and you just might be thinking it, too. So, in case you are, let's talk about it...

* If you apply the tactics in this report to your blog, and you don't see a significant increase in your blog's email subscribers, contact us for a full, 100%, no-hassle refund.

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http://www.aweber.com/contact-us.htm

Does My Blog Really Need Email to Get More Subscribers? Isn't RSS Enough?

It's true, one way to build a base of subscribers to your blog is by offering an RSS feed.

At AWeber, we like RSS. Many of us use it to follow our favorite blogs and news sites.

But relying solely on RSS for your blog is foolish. Here's why:

1. Not nearly enough people actively use RSS.

Yahoo has previously reported (PDF) that only 4% of users have knowingly used RSS, and more recently a Hubspot study indicates that the average blog has 12 times as many email subscribers as RSS ones.

So if you're relying solely on RSS for your readership, you're potentially throwing away upwards of 92-96% of your blog's potential subscribers.

2. Your blog's RSS feed is limited to what you publish on your blog.

Want to welcome new subscribers to your blog with a thank you message? Or send them a special offer for a product you're developing? Thank them for their continued readership with a free bonus? Quietly ask for their feedback? Tell them something that you don't want to publish on your blog?

This is easy with email, but downright impossible with RSS.

And while we're on the topic of RSS shortcomings...

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RSS (or rich site summary) lets people keep up with

your blog by sending them automatic updates. They can read all their

updates in a feed reader, such as Google Reader.


http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5448/Business-Blogs-Average-12-Times-More-Subscribers-by-Email-Than-by-RSS.aspx

http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/feedreaders-to-become-most-popular-tools/

http://www.google.com/reader

3. Who are your RSS subscribers? What do you know about them? Do some of them only like certain types of posts on your

blog?

RSS doesn't let you segment your subscribers into groups. It forces you to treat everyone as an unidentifiable number.

Sure, you could look at your Google Analytics stats and say “oh, this article got 20% more traffic than the others, I should write more articles like this,” but you wouldn't know who was responsible for that increased traffic, and you wouldn't be able to reach out to them individually to learn more about why they liked that article.

With email, you can see who is opening your emails and clicking through to your posts. If you want, you can even see where else they're going on your website. You can identify groups of subscribers with similar interests and deliver highly relevant content and offers just to those groups.

RSS is useful for what it is, but it's not nearly as powerful and valuable as email.

Besides, it's not an either/or proposition! You can, and should, offer both RSS and email subscriptions. Let people choose which one they want. (After all, if your blog is anything like most others, most of your subscribers are going to be email ones.)

By now, you've seen that there's value in building a list of email subscribers to your blog, and using email to get them to read more, comment more and get your blog closer to its goal.

Well, if something’s worth doing... it’s worth doing well, right? Right.

Let's jump into the 4 tactics that we’ve found particularly effective in growing our own blog's email newsletter. In fact, they’re responsible for over 50% of our blog newsletter subscribers!

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For more on why email newslettersare important for blogs, read thesearticles by successful bloggers:

Darren Rowse, Problogger.netChris Garrett, chrisg.com

Yaro Starak, entrepreneurs-journey.com


http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/08/15/why-email-newsletters-can-improve-your-blog/

http://www.chrisg.com/why-is-a-blogger-creating-an-email-newsletter/

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/947/why-dont-bloggers-understand-email-marketing/

Blog Email List Grower #1: Ask For The Subscribe at the End of Posts.

Question: If someone reads to the end of an article (especially if it’s a long/detailed one), they must have been particularly interested/impressed with the content, right?

So why not see if they want more like it?

And what if you’re writing a series of posts on a topic? Would someone reading an early post in that series want to be notified when the next post in that series is online?

It's all well and good to put a signup form in your blog's sidebar. After all, it fits there conveniently, and it's a common enough practice across blogs that people who are familiar with blogs and are actively looking for subscription options will find it there.

But what about the people who aren't familiar with blogs? Who don't know to look in the sidebar?

As I'm writing this, I'm looking at our blog's subscriber stats, and what I see is still shocking:

The signup form in our blog's sidebar, that appears on every post we publish, is only responsible for 43.9% of our subscribers.

That sounds awesome (“that one form is giving you almost half your list!”) until you consider that most blogs rely only on that type of form to build their list.

But what if readers aren't going to your website to read your posts?

If we relied solely on the form in our blog sidebar, we would only be reaching 43.9% as many subscribers with our emails as we could be.

That means that out of every 100 people who join our email list, only about 44 of them fill out that form. The other 56 get on our list another way. If the sidebar form were all we had, we'd be growing our blog a lot slower than we are.

So we started adding forms to the end of our posts, like this:

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How Many Readers Can This Get You?

We’ve been experimenting with signup forms placed at the end of posts for a while now, and here's what we've found:

Over 24% of web signups to our blog newsletter come from forms at the end of posts.

And here's the kicker – we don’t even do it for every post! Over the course of 100+ posts, we’ve done this only a handful of times. And many of the posts we’ve done it on are nowhere near the main page of the blog anymore, yet the signups keep coming in.

Why don't we do it for every post? We felt that some posts lent themselves more to this tactic than others – meaning that the readers of those posts would be particularly inclined to sign up for more. We didn't want to put a form at the end of all posts, because we were concerned about “banner blindness.”

That said, we intend to continue testing this and very well may end up adding a signup form to the end of all posts.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

Why Does This Work?

Think of your blog posts like sales letters for your blog, with each new subscriber as a successful conversion.

Imagine a sales letter that laid out all the great reasons to purchase a product or service, then neglected to ask for the order. Wouldn't be very effective, would it?

So why do so many great posts fail to do this?

Ask for the subscribe!

To-Do: Add Signup Forms at The End of Some of Your Posts

The next time you create a blog post on a topic, add a signup form to the end of it!

You can do this in popular blogging software like WordPress and Blogger by switching from the visual editor to the HTML editor, pasting your form's HTML at the end of the post and then publishing the post.

If you have to make any changes to the post after you put the form in, be aware that you may have to paste the form in again (sometimes such blogging software will strip out part of your form if you switch back to the visual editor before publishing the post).

Or, if you want to quickly add a form to all your posts, edit your blog's template or theme and add the form there (you'll need to be comfortable with editing those templates or themes to do this).

Note that if you edit your blog's theme or template to automatically add a form to all posts, you won't be able to tailor the copy in your forms to the specific posts they appear with. There's a trade-off between convenience and customization, and you'll need to decide which is more important to you.

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http://www.blogger.com/

http://www.wordpress.com/

Blog Email List Grower #2: The Dedicated Subscribe Page

If your blog's posts are little sales pitches for your blog, your blog's subscribe page is even more of one.

Wait...

Your blog does have a subscribe page, right?

Many successful blogs do, and with good reason – the subscribe page is a great way to grow your email list and “sell” visitors on the value of subscribing.

What Does a Subscribe Page Look Like?

A subscribe page can best be thought of as a “sales letter” for your blog. When people get there, you want them to “convert,” just like you do when they visitor your other sales and landing pages. It can be helpful to think of people joining your blog's email list from the subscribe page as a successful “conversion” for that page.

Just like a good sales or landing page, your blog's subscribe page should clearly answer a few questions for your visitors (and potential subscribers):

• What am I supposed to do here?

• Why should I do that? (What's in it for me?)

• What happens after I do it?

Here's how our blog's subscribe page addresses those questions:

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View our blog's subscribe page

So when someone gets to that subscribe page, they know exactly what do and why. We even added in a testimonial from one of our readers to further sell visitors on subscribing.

Does everyone who visits this page immediately sign up to our list? No, but currently our opt-in rate for this page is about 18%. In other words, for every 100 people we can get to that page, we can grow our blog's email list by 18 more people.

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http://www.aweber.com/blog/subscribe-to-blog/

Depending on how strong your subscribe page converts and how many you can send to it, it could potentially add quite a bit to your list:

Our subscribe page brings in over 30% of the total online signups to our blog's email list.*

Could you justify throwing away 30% of your subscribers? I sure can't. But before we built our subscribe page, we could have been doing exactly that.

It's not just AWeber who uses a dedicated subscribe page to get more readers.

Check out these subscribe pages from other successful blogs:

Mashable, although a social media news site, includes email among its subscribe options.

SearchEngineLand runs newsletters on a per-topic basis, and gives you the option of subscribing to one or multiple ones. A bit overly complex, but may work if your blog covers a wide range of distinct topics.

Chris Garrett throws in a freebie for subscribing… a good Internet marketing strategy that not enough bloggers use.

Tim Ferriss uses a list to sell you on subscribing. We do something similar at the moment on our own subscribe page, but he’s much more concise.

While not all of these sites use AWeber to deliver their blog newsletters (although they should!), they clearly understand the power of the subscribe page for growing their blogs' email lists.

* I say “online signups” because we also build our blog's email list offline. More on that later.

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http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/7-reasons-to-subscribe/

http://www.chrisg.com/subscribe/

http://searchengineland.com/columns

http://mashable.com/2010/11/29/how-to-follow-mashable-on-social-networks-e-mail-rss/

Ways to Get People to Your Subscribe Page

If you create and optimize your blog's subscribe page, you have a chance to convert a lot of visitors to it into new email subscribers.

But how do you get people to that page in the first place?

Here are a few ways we've used or seen other marketers using:

• Use the subscribe page as your website when commenting on other blogs (be sure that your subscribe page makes it clear what your blog is all about, since people who find it this way will arrive at it without seeing your homepage).

• If you don't have a subscribe form at the end of a blog post, at least link to the subscribe page from there. This can be a subtle but effective alternative to the embedded form, and can fit in nicely with other end-of-post content (like social sharing links).

• If you use Twitter, use the subscribe page as your Twitter profile URL. You can edit that in your Twitter account settings:

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• Use your blog's sidebar form. Link to the subscribe page, where you explain in more detail why someone should join your email list.

• Link to it from within your blog's email newsletter itself (more on this later).

• Cross-promote your blog with a wall post on your Facebook fan page, and link to the subscribe page from the wall post.

• If you post videos to YouTube as part of your blogging, include a link to your subscribe page in the video description. YouTube will make these clickable, and people who watch your videos directly on YouTube (instead of watching it embedded on your blog) can then get to your subscribe page from YouTube.

To-Do: Create Your Own Subscribe Page

You'll need this page to take advantage of the next tactic we discuss, so right now, before you read the next page in this report, go create your blog's subscribe page, and link to it from somewhere on your blog.

(You can go back and try these other ways to get people to it later, but at least link it up on your blog now.)

Remember, on your subscribe page, tell visitors they should subscribe, clearly explain what they'll get when they do so and show them how they'll benefit from doing so.

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Blog Email List Grower #3: Get Readers To Share Your Newsletter With Others

This tip is applicable to email marketing in general, but deserves bloggers’ attention because not all bloggers are experienced email marketers.

Plus, it’s so basic, it can be easily overlooked.

If getting more readers without spending on paid traffic or doing some SEO appeals to you, you’ll appreciate this tactic – because it gets you more subscribers without relying on Google.

Your blog targets a certain group of people with a similar need or interest… right?

And even if you only have a handful of subscribers, each one probably knows at least one or two other people who share that need or interest… right?

Ask Current Subscribers To Share Your Blog!

When they expose your blog to others in your target market, you’re likely to get new subscribers – who then share your blog with other people in your target market…

The ensuing “snowball effect” can bring in an avalanche of subscribers:

Over 36% of our web subscribers come directly from links in our emails!

In other words, many of our email subscribers sign up after clicking a link in an email sent to another subscriber.

How does someone who isn't an email subscriber click on a link in our blog's email newsletter and then become a subscriber? Simple: our subscribers share the emails they receive from us with other people.

It's important to grasp the impact that getting emails shared can have on your list's growth. So here's another way to think about that 36% number above:

If we weren't getting people to share our blog's emails, instead of getting 100 subscribers every couple of days, we'd only be getting 64. Every couple of days, we'd be losing out on 36 subscribers that we could have gained.

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How to Get Your Blog Emails Shared

Some word of mouth phenomena are completely unexpected and organic.

But most of the time, it helps to give people a little nudge.

Originally, we did this with a section that we inserted into the right-hand column of each issue of our blog's newsletter:

It gently encourages readers to pass the email along to someone they think would benefit from it.

You'll notice that the language we use addresses both the current subscriber and the person our email would be forwarded to. We want to encourage the sharing of the email, but we also need to encourage the subscribe.

We've since replaced that with a section that includes some social media sharing links:

This helps us get our emails shared on social sites as well. However, if you're just starting out with a blog newsletter, I'd try something like the first example, as it's easier to implement and focuses more tightly on the email subscription.

Either way, when someone gets the forwarded email, they can read the article as if they were a subscriber, and they have the option to subscribe via the link in the email.

The subscribe link in these sections goes to our blog’s subscribe page – another reason that you need to create your blog's subscribe page.

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Send-To-A-Friend Forms: A Note Of Caution

Different companies invite sharing in different ways.

One method is a tell-a-friend link included in every message, which lets subscribers send their friends a copy of the original message via a web page.

For example, when the Hungry Girl sends out her Chew the Right Thing recipes, she encourages her subscribers to pass them along.

Clicking that link brings up a form asking for the subscriber's email address and those of the people they'd like to share the message with. Hungry Girl sends the recipient a copy. The recipient can check out the recipe and, if they wish, subscribe.

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http://www.hungry-girl.com/

The trouble with this is...

People make mistakes. And typos. And if they mis-type a recipient's address, your email could end up going to nobody at all.

Worse, it might go to someone who's never heard of the sender and has no interest whatsoever in your brand. Let the irritation and spam complaints ensue.

Simply clicking “forward” is preferable for several reasons:

• It’s easier – people know how to use email. There’s little chance for confusion compared to “send to friend” forms. (Don’t believe this? Check out what social network GoodReads had to say about why they use forwarding instead of “send to friend”)

• It's a much faster process, especially if your subscriber wants to recommend you to multiple people

• It’s more accurate – most email programs will auto-suggest contacts as you type them, saving time and reducing misspellings.

• It’s more likely to be opened – your subscriber’s email address is in the “from” line of the forward. What do you open first, emails from people you know or emails from 3rd-party services?

To-Do: Add a Share and Subscribe Section to Your Blog's Emails

• Write 1-4 short sentences encouraging current subscribers to forward your emails to others, and inviting those people who receive the forwards to subscribe.

• Add those sentences somewhere in your emails. Be sure to link to the subscribe page you created so that people can join your blog's email newsletter!

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http://www.banane.com/workblog/?p=272#comment-7481

Blog Email List Grower #4: Off-Site Subscribes

In the past week, how many people have you talked to face-to-face (either in a business or casual setting) where your business came up?

What about on the phone? Anyone?

You have ample opportunities to ask people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, even when they’re not on your blog!

For example, near the end of each of our live webinars we ask attendees if they’d like to subscribe to our blog newsletter:

We import the people who say yes shortly after the webinar ends.

We can directly attribute an increase of 15.97% in our readership to offering our blog's email newsletter to webinar attendees. That's about 16 additional readers (who we might not have otherwise gotten) for about every 100 people who join our list another way.

So, where can you find these “off-site” opportunities to grow your blog's email list?

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http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/60

http://www.aweber.com/webinars

In Person

Whether it’s at a trade show/conference, a Meetup, your office, or any other appropriate setting, “face time” is a great time to promote your blog and newsletter.

If you exchange business cards with someone, bring up your blog in the conversation. Point out the URL on your card, and explain that the best way to receive up to date information from your company is to check the blog.

Then, remind them that they don't even have to check it themselves if they are too busy! Let them know that you will send them a weekly email with all of the information they could ever possibly want or need.

If they say they'd love to receive your emails, make a note on the back of their card that they want to be added to your list. If they decline, be sure to write that on the back of their card, too, so that you know who to import and who not to when you're going over meeting notes later on.

Note: don't just take every business card you collect and add that person to your list. Only add someone if they've given you the OK beforehand. For more on whether a person should be added to your email list, see this article.

On Teleconferences, Webinars and Other Training Calls

Every time you speak with prospects, contacts and existing clients you have a prime opportunity to pitch your blog newsletter.

Those conversations all focus on some aspect of your industry, and you are providing your one-of-a-kind input. If people looking for more information are impressed by your knowledge and experience, pointing them toward your blog newsletter is a no-brainer.

Think about it. If you provide value on the call, attendees are likely to want to get more value. Where better for them to get that than on your blog where you continue the conversation and provide even more value?

Your webinars, conferences and business calls, just like your blog posts themselves, are mini sales letters for your blog. When you send a sales letter, the biggest goal is to generate a response. The response you're looking for here is subscriptions.

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http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/263/

You can point out your blog's URL to attendees or participants, but you may find it easier and more reliable to just directly ask them if they want to subscribe. We use GoToWebinar to create the survey where we ask attendees if they'd like to subscribe.

Put the effort into making your calls and webinars great, ask for the subscribe, and watch your blog newsletter grow.

In Your Email Signature

Every email that you send has the potential to earn you a new blog newsletter subscriber – provided that you include instructions in your email signature, that is.

What's that, you say? You don't use an email signature?

Hmm. That's problem number one. If you don't use an email signature, you really should consider it. It's a tactic that's easy to implement and super helpful for people who are trying to get in touch with you.

An email signature, when done correctly, includes all pertinent information that someone would need to get in touch with you.

According to Mashable.com, at the very least an email signature should include:

• Your Name

• Your Company and Position

• How to Get In Touch With You

An effective signature could look something like this:

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Mr. Albert AwebertronLead RobotAWeber Communicationswww.aweber.com1-877-AWEBER-1


http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/04/the-art-and-science-of-the-email-signature/

http://www.gotowebinar.com/

If You Do Use an Email Signature, What Information Does It Include?

There’s no law that says you have to put your site’s homepage in your email signature (well, unless you work for a company that mandates it).

Your blog, or even your blog subscribe page, may be a more useful landing page for people clicking from your email signature, and may lead to more subscribers.

This is a simple, costless and automated way to introduce your blog to relevant potential subscribers.

Now, if Mr. AWebertron were trying to build up the AWeber blog's email list, he could use a signature that looked something like this:

On Guest Posts You Write for Other Blogs

Guest posts are a great way to spread the word about your blog and drum up new readers.

Typically, when you write an article (either for an article site or a news publication) or a guest post on another blog, you’re allowed to include a signature at the end of your article.

Just as you should add opportunities to subscribe within posts, you should also give people who read your articles and guest posts the chance to easily join your blog newsletter too.

Make sure to include:

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Mr. Albert AwebertronLead RobotAWeber Communications1-877-AWEBER-1

Want to become a better email marketer?Subscribe to the AWeber blog for free


• Your name

• Your company

• A link to your subscribe page

• A summary of what someone will get if they subscribe (sell them on it!)

Other Business Communications

Every single product or piece of printed information that you produce and share with prospects and customers offers you the chance to procure a new email subscriber.

• Do you ship physical products? Take a recent post (or highlights from several recent posts) and print a one-page insert that exposes customers to your blog and encourages them to subscribe.

• What about catalogs or other promotional pieces? These can be good places to advertise your blog and subscribing to it.

• Do you give away or sell digital products (such as ebooks or whitepapers)? Include references to your blog and blog newsletter on the “about” section or in the footer of each page.

• Can customers and readers reach you by phone? Mention your blog in your outgoing voicemail message, or in your phone menu.

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Opportunities For Your Blog to Get More Email Subscribers Are Everywhere... Take

Them!

Over the course of this report, you've learned the tactics that we've used to more than double the size of our blog's email newsletter.

You've learned how we implemented them, and what proportion of our list has come from each one.

You've seen how other blogs and businesses are using similar tactics to grow their email lists, too.

You've picked up ideas for how you can make these tactics work for your own blog, and get the most out of them.

If you've been stopping at the end of each section and implementing the tactics, you've got a good head start on growing your blog's email list. When you go back and look closer at the examples and the extra tips, and start to optimize what you've already implemented since picking up this report, you'll start getting even more new readers, traffic and more out of it.

Before You Close This Report: Two MoreTo-Do Items

Here's the first one: get out your calendar and mark down the date you implemented the tactics in this report.

Then, in a few months (say, 3 or 6), do a “before and after” comparison of your blog's list growth since the date you implemented the tactics in this report. I think you'll like what you see.

Keep in mind, there are always more ways to get more email subscribers to your blog. You might find new ways of building your list that we haven't thought of yet, or you might just implement what we've talked about in this report in a particularly creative or powerful way. I'd love to hear about those.

So here's your last to-do item: if you implement these tactics and get exceptional results, or if you come up with a new way to build your blog's email list faster, share your story and results. I'd love to know how this report has impacted your list-building.

Thanks... now go grow your blog!

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mailto:[email protected]?subject=Feedback%20on%20the%20How%20To%20Double%20Your%20Blog's%20Email%20List%20Report

Bonus Blog Email List Grower #1: Optimize Your Sidebar Form

We've talked a lot about ways to boost your blog's email subscriptions: subscribe pages, email snippets, end-of-post forms, webinars, trade shows...

… but sometimes it's easy to overlook your blog's primary signup form, and optimizing it to get the maximum number of subscribers possible. Remember, our blog's sidebar form got 43.9% of our subscribers.

For most blogs, your #1 subscriber-getter will be your sidebar form because it appears on the main page of your blog, as well as alongside each of your posts.

Even if you do all the things we talk about in this report, your sidebar form will still get seen by a lot of potential subscribers. In fact, some of the tactics we've discussed will increase the traffic to it. So it's important to make your sidebar form convert.

Opt-in forms contain a few key parts that you should understand, especially if you care about getting the maximum number of subscribers from them.

To understand these parts, have a look at the following two sidebar forms. First, here's the AWeber blog's sidebar form:

Now, see this sidebar form from the personal finance blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich:

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http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

Both of these forms contain a few key sections (labeled in red) that you want to be aware of and think about when creating or editing your sidebar form.

Let's break down each of these sections, looking at what your sidebar form needs to do in each one to get more subscribers.

Header

The header is the part of your form that appears above the fields where new subscribers fill out their email address and other information.

It's also where you make the case for why people should join your blog's email list. An effective signup form will clearly tell people what they'll get when they sign up (in marketing-speak, this is the offer).

The big mistake I see with form headers is that they suffer from a lack of clarity about what subscribers will receive. They say “enter your email address to get updates,” which doesn't tell visitors anything at all about what those updates would contain.

Now, you might be inclined to say,

“Why does this matter? They're signing up to get new posts to my blog by email. Who cares if I call them 'updates' on the signup form?”

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Here's why it matters: those emails you're going to send subscribers? The ones that you put time into creating and don't charge a penny for?

They're not free.

I repeat: they're not free. They cost your subscribers time and attention.

When people sign up to your list, they're engaging in a transaction: their time and attention, in exchange for what you're offering to send them.

Your subscribers' time and attention are valuable. Are “updates” valuable? What can someone do with an “update” from you? How does an “update” solve whatever problem they're having that has brought them to your blog?

Look again at the headers in the two forms above. Now, there may be improvements that we could make to either of those forms, but both tell would-be subscribers what they're going to get in exchange for their time and attention.

Fields

The fields are where your potential subscribers will fill in their email addresses and any other information you're asking for.

It's important to keep your form simple – just a couple of fields. Remember, people are signing up to your blog... they're not applying for a loan with you!*

If you ask for too much information, you'll introduce friction into the subscribe process; in other words, by making it harder for people to subscribe (by requiring them to do more work to get your form filled out and submitted), you'll reduce the number of people who follow through and subscribe.

Only ask for information you'll actually use. At the simplest, you could ask for an email address and nothing more (not even a name). After all, the email address is technically the only piece of information you need in order to email someone.

It's common to also ask for a name, but this is up to you – if you're not going to use the name to personalize your emails to subscribes, it's not necessary to collect it. At AWeber, we collect it because we often do personalize our emails.

* For an example of a form that really goes overboard when asking for information, see this post from our blog.

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http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/out-of-control-opt-in-form.htm

http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/out-of-control-opt-in-form.htm

Submit Button

The submit button is a part of signup forms that typically gets overlooked, which is a shame because it could be costing you subscribers. Here's why.

How often do you see a form where the button actually says “Submit” on it?

What exactly are people filling out that form “submitting” to?

Nobody wants to submit to anything (it sounds like they're giving in to you: “OK, fine, I'll submit to getting emails from you”). You don't want people to “give in” to joining your list; you want them to be excited about the emails they're going to get from you!

Make sure the button correlates to what people are actually doing, or better yet, what they're getting.

“Subscribe” or “Sign Up” or “Join” is decent button text (it's not especially exciting, but it works, and is more effective than “Submit”), but you can also get creative and tie your button text more tightly to what you're offering subscribers.

For example, if your blog offers advice on how to become a better poker player, your submit button could say “Win More Hands.”

The submit button is your form's call to action. Make it compelling!

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Footer

Often, visitors will see a form, be interested in what you have to offer, but fail to fill out your form and join your blog's email list.

This might be because...

• … they're worried that maybe your emails won't be worth their time (remember what I said about joining your list not being free?).

• ... a nagging voice in the back of their heads is telling them that you're going to spam them or share their email address with other people who will spam them, or that they won't be able to unsubscribe.

• … they're not convinced that you're the best source for the information they're looking for.

Sometimes, they'll even fill out the fields in your form, and then just not press the submit button to finish joining your list.

The footer is your chance to save those would-be subscribers who are about to bail out on your signup form.

There are a lot of ways you could potentially do this, but there are three main ones that I see successful blogs using. You don't necessarily have to use all 3 of them simultaneously, but they're good elements to try in your forms to maximize signups.

3 Ways to Save Subscribers With Your Footer

1. TestimonialsTestimonials are a key element of effective marketing, and can improve conversion rates on your blog's signup forms just as well as they can on your sales pages.

Including a testimonial from a happy subscriber can relieve worries about whether or not your blog's email newsletter is really worth signing up for.

Let's look again at our 2nd sidebar form example:

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Notice the simple quote from reader Daria W., sharing how much she enjoys the emails. It's right next to the “Sign Up” button, where people who are thinking about whether they should click that button are sure to see it.

2. Show a Sample Issue of Your Blog's Email NewslettersAnother way to relieve worries about whether your emails are valuable is to show potential readers a sample of what they'll receive as subscribers.

Note how the New York Times does this with the small business email newsletter associated with their “You're the Boss” blog:

The “See Sample” link opens a recent issue of the newsletter in a new window. Here's an excerpt from it:

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http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/

Once potential readers see this, they'll have a much better picture of what they'll receive as subscribers, and be able to subscribe confidently.

3. Assert Your Respect of PrivacyIf your blog might be losing out on potential readers because they're worried about spam, try tackling the issue head-on in your form's footer.

You can link to a privacy policy like the form above does, or you can simply add a line or two of text to the footer that states that you won't share subscribers' email addresses and that they can unsubscribe easily.

The sidebar form on writer Chris Guillebeau's blog does this well:

Note the sentence just below the fields and submit button.

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http://www.chrisguillebeau.com/3x5

4. Social Proof via a Subscriber CounterAnother way to convince visitors that your blog's emails are valuable is to use the concept of social proof: show them that other people are subscribing, and they'll be more likely to subscribe.

We do this on our own blog's sidebar form:

See the little grey box in the lower right-hand corner that shows how many readers we have? That's commonly called a subscriber counter. It's one way of providing social proof, and can yield significant increases in readership:

Here's an example from one AWeber customer who increased his opt-in rate over 32% by adding a subscriber counter to his form.

If you're using FeedBurner to publish your RSS feed, you can integrate AWeber with FeedBurner and use the FeedBurner counter (as we do), but it's also easy to add one directly in AWeber while creating your signup form:

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http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/525/How+Do+I+Add+a+Subscriber+Chicklet+to+My+Form?

http://www.aweber.com/blog/new-features/blog-broadcast-feedburner-integration-click-tracking.htm

http://www.aweber.com/blog/case-studies/social-proof-boost-landing-page-conversion.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

A poorly designed form can cost you subscribers. Optimize these elements of your sidebar form to make sure you're getting all the subscribers you can.

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Bonus Blog Email List Grower #2: Get the Subscribe in Front of New Visitors

Open up Google Analytics or whatever software you're using to track your website traffic and performance.

Now, take a look at your visitor statistics, and find the graph or table that shows what percentage of your visitors are returning visitors, and what percentage are new ones. Here's the breakdown for the AWeber blog:

What we're interested in here are new visitors – the people represented by the green section above. Our goal is to turn them into returning visitors – instead of letting them come to our site once, look around, then leave and never come back.

And how do you turn them into returning (or repeat) visitors? I think you know: get them to join your blog's email list on their first visit.

You could rely on your sidebar form to do this, but it might get overlooked. You could rely on your subscribe page to do this, but are they going to click over to it?

There are ways to advertise your blog's email newsletter more prominently to new subscribers. One of the most powerful of these is to display a pop-over or lightbox web form to people the first time they visit your site.

Here's an example of such a form:

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http://www.google.com/analytics

As you'll notice, it puts itself front-and-center in a way that is impossible for the visitor to ignore.

Now, you might be thinking,

“That's really aggressive. Won't it just annoy people and drive them away from my blog?”I understand where you're coming from. Nobody wants to alienate readers, and it's easy to think this would do that – after all, it's basically a popup form, and for some people popup forms carry a negative stigma.

Rather than make an extensive case for why it's not a bad thing*, I'd like to present results from two blogs that have implemented forms encouraging new visitors to sign up to their email lists.

* Here's the short version: if your blog's email newsletter is truly something valuable, you're doing visitors a service by pointing it out to them, and you'd be doing them a disservice by not pointing it out.

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Example #1: 1000% Increase in Opt-Ins on a Technology Blog

Our first example comes from technology blogger Leo Notemboom of Ask-Leo.com. Leo began showing a signup form to new visitors in order to increase signups to his technology Q&A blog's email list.

By adding a pop-over form to his site, Leo increased his opt-ins by over 1000%. In other words, after adding the pop-over form, he started getting 10 times as many subscribers as he had been getting.

There's a brief summary of his results on our blog, and if you're a MarketingSherpa member, you can read their full case study on Leo here.

Example #2: 775% Increase in Opt-Ins on a Photography Blog

Our second example comes from Darren Rowse's Digital-Photography-School.com. Like Leo, Darren had been growing an email list for his blog, but wanted to accelerate its growth, and started experimenting with pop-over forms to see if they could help him do so.

As you can read here, the results were staggering:

After adding the pop-over form, his list went from gaining 40 subscribers per day to gaining 350 subscribers per day – an increase of 775%.

Plus, his visitors' experience didn't seem to suffer as a result of adding the form. The average number of pages people viewed per visit remained constant or increased slightly, and he received nearly no complaints about the form from visitors.

For the full results and some good insights from Darren into using pop-over forms, read the writeup on his blog.

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http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/10/23/how-to-drastically-increase-subscriber-numbers-to-your-email-newsletter/



http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30692

http://www.aweber.com/blog/case-studies/1000-percent-increase-in-opt-ins.htm

http://www.ask-leo.com/

How to Create a Popover or Lightbox Form

When creating a web form in your AWeber account, change your form type from “Inline” to “Lightbox” or “Pop-Over.”*

Once you've selected your form type, you can choose when and how often the form appears:

The “Delay” box allows you to set how much time passes between when someone arrives at your blog and when your lightbox or pop-over form appears.

You can set the delay to 0 if you want the form to appear immediately when someone comes to your blog, but you may find it more effective to add a delay so that new visitors can take in your blog before you ask them to subscribe.

If you're not sure how long to set the delay, a good starting point is to take the average length of a visit to your blog (your website tracking software can show you this) and deduct a few seconds. Run the form using that delay for a while and then start split testing different delays against it.

The “Recurrence” dropdown menu allows you to choose how often the form will appear to a given visitor.

* The difference between a Pop-Over and a Lightbox is that Lightbox forms cause the rest of the screen to darken, which draws more attention to the form.

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http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/197/How+Do+I+Split+Test+My+Web+Forms?

https://www.aweber.com/users/web_forms

You can have the form display every time; however, since that might be off-putting to people who want to read your blog but not join your email list, you'll probably want to set the form up to either:

• Display only once to each person, or

• Display once every few days (you'll choose how many days pass between each time the form displays to a given visitor)

Once you've created and saved the form, add it to your blog.

You'll want this to appear to visitors no matter which page or post of your blog they initially visit, so you'll want to paste it into the appropriate section of your blog's template or theme.

If you're using WordPress to host your blog on your site, a good place to paste it is in the footer.php file, just before the closing </body> tag that appears in it:

1. Go to “Appearance” > “Editor” in WordPress:

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2. Choose the Footer (or footer.php) from your theme's files:

3. In the large text box to the left, find the </body> tag, place your cursor immediately in front of it, and paste the JavaScript for your form. Save your changes and your lightbox or pop-over form should appear to any new visitor to your blog.

Make a note of the date you added the lightbox or pop-over form to your blog, and then use the “Daily New Subscribers” and “Daily Subscriber Growth” reports in your AWeber account to track how adding it has affected your blog's email list growth.

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https://www.aweber.com/users/analytics_reports/daily_growth

https://www.aweber.com/users/analytics_reports/daily_new

https://www.aweber.com/users/analytics_reports/daily_new

How has this report helped grow your blog?

Congratulations on reading all 43 pages of this report!

Hopefully you've been taking notes and implementing these blog-growing tactics as you go. If not... it's time to get started. Reading this report is a good start, but you'll only see results when you start applying what you've learned to your own blog.

Once you've applied the tactics discussed here to your blog, would you do me a favor?

I'd love to hear how the tactics in this report have impacted your blog email list. Could you email me and let me know? I'd especially love to hear:

• How much your blog's email list has grown since you started applying what you've learned in this report. How many subscribers did you used to get per day or week, and how many are you getting now? How much growth in your email list do you attribute to what you've learned in this report? (I love seeing numbers, so the more specific you can be, the better!)

• Which tactics in this report were especially helpful? Were there any that didn't seem to do much for you? What was your experience with each tactic?

• What did you learn along the way as you implemented these tactics? Did you discover anything that you think other bloggers and businesses might benefit from as they try to grow their email lists?

• What other topics would you like to learn about in the future as you grow your business? What challenges do you face with your email campaigns, your site or your business that we could help you with?

• Do you have any other feedback on this report? What can we do to make it better for you? (As an owner of this report, you'll receive any updates we make to it for free, so if there's something you think might make it stronger, please let me know!)

You can email me via this link.

Thanks – I look forward to finding out how this report has helped your business!

Cheers,

Justin Premick

Director of Education Marketing

AWeber Communications

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