Creating a Squeeze Page
If you have have already read my article on the importance of building up a list then you know how much I love email marketing for making money online. If you are using free traffic from the search engines, then you are probably using the different ways to capture leads like a hover box and a signup page. However, paid advertising can also give you a boost in profits if you can make more money off of each lead than it costs you to acquire them. The place to start with online advertising is the most popular pay-per-click platform around, Google Adwords.
The key here is to send these visitors to a squeeze page. If you are paying for clicks it is because you want the visitors to take some sort of action, in this case it's sign up for your newsletter. If you send them to your site's homepage then you take the risk that the visitor will become distracted by reading a few articles and will leave your site before signing up for your newsletter. Instead, create a squeeze page that focuses all of the users attention solely on signing up.
How do you create a squeeze page that works? The easy way to do it is to sign up for the Squeeze Theme. This is powered by WordPress and will allow you to create custom squeeze pages in no time at all. It's so easy to use, all you have to do is choose the theme you want to run, add the text, photos, or videos, then enter your Aweber email codes in and let the Squeeze Theme do the rest. Take a look at some of their examples and I don't think it will be hard for you to see the value in their product.
Relationships With Your Subscribers
If you are going to make money in any niche then you have to be able to build a relationship with your readers. It is going to be a whole lot easier for you to do that if you pick a topic that is of interest to you. If you don't like the topic then how are you going to be enthusiastic about it? If you aren't enthusiastic about writing or promoting that topic, then how are you going to attract enthusiastic followers? The answer is you won't and you will be stuck writing about something that isn't of interest to you.
With that enthusiasm for the subject you will need knowledge and experience. It's OK if you don't know everything about your topic right now, you are enthusiastic to learn right? As you learn new things, tell your readers about them. If you share your knowledge with your readers, then you will appear to be an expert. If they ask questions, do your research and answer them. It's not like you need to know everything on the spot.
A great way to build up your relationship with new subscribers is through an auto-responder. Aweber is very easy to use when it comes to auto-responders. As soon as the visitor signs up for your newsletter you will want to set up a series of follow up letters that will go out to them. Start out simple, don't promote anything. Just explain yourself a little more and list the places that the reader can find you online (Facebook, Twitter, etc..). As you build up trust then you can start being more aggressive and sending them offers, but it's important that the offers be tailored to their needs. You are trying to solve the problems your readers have, not offer solutions to problems they didn't even know they had. The more that you help your readers, the more that they will trust the offers that you send them. That will mean a higher conversion for the products and services that you promote, and more money for you.
Ways to Capture New Leads
Once site owners have realized the importance of building up an email list, there are still some mistakes that they can make which will cause them to not make as much money as they possibly could be. We have already covered how a site owner can capture more leads by using free incentives, but another way to maximize the number of subscribers is to make sure there are several different ways for the visitors to signup. If you want to have as high of a conversion rate as possible for capturing leads then you need to use every chance you can get to put your free incentive in front of your readers to entice them into signing up.
Signup Box
Having a signup box has become a standard on any site serious about capturing leads. You want to put this signup box in a highly visible spot on your site, above the fold. You also want to make sure the signup box details your free incentive offer in an enticing way and lets the user know just what they have to do in order to receive your offer.
Hover
I've said in the past that Aweber has the best delivery rate of any email service that I have used in the past, and I love their auto-responder system. My favorite feature of the site though might be their hover box. You design a signup box and then set a timer in the Aweber backend. After a user has been on your site for that period of time, the box drops down. It's great because it doesn't annoy them immediately upon entering your site, but once they are engaged and have shown interest in what you have to offer the box pops up and the reader can't simply ignore it. They are drawn to it and will read your offer. This is a great tool for increasing signups and since you can set it to only show up the first time a visitor comes to your site, it isn't too intrusive to the repeat visitors.
The key to both of these methods is to test, test, and test some more. See what has the highest conversion rate and works best for your site design and your visitor.
Building Your List with Incentives
We have already talked about the importance of an email list, so by now I hope that you at least have a sign-up form on your site or some other way to generate leads. Now the question turns to "what is the best way to encourage visitors to subscribe to your list?" Something that has worked very well for me in the past with my sites is offering a free incentive. Basically you give the visitor something of value in exchange for their email address. By giving the reader something in exchange for their information you are going to see a higher conversion rate of visitors who end up subscribing. This gives them an additional reason to sign-up other than just to receive your special offers or latest updates.
The question then becomes "what can I offer?" If you have a membership site then maybe it's some kind of a free trial or if you own an ecommerce/affiliate site then you could offer an ebook of the industry or product, detailing your knowledge and informing the user of answers to questions they may have. Blogs and information sites can create an ebook that lists the "best of" their site so users don't have to scroll through the archives to see what your best posts are.
The real key to making this work is to give the reader something that will see as having value. The incentive needs to be related to your site or it isn't going to convert. However, if you give them something of value that is closely tied in to what your site is about it will not only increase the likelihood that they will sign up for your newsletter, but it will also move you up faster in terms of trusting the offers that you send them. This will only increase the amount of money that you can make off of the list that you build.
Importance of an Email List
If you really want to make money online and you don't have an email list, then I hope you do not seriously think you are making as much money with your site as you possibly can. Email marketing is something a lot of sites overlook, but is something that every single site owner who is making serious money online utilizes. There are other important tools too, such as RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and your blog posts, but the real money, the really big money, is in having a list you have built a relationship with that you can contact on a regular basis.
When you build a large email list, you have a strong foundation. In fact, the sole purpose of some sites is to simply generate as many leads as possible. These site owners do not want to sell anything directly to their visitors, they just want to harvest as many email addresses as possible so they can make contatct with offers at a later date.
Even if you have an ecommerce site, affiliate-based site, or make your money soley via advertising you need to add lead generation to your business model because it can add to what you already do. Ecommerce and affiliates can email leads special offers or new products, while blogs and information sites can email users a list of recent articles that users will click on to get back to your site in order to view advertisements. If you have a large email list, then you can promote to those subscribers your own products or affiliate products. You can even send out a blast when you start a new site that may be of interest to your readers, instantly getting traffic to that site and helping it get off the ground.
Do not wait to start your list. Have a sign-up box on your site from day one. Some people worry about adding a bunch of content and building traffic before they worry about adding a sign-up form to their site, but they have lost the chance to entice all of that early traffic to sign up for their list.
Do not go cheap with your provider either. Sure, you can buy a newsletter program to host on your site or use a free provider with the intentions of switching when you start making money with your site, but you are going to lose a lot of subscribers off of your list if you try to switch down the line. The reason is that the reliable providers will all require a double opt-in, so you are going to have to send out an invitation to your list asking them to sign up with the new provider and less than 25% of them will likely do that. The other 75% will be lost.
So who should you go with? I recommend you start out with Aweber from the beginning since in my mind they are the best in the business. Their emails get through to your subscribers inbox and are not blocked as spam, they have a great auto-responder system, and they are trusted by all of the biggest names in the business. You can even try out Aweber for $1 your first month and then it's only $19 per month after that. If you aren't making $19 off of your list then you must have almost ZERO traffic.
How to Increase Your RSS Subscribers
A great way to increase interaction with visitors is to have an RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. The feed is similar to a newsletter in that you can push your content to the reader instead of relying on the visitor to come back to your site for updates. A lot of blogs also display the FeedBurner widget with the number of subscribers they have, so it's a badge of a blog's popularity. Let's take a look at a few simple steps to increase your RSS subscribers.
Make Your Signup Button Big and Obvious
The visitor needs to be able to quickly and easily find your RSS button. If I come across a great article and I want to be able to sign up for the blog's feed, I don't spend a long time looking around the site for the button or subscribe link. If I don't find it quickly then I move on thinking the site doesn't provide one.
Offer a Full Feed
Don't just offer short excerpts of all of your posts, but instead provide a full feed. Some people think if they offer only a short piece of a post with a read more link that will drive readers to the actual site where the advertisements are, but instead it just pisses people off enough to unsubscribe.
Subscriber Count
This is the cool little widget I was talking about from FeedBurner. People like to follow the herd, so if you have more than 50 readers, display this next to your RSS symbol and it can actually increase the chances of someone subscribing. If you don't have at least 50 readers already then do not post the number on your site. People will think, "Well since nobody else subscribes so I guess it's not worth it for me either."
Subscribe by Email
I have already talked about how much I like Aweber in my post on how to get more email subscribers, but here is another reason, Aweber counts all of your newsletter subscribers as RSS subscribers so you can build your number up quickly (remember the 50 limit mark before displaying the FeedBurner widget). The reason for Aweber including the newsletter subscribers as RSS readers is that they will send your RSS feed out to people via email, updating them of all the subscriber of all of the new posts. You can set the frequency to whatever you feel comfortable with, but I currently use once a week and the email comes in list format.
Do you have any other techniques that you use to increase your RSS subscribers? If so I would love to hear about them in the comments.