Are you still having trouble getting email subscribers from your blog? With these 7 easy steps, you can turn your website into a list building machine.
Before we dive into the nitty gritty of getting more email subscribers from your blog, if you haven’t already, check out Inbox Besties episode 31 where I talk about 3 dead simple tweaks to getting more email subscribers from your blog including how to optimize your opt-in forms.
And of course, when it comes to getting more email subscribers, you are going to want to take a look at your landing pages and make sure they are up to par. While I’m not going into landing pages on this post, you can check out ‘7 Landing Pages Must-Haves’.
Are You Scaring Your Email Subscribers Away?
When you focus on getting email subscribers from your blog, the first thing to look at is the amount of ads you have on your website. This is an issue I see mainly with bloggers but it can be in any niche.
Bloggers, in particular, tend to chase pageviews because the main source of their income is from ads on their website. While ads are great for short-term income, growing your email list is going to ultimately earn more money.
If you want to get more email subscribers from your blog, you have to tone it down on your ads.
In Love Your List, a few students weren’t having much success, despite trying multiple freebies. My feedback every single week was there were too many ads distracting people from subscribing to their email list.
If you really want to focus on growing your email list, then you want to tone down on the ads and treat your email list like it’s going to be its own revenue generator. If you follow a system like I talk about in Love Your List and inside my free masterclass Little LIst, Big Profit, your email list will generate a lot more revenue than the pennies you get from ads.
Hotspots for Getting Email Subscribers
Hotspots are essentially places that you can advertise your freebie and get more email subscribers. Marketers have spent thousands and thousands of dollars and countless hours of research to figure out the ‘hotspots’ where our eyes tend to go when looking at a website or blog.
The first hotspot is right up top in your menu bar.
If you have a free class, a free webinar, a free PDF, or basically anything that says ‘free’ in the title, people are naturally going to want to click on that. Here at Kate Doster HQ, we’ve been doing some experiments with getting email subscribers from the menu bar click. Not only do we get tons of clicks, but they actually convert really well.
The second hotspots are your header and footer.
Some people call this space on your website “above the fold”. That means that this is the area that is visible before someone has to scroll to see the rest of your content.
You can put your opt-in right in your header where people can immediately sign up for your freebie. You want to have a nice picture or mockup of your freebie, a headline, sub-headline, and a sign-up box or button that goes to your landing page.
Ideally, you want to have your opt-in on the header of every single page of your website or blog to advertise your main lead magnet.
You can also use your footer to display another opt-in box with a bold headline, an eye-catching graphic and a sign-up box. Again, you ideally want to have this on every single page of your site except sales pages or Thank You pages.
Use your sidebar to create an ‘ad’ for your freebie.
FREEBIES THAT SERVE & SELL MINI-COURSE
Learn how to create, deliever & promote opt-in gifts new subscribers gobble up like candy.
Your sidebar is a great hotspot for getting email subscribers from your blog. You can either use a standard opt-in box with your mockup or you can use a clickable image that takes people to your landing page. If you have a couple of different freebies, put them on different parts of your sidebar.
While some people aren’t using sidebars because they aren’t very mobile friendly, if you are using sidebars, make sure to use that space to get more subscribers. If you’re not, you might want to create a footer section that is similar to your header with images or opt-in boxes to get email subscribers that way.
Get creative with your 404 page.
Your 404 page is where your website viewers automatically land when they put in the wrong URL or click on a dead link. I know for sure that Divi by Elegant Themes has a custom 404 page option. There are also WordPress plugins you can get that will give the option to create a custom 404 page.
When you’ve set up your custom 404 page, instead of it just being the default “oh no, there’s nothing here” page, you can say something like:
Sorry we can’t find what you’re looking for. Must have been a glitch in the time-space continuum.
But hey! While you’re here, check out this free gift that’s going to help you with (problem).
Are you still having trouble getting email subscribers from your blog? With these 7 easy steps, you can turn your website into a list building machine.If you’re on Squarespace or Wix, I’m not sure how to set it up but I’m sure if you reach out to them, they can point you in the right direction.
Getting email subscribers from your blog posts
Another great hotspot (actually several of them) is to use your actual blog posts to get more email subscribers. Depending on how long your blog post is, you could have two or three places for people to sign up right there in your article.
In your actual blog post, you definitely want to have an opt-in form or a click trigger in the top third of your content. A click trigger is an image that when someone clicks on an image, it triggers an opt-in box.
To set up your click trigger, you can use LeadPages, a WordPress plugin, or something from your email service (we use ConvertKit for our click triggers).
Getting Email Subscribers with Pop-ups
While pop-ups may seem annoying, the reason you see so many of them is that they work.
When it comes to using pop-ups for getting email subscribers from your blog, make sure that you practice good pop-up etiquette. That means you don’t have any pop-ups on your Thank You pages or on any sales page. Depending on what tech you’re using to create your pop-ups, most of them have the feature to be able to disable them for certain pages.
The other thing to consider when it comes to pop-ups is to make sure that they are relevant to the content your visitors are reading. If you have a free blogging course, you wouldn’t want a pop-up on a post all about email marketing. It wouldn’t make sense.
Another pop-up you can use is called ‘exit intent’. These pop-up as someone is leaving that blog post or web page. You can use these to get email subscribers on virtually every page of your website (except for thank you pages and sales pages). These are great for getting email subscribers after they’ve finished reading your blog post.
Recap
To turn your website into a list building machine for getting email subscribers from your blog and every other page of your website you want to:
- Have a link in your menu bar and footer
- Make sure your header has an opt-in form
- Use your sidebar to create an ‘ad’ for your freebie
- Set up a custom 404 page with an opt-in
- Have at least two opt-ins or click triggers inside your blog posts
- Use pop-ups and make them relevant to the blog post
You’re doing a great job! Let’s keep going…
>>4 Newsletters you should send this month
>>Finding the perfect topic for your masterclass
>>What you should be focusing on right now
