A person phones the insurance company and says “Hi, my house just burned down. Can I buy some insurance?”
That’s the thing about insurance. By the time you need it, it’s too late to buy it.
The Greatest Ebook That Nobody Ever Bought
Imagine you’ve been blogging for a few years. You’ve worked hard writing great blog posts, leaving comments all over the place, and tweeting every day. You’ve built some good traffic and are starting to think you could be a successful blogger.
You also did what the experts told you to do and created a product to sell, an ebook for the sake of example. And now you want to tell people about it.
So you write a blog post and send out a tweet. You sell two or three and that is all. Meanwhile successful ebook launches are going on around you. Theirs is selling like crazy and yours isn’t. The big difference? They have a list they can sell to.
Your blog brings you traffic. You sell to your list. Its time you started one.
The Simple Steps to Successful Email Marketing
Here’s what you do.
- Sign up to Aweber or Mailchimp. They’re both good. I use Aweber, you might prefer Mailchimp for the free starter plan.
- Set up your first list and become your first subscriber to test it out.
- Create something you can use as a list building incentive.
- Promote your list on your blog. Put signup forms in your sidebar and at the end of blog posts (if you’re not sure just take a look at what your favourite blogs are doing and start with that).
- Test a popup. Yes, an evil popup. They don’t have to be annoying and obnoxious if you don’t want them to be.
- Keep driving traffic to your blog, and watching your signup rates. Sidebar form not converting? Try a different colour. Popup conversions too low? Try a stronger offer.
- Keep your list warm with regular, high value content.
- When the time is right, make them an offer. Your ebook, an affiliate product, or a consulting service. Whatever it is you sell, your list should hold the people who are most interested in you and your stuff.
Yes you’ll make mistakes. Yes you’ll write a dud headline on an email that nobody opens. Yes people will unsubscribe. And yes, it costs a little bit of money to have a list. But there is no black magic behind it all, and nothing to learn that is any harder than learning to blog in the first place.
Still Not Convinced?
Getting started with email marketing was something I really struggled with. It wasn’t anything to do with the technical stuff; it was this voice inside of me that thought marketing was sleazy, spammy, and soulless.
If your internal voice is objecting then simply leave a comment below telling me what that voice is saying to you right now, and I’ll answer your concerns as quickly as I can.
Image Credit: Flickr
About Paul Cunningham
hi Paul,
Can you tell me what pop-up script you are using?
Dave
Hi Dave, the plugin on this blog is Popup Domination. I’ve also been testing Action Popup on a different site. Both are pretty good. PopDom has a few things that could be better and I hear they are due to be included in the next version a week or two from now.
Couldn’t agree more. If I knew more about list harvesting and email marketing, I’m sure I’d have sold a lot more ebooks.
In fact… Hey wait a minute… Are you pointing at me Paul?!
Glenn I’m sure this seems like a familiar tale to many people :-)
True stuff, email marketing is often ignored or not done well. I am actually guilty of the “not done well” bit. I still have to finish up the incentive for joining the list.
James, why wait for the incentive to be ready? Put up a general call to action for the stuff you’ll be sending to the list and start getting those signups now.
I started all my lists with no incentive. Its slow, but its something.
I already have the call-to-action set up and getting sign-ups already. But I only have 2 of the 7 parts I promised. I’m doing that as I go along. Kind of like the IM for Smart People newsletter, where 2o was promised but it is only up to 17 now…
I’m getting there slowly
Sounds good. I did a similar thing, offered up an e-course before it was written, so as soon as people started signing up I was more motivated to write it.
I did this. I put a “coming soon” and “if you sign up you’ll get this when it comes out.” I have a handful of subscribers and I’m thinking, “golly gee! If I don’t get the promised item out soon, I’m going to look really bad.”
So my question is this: If you do this, what’s the acceptable amount of time before you lose credibility if you don’t deliver. (It’s been about 1.5 weeks for me and I’m panicked.)
Bon, I would try to do it within a couple weeks or at most a month. It isn’t the credibility so much as they just might forget they signed up, and they might make spam complaints or just lose interest in what you’ve got to offer.
I have mailchimp and a sign up form on my sidebar, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the Mailchimp form snazzier. There isn’t a place to actually put any pictures, color, or an offer in the box. And as silly as it sounds Aweber is outside my price range
Hi Nicole, I just signed up to a free Mailchimp account to check it out. From the Dashboard I click on Lists, and there is a “Design Signup Forms” item there to click on and pick your list.
This opens the form designer. On the “Build It” tab you can click to add fields such as text fields. There is also a “Use images” button to upload your own images (Mailchimp will host your form and email images for you apparently).
There is also the “Design It” tab to click on which lets you choose from various color palettes.
Aweber comes with a big list of pre-designed templates plus you can design your own. Mailchimp doesn’t seem to come with anything pre-designed but the tools seem fairly straightforward once you start playing with them.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for that timely reminder that blogging is more that just great content. It also involves a great monetization strategy.
Mailing lists can certainly be a part of your monetization strategy.
An important point is not waiting for a clear monetization strategy before you start your list. Better to be building a list by giving away free content, so that if a monetization opportunity arises you have a list to tell about it.
Right on. What’s the point of blogging if it doesn’t lead people anywhere? If you can’t notify them of updates? Or give them a PDF containing some of your best blog posts?
Yep those “evil little popups” … I like the tongue-in-cheekness… it’s not the popups themselves that are evil, it’s the settings you apply to them… if y0u make that thing popup all over the place every single time, sure, that’s annoying.
Luckily lots of popup software will allow you to make it unobtrusive… only popup after they’ve been on the page for X number of seconds… or they’re about to leave… and even then, only show up once a week or once a month. Plus there’s footer ads and all that goodness.
You NEED a mailing list… or you’re throwing most of your business out the window every month.
Robert, I’ve been testing your plugin on another blog of mine and it is going well. Got any major updates or new features in the pipeline?
Yep lots of cool stuff. I’ll tell you if you want to get me on a webinar with your subscribers.