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How To Get More Email Subscribers For Your Blog Today

 Tim Soulo Updated on Apr 12, 2016 Tutorials 63 Comments

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Let’s have a bet that I can teach you how to get more email subscribers!

I don’t know you and I’ve never seen your blog.

I have no clue of your email conversion rate and whether you’ve used Matthew’s tips on how to increase it.

But I can safely bet that I can teach you how to get more email subscribers out of your blog if you try just a single strategy that I have for you.

Why bother?

Well, after Matthew pumped his own email optin rate from 1.07% to 5.81% his profits immediately increased from $7,765 to $47,748.

So if that’s something you’re looking to do, read this article till the end and have a bet with me!

How To Get More Email Subscribers For Your Blog

It’s no secret that the best way to make a person give you their email address is to create an irresistible opt-in freebie and promote it all around your blog.

But here’s an issue – a single opt-in freebie can’t possibly appeal to all of your visitors.

Here’s an example:

On the homepage of this blog, Matthew is offering you to “Steal His #1 Personal SEO Strategy”. So are you interested in it at this very moment?

Not so much.

Right now you’re reading a post about growing your email list so a much more enticing bribe for you would be something like “Steal My #1 Personal List Building Strategy”.

In other words, you’re more likely to opt for a freebie that would be tailored to the content of the article that you’re reading.

I’ve experimented with “one-size-fits-all” freebies for quite a while but my conversion rate never went beyond 3% (actually 2.67% was my peak value).

But after creating a few opt-in bribes tailored to the content of my articles, I managed to improve my site-wide conversion rate by 300% in just a few weeks.

This hot new list building strategy is called “content upgrades”.

Introduction To Content Upgrades

When you’re writing an article, try to come up with a piece of bonus content that you can offer to your readers.

Make sure to let them know that the article has some bonus materials that they can opt for. Persuade them that your article is incomplete without these bonuses.

Then go ahead and put an opt-in form right within your article so that your readers could easily grab the bonus content.

That’s it! You’ve just created a “content upgrade”.

Example:

Check out this article by Michael Hyatt: “Literary Agents Who Represent Christian Authors”.

He’s offering his visitors an exclusive list of literary agents, but once you try to download it, he will ask you for your email address.

Go try it.

I decided to reach out to Michael Hyatt on Twitter to ask about the conversion rate of this article.

Can you guess the number?

Impressed? Well, I should say that this kind of conversion rate is quite common for well executed content upgrades.

Speaking of execution…

Creating a dedicated opt-in bonus for each of your articles may seem like a ton of work, but that’s not always the case.

Some of the content upgrades on my own blog are simple two-page PDFs, which were automatically created from a Google Document. You can create such opt-in bonuses within 20-30 minutes.

I’ll talk more about simple ways to create opt-in bonuses later in this post, but first…

Why Content Upgrades Are The Best Tactic To Grow Your Email List

Let’s dive deeper into this strategy and discuss what makes content upgrades so incredibly effective:

1. Relevant Opt-In Bribe

The conversion rate of your opt-in bribe fully depends on how much people want it. We’ve already discussed that.

Well, tailoring the opt-in bribe to the content of your article is by far the best way to ensure that you’re offering your visitors something that they are looking for.

In fact, you can make your opt-in bribe such an integral part of your article, that the whole read will feel like a waste of time, unless you opt-in to get that extra content which completes it.

2. Easy To Pitch

Most opt-in forms consist of only 4 elements: a visual, a headline, some supporting text and a call-to-action.

I mean that’s all the “real estate” you can use to persuade a random visitor to grab your opt-in bribe.

Content upgrade is a different thing.

You put your opt-in form right into the body of your article, which means that your whole article can be your sales pitch.

I mean you’re not limited in any way and you can use as many sentences and as many visuals as you need to make sure you will persuade your visitors to opt-in.

Think of your article as a landing page that pushes the readers towards downloading your bonus.

3. Not Intrusive

Once a person lands on your blog to read an article, you try to win their attention by using all these popups, feature boxes, slide-in forms and hellobars that promote your opt-in bribe.

Your visitor doesn’t want all that!

They visited your blog with the sole purpose of reading your article. And all your attempts to distract them with your freebie are nothing but examples of “interruption marketing” (a term offered by Seth Godin).

But you already own their full attention – they came to read your article. Why would you want to interrupt them?

Just let them read your article and blend your opt-in bonus right into the content.

In other words, content upgrade is not interrupting your readers because it is an integral part of your article.

Things That Can Be Used As Your Content Upgrade

This strategy is amazingly versatile and there are no actual limits as to what can be your content upgrade.

Just to get you started, here’s a great article where Bryan Harris is offering you 11 different types of content upgrades with detailed instructions on how to create them.

Some are super easy to create, while others may require quite a bit of your time and maybe even a certain skillset.

But once you decide to create a content upgrade for your next article, I want you to remember one thing:

The conversion rate of your content upgrade does not depend on how sophisticated it is, it only depends on how much your readers want it.

For one of my latest articles I created a simple one-page PDF with a few extra tips.

This resulted in a 6.88 % conversion rate, which was two times better than my site-wide opt-in bribe.

But I’m sure you’re dying to find out how to create a content upgrade that will convert at 60%, like the one by Michael Hyatt.

Am I right?

Well, it’s awesome if you want it. Because I’m going to offer this section of my article as a “content upgrade”.

Download The Cheat Sheet Now: 4 Steps To Create A Content Upgrade That Converts At 60%

Email:

You should grab it for two reasons:

1. You will learn how to create content upgrades that convert crazy well;
2. You’ll be able to see how this content upgrade is setup on Matthew’s blog.

How To Setup Content Upgrades On Your Own Blog

I’ve seen many top bloggers create content upgrades on their blogs and as I’ve reached out to them I discovered that everyone had their own unique setup.

So I’m going to share some of the best solutions that you can use and from there it’s up to you to decide which one suits you best.

1. Online Service

There are only two online services that offer content upgrades as part of their package:

1. LeadPages with their LeadBox feature;
2. SumoMe with their Leads app.

(Actually the latter is disabled as of today, but by the time you’re going to read this article it may be back up, so I decided to mention SumoMe anyway)

Matthew is using LeadPages to create content upgrades on this blog (and for many other cool things too) and I can assure you that this service is a killer!

The price may seem a little steep to some people, but that’s because LeadPages offer many different features except for content upgrades.

2. WordPress Plugin

This time there are quite a few options to pick from

• Content Upgrades PRO
• Thrive Leads (that powers this blog)
• OptinLinks

I can’t give you any recommendations here, because the only plugin I’ve ever used is Content Upgrades PRO although Matthew really loves Thrive Leads.

Disclosure: I’m actually the creator of that email subscribers WordPress plugin plugin. I use it on my own blog and every few weeks we try to improve it and add new features based on the feedback from our users.

I guess I won’t go on dissertating about how good my plugin is, because that will look too self promotional (and you probably won’t believe me anyways). However I’ll be happy to answer any of your questions in the comments.

Now despite the vast variety of options, the setup process is pretty much the same no matter which solution you pick. So I’ll share the basic setup steps real quick:

Step #1: Creating a popup form

First of all you need to create an email form specifically for the bonus that you’re going to pitch in your article.

Usually you have a list of pre-designed email form templates to choose from, and you can customize them to fit your needs:

This is how popup form editor looks in LeadPages

Step #2: Configuring where new leads go

Once your form is ready, you need to connect it to your email service and pick a list where it will add your new subscribers.

Most tools I’ve mentioned above will easily integrate with MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse and many other popular email services.

Step #3: Placing the form within your article

After you finish customizing and configuring your email form, you’ll get a simple embed code that you can use anywhere in your article to embed that form.

Now here’s one important thing to consider.

Some of the solutions that I’ve mentioned only allow to embed the actual form into the content of the article, while others will embed a button and the form will only appear after your visitors click on that button.

That second option is called the “2-Step Opt-In” – it means that your visitors don’t see the email form right away. They only see a download button (or link) and the opt-in form appears only after they click on that button.

Brian Dean is using a content upgrade with a 2-step opt-in in one of his articles

Pat Flynn has recently redesigned his blog and implemented a 2-step opt-in strategy on all of his email forms. According to his own words this little change resulted in 25% increase of his site-wide email conversion rate.

Step #4: Delivering your bonuses

There are many different ways to deliver your bonuses, but the three most popular ones are:

1. Put all your bonuses on the “thanks for subscribing” page, where all your new leads will eventually land (this is how Matthew does it here);
2. Put your bonuses on dedicated pages and redirect people to a proper bonus after they submit their email;
3. Automatically deliver a link to the bonus to the email address that was submitted into your email form.

If you’re just starting out with this strategy, I would suggest you to simply store all your bonuses on the “thanks for subscribing” page. From my experience this is the most convenient way to do it.

And before I wrap up this post, I want to remind you of an awesome content upgrade that I have for you.

Click below to grab it:

CHEAT SHEET: 4 Steps To Create A Content Upgrade That Converts At 60%

So… Are We Having A Bet?

So now you know how to get more email subscribers are we going to have a bet?

The sales page of my Content Upgrades PRO says that there’s a 60-day “no-questions-asked” money back guarantee.

But I’m so confident in this awesome new list building strategy that I want to go further.

So here’s the bet I was talking about from the start:

1. Calculate your current email conversion rate;
2. Purchase my plugin;
3. Follow my tips from this article to add content upgrades to the next 5 articles on your blog;
4. Calculate your email conversion rate once again.

My bet is that your conversion rate will significantly increase.

What if that doesn’t happen?

Not only will you get your money back, but I will also spend the exact same sum of money promoting your blog with Facebook Ads.

How does that sound?

Read more: http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/convert-readers-into-subscribers/#ixzz4OrNkwVyW