After you make the decision to start an email newsletter, you need to decide how you are going to get people to sign up for your newsletter. If you place a sign-up box on your blog or website, they will sign up, right? Yes, a few wills, but if you want to add 50 or more subscribers a day to your newsletter subscriber list, you will need to employ some extra marketing tactics in order to get even more people to sign up for your newsletter.
Even though I just made fun of the sign-up box, you definitely want to have a sign-up box on your site, even more than one. Place one near the top of the page, either in the left or right-hand column, next to the main content on the page.
Place another sign-up box at the bottom of the page, in the footer of every page, so that the sign-up information for your newsletter is the last thing your visitor sees as they scroll down the page and then leave your site.
Many newsletter software programs such as the one offered by Weber (http://www.aweber.com) include options for pop under and pop-overs that can get around the pop-up blockers on many people’s Internet browsers. Weber also offers tracking features that allow you to see how many people have signed up for your newsletter and let you know which forms are working best on your website. The software gives you great insight into what works and doesn’t work, so there is no guesswork involved.
After you get your sign-up boxes in place, it’s time to give some thought to how you are going to get people to put their name and email address in the form to sign up for your newsletter. If people find your site useful, some will sign up for your newsletter without any further enticing. For others, however, you may need to add a little extra incentive to get them to sign up.
Free giveaways are an excellent way to get people to sign up for a newsletter. They sign up for the newsletter, and then they receive the free information they are after. The information can be a free report or e-book, anything that your visitors may find useful.
If you do not have a free report or e-book that you have written yourself, it is very easy to find free information that other website or blog owners would be happy to have you share with your readers. Using other people’s e-books is a win-win situation for both of you. They get free exposure for their products and website, and you get new subscribers for your newsletter.
Of course, it is better for you to offer your own e-books. Your e-books will contain important information about how to find your products and website, and often good free e-books and reports are passed on by the original recipient. Every time your e-book is passed on to someone new, you have gained more exposure for your website.
You can also offer a combination of information you have written, and information others have written, packaged together in a bundle. Just make sure that if you are using other people’s information, you have first asked for their permission to use it.
The more free information you offer, the more likely people will be to sign up for your newsletter. Make sure the free information you are offering is not offered anywhere else on your website. You want them to only be able to receive the information if they sign up for your newsletter.
You might wonder how you are going to deliver the information to your visitor once they have signed up for your newsletter. Weber makes this very easy for you. You can set up automatic emails that will go to the subscriber as soon as they sign up. You can have the software either automatically email them a file, or you can reply with an email explaining how and where to download their free information. Once you set everything up in the software, it is all automatic, and you can sit back and watch people sign up for your newsletter.
If you offer useful information to your visitors to get them to sign up for your newsletter, your visitors will actually thank you for offering them information that they couldn’t find anywhere else. They will look forward to receiving your newsletters. Although sign up boxes alone will gain you a modest amount of new subscribers, combining this method with offering free information will lead to you gaining 50 or more subscribers to your newsletter a day.
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