Making Money with Blogging & Growing Your List
If your visitors see an interesting article on your blog when they visit, how do you make sure they come back again? We’ve added ways on our posts to share and sign up for the offers we have to test this very thing out. We wanted to have an idea of what our visitors needed and wanted.
The truth is that they may never return to your blog again unless you create the opportunity for them to join your email list. If you want to make money blogging for your business, getting visitors to opt-in to your list is a necessary step.
Creating an eMail list
Building a list gives you a better chance of offering your website visitors a chance to purchase something they need when that opportunity becomes available.
People come to your blog because they are interested in the content you have to offer. They get choose to be on your list because they want to know more about you and your products. At WPWM we choose to email infrequently as I personally don’t like too many emails arriving in my in box.
Eventually, a relationship can evolve as you provide what people need. So yes, converting a person on your list into a customer is a goal for when you send out emails later. A bigger list of interested people you have, the more you can grow your business over time.
Understanding how an email list can help your business is crucial when asking the question “how to start a blog to make money.” Your blog is the content the search engines love that increases your businesses visibility and gets your message out to the people who need to hear what you have to say.
So how do you make it easy for them to sign up?
Placing an opt-in box in your sidebar is one option. There are many more which produce better results. Let’s look at a few examples.
Sidebar email capture, can and will, be ignored by many visitors to your site, they are on too many lists already. However, introducing a pop-up email capture has been proven to increase the number of people who join your list especially if you offer something for free that they can use right now. One reason a pop-up works is because they simply can’t miss that you have an email list, and they have to act to either remove the pop-up or join.
While pop-ups can be annoying, the data confirms that it doesn’t make a difference to visitors overall behavior. Since they are so common on blogs these days people expect them, but there are some things you can do to make them more effective and different types to choose from.
Let’s take a look at some of them.
Entry Pop-up
You can have a pop-up trigger as soon as the visitor lands on your page. This may not be the most effective for your site since the visitor could see this as a hurdle to viewing the content they wanted to learn about from you.
Exit Pop-up
When the site visitor is moving their cursor towards the back button, an exit pop-up will trigger them for their email address. This can be a very good time to ask since they will have already read through your blog post and are going to be more likely to convert.
Scrolling Pop-up
If someone has scrolled down the page, it is likely because they have read through your content. This is a great time to ask for their email. If they have read your post to the end or a certain percentage down the page, they will have received value from it and are going to be more likely to want to hear more from you.
Timed Pop-up
Triggering a pop-up after the visitor has been on your site for a certain amount of time can be very effective. This could be after only a few seconds or a minute or longer, depending on the statistics from your site. Some experimentation with the timing could potentially produce better results.
Click Pop-up
An email pop-up can be triggered when a visitor clicks on some text or an image on your page. They have the potential to be very effective as the visitor has had to take action to make the pop-up appear. You could offer additional information to the reader if they provide their email, for example.
Whichever of these pop-up types you choose for your blog, they can be used alongside a sidebar opt-in. Not all blogs are the same and what may work for one might not work for your audience.
Try out different pop-up options for your site and test what works. Having a pop-up could produce unexpected dividends, so it is worth taking the time to try out the different methods. If you want to get serious and make money blogging for your business, you need to put the work into list building to increase your revenue.
I have researched and settled on two email service providers to create my list and help my customers: Active Campaign and Constant Contact. Send me an email if you would like to know why I recommend these two and for which of my clients. Both have a free trial period. I use Active Campaign for WPWM.
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