You’ve tried to make money from your blog for a long time now and it’s still not working out for you. It’s not because you haven’t been trying hard because you read as much business advice as possible. One of the things you have probably heard about more than most is that you need to build an email list. As soon as you heard that you might have signed up to an autoresponder company, so why is there not a steady stream of money coming into your bank account every day?
The reason you aren’t making much money yet is because an opt-in box is only a tool. You still need to use the tool correctly or it won’t work, at least not as well as you’d like it to. I bet you are throwing away hundreds of potential signups each day because you don’t have the opt-in box in the right place and also because it looks crap. If you have lots of traffic it could be even more than that, so let’s look at ways you can guarantee quicker results by getting more people to sign-up.
At the top of your homepage
One of the best places to stick an opt-in box is right in the middle of your homepage before any other content. If people land on your site it will be the first thing they see. If you look around the web you will notice the feature box has become very popular recently. You can’t just expect people to enter their email address because it’s there, so remember to include a picture of your freebie offer plus have some good copy underneath a tempting headline.
In the sidebar
You might have one in the sidebar already because that is where everyone has them, but the only way you will get a lot of people signing up is if it looks great. Don’t use the basic opt-in box your autoresponder company provides for you because they look crap. Because you want it to stand out it would be a good idea to use a different color to the rest of the content on your site. Once it catches someone’s eye they will be drawn to it much more often.
Under your article
Everyone should use the space underneath each article very carefully because it’s a great place to ask your reader to do something, but that only works if you provide great content. If someone gets to the bottom of an article they didn’t like they won’t sign-up. If you don’t even get to the bottom of the article then that is a fail too. That is why you should make sure you only deliver the best content and put a little opt-in box right underneath it.
Right at the bottom
Have you ever landed on a website and scrolled all the way down to the bottom because you wanted to see if it was right for you? Most people do this and they will scroll down each website they land on. It means having an opt-in box at the bottom of the page becomes important so you can catch some of them before they leave the site. You won’t get a huge amount of people opting in, but it all adds up in the end.
In the middle of an article
Sometimes you will write an article you know is going to be absolutely amazing and everyone will end up reading it for years. It might be a good idea to stick your opt-in box somewhere in the middle of the article. Just remember that this should not be done each time you publish something and it should only be kept for stellar content. You’ve got to put your opt-in boxes where the traffic is going to be.
About the Author: Tedd Benson is a web designer by profession and runs an institute of web design in Toronto. He is a keen learner and is always on the lookout for new ideas for web designing. This post is just one of his efforts to help people get a low-down of the intricacies of the web.
