Last time I talked about Autoresponders and why you need one to help build your list. So how do you start?

Once you have signed up for an autoresponder you will need to create a web form or opt in form to place on your blog so your readers can subscribe to your list.

 

 

In order to persuade people to opt in to your mailing list you need to provide them with some sort of incentive to do so. I call this your ‘bait’ because that’s effectively what it is!
Your bait will be something you give away for free in exchange for the persons name and email address.
This could be a product such as an eBook/report, video, short course etc. It could also be something as simple as you creating a regular email newsletter which is packed full of information. Your bait must be something good. Just because you are giving something away for free doesn’t mean that it can be any old rubbish.
People are very protective about giving people their email address and in order for them to do so they must really want what you are giving away. Gone are the days when you could cobble something together in half an hour and people would rush to grab the freebie. There was a time when you could probably do this but not any more!

Your freebie ‘bait’ needs to be good for two reasons:
1. To persuade them to join your list in the first place
2. To keep them there!

 

Once you have decided what to use for your free gift, you will need to get your webform from your autoresponder, I will not go into too much detail here as there are many tutorials to help you depending on which one you are using.

 

Here is one example from the GetResponse tutorial on web forms:

In GetResonse to create a web form, choose Web Forms in the Dashboard menu and click Create new. Follow the steps to design your form and fields.

The final step provides you with a snippet of code to copy and paste into your website. There are two versions of the code:

1. JavaScript version – automatically updates the web form on your site anytime you change the web form design in GetResponse.

2. HTML version – provided for power users who wish to edit the HTML. Every time you make changes to the web form, you will need to replace the code on your website.

 

If you can, have both First Name and Email Address fields. Some people find that having just an Email Address field increases opt-in rates but of course the drawback is that you can’t personalize people’s emails by adding their name into it.

 

The best place to have your opt in form is above the fold, on the right side of your blog in the widget area, that means your readers will not have to scroll down to find it, they will see it as soon as they open up your page to read your post.

You can see where mine is here, did it catch your eye straight away? have you signed up yet?

 

Setting Up Your Sales Funnel

A sales funnel refers to the whole sign up process, along with promotions that you put in your autoresponder.

 

 

 

When your subscriber signs up through your opt in form then you forward them to a thank you page, you can either use the standard one from your autoresponder or customise
your optin/thanks message because: “We have received your request for a subscription to a mailing list maintained by GetResponse email marketing service.” doesn’t sound so nice, change it to something like “I received your request for “report name” in order to make sure you get your copy click the link below” (something along those lines)

 

The first email should contain a link to your download page. Don’t just put the link to the zip file in there, make it a link to a page where they can download the product. The reason for this is that you want to put some affiliate banners on that page. You can make a lot of affiliate sales this way before anyone even goes through your autoresponder!

 

The first email also starts your autoresponder series. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is wasting this initial email.  It’s the most read email in your entire autoresponder series, so make it count! Tell people who you are, give them a reason to keep coming back, then put the link to your download page after your signature.

This is where the rest of your sales funnel starts, the most important part of it, the autoresponder series. There are tons of ways to create cash in your funnel prior to this, but the real cash is usually in your follow up emails.

 

One of my readers Neamat said in her comment on my last post that she would like me to write about how to write follow up emails and how to schedule them in your autoresponder,  so that will be the subject of my post next time.

Do you have anything specific you would like me to write about? if you do then either fill in the form below, add it to your comment or drop me an email, I would love to hear from you, and don’t forget to share your thoughts on this post

 

To your success

Thanks for reading

Pauline