Category: list building

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list building Marketing Tools Wordpress

How to make horizontal opt-in boxes for Aweber in WordPress

It’s new year’s day and since you’re already up and reading your email, it’s probably a GREAT day to do something that’s going to help you build your list and make you more cash for all of 2013.

So here’s an idea for you…

Dan Nickerson (the smartest WordPress Marketer I know) and I spent a couple hours the other night playing around with a new WordPress list building plugin that is truly impressive.

If you’re in a rush, check out this new plugin right here:

WordPress Plugin to make Advanced Optin Boxes for Aweber

You’ve seen this already…

All of the professional bloggers add these neat boxes to their sidebars (and usually also to the bottom of the posts), where they advertise their newsletter and where you can sign up. They work GREAT. The problem is: those opt-in boxes are not easy to create.

Trust me, we’ve spent hours in the past building horizontal optins that will fit in a 728×90 widget area or smaller. It requires a lot of custom coding and tweaking to Aweber forms.

Well, this new plugin changes all that.

It comes pre-loaded with more than 30 awesome templates. Which can be customized in 100’s of ways.And it works with almost ANY autresponder service, not just Aweber (includes Aweber, iContact, GetResponse, InfusionSoft, MailChimp, ConstantContact, and more.)

Seriously, you have to see this, to believe it:

Hybrid Connect — WordPress Plugin to make Advanced Optin Boxes

But here’s the thing… you’re thinking: “Ok, an opt-in box builder. Cool, but NOT VERY EXCITING.”

Well, it gets better, because

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Categories
Bad Squeeze Pages Conversion Landing Pages list building squeeze pages

The Worst Squeeze Page Winner

The last week or so we’ve been talking about bad squeeze pages.

There’s CLEARLY no shortage of them online. Once you learn that step one of internet marketing is to build a list, you decide to build your first squeeze page.

I remember my first squeeze page. It was for a mattress website, of all things. I thought I could sell leads to local businesses — a good business, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing.

Having been a programmer in a past life, I thought I’d design the mailing list system myself (bad idea). It’s much better to use standard list-building tools. They’re ultimately cheaper and easier.

And although I had heard that the best way to build a squeeze page was with no menu choices, no links and no distractions on the page, I had plenty of them all.

It wasn’t pretty, and I don’t think I got a single lead.

Well, I’ve come a long way since then, and I’m sure over time I’ll travel even further. But at this point it’s time to give back a bit, and help others in the same situation.

A bit of advice: Don’t expect that just because you WANT someone to opt into your page, that they will. It’s an odd thing, but we tend to think that the things that we love, are in fact also loved by others, and that’s not always the case — in life and in marketing.

In my last post, I showed you the Worst Squeeze Page Runners Up.

Today, you get the winner (or loser, depending on how you look at it.)

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Categories
list building Traffic & Conversion

A Tactic Observed Is A Tactic Defeated

It’s a bit tough to be so transparent in discussing with you how I’m going to run my business. Most marketers don’t do that. Most just do what they do and not let on, because once they let on, the cat’s out of the bag, the tactic is perceived, and the effect of the tactic is neutralized and defeated.

But I perceive my role in your business life as bigger than that. You may or may not agree, but that’s how I see it.

The real purpose of my transparency is LESS about letting you know what I am doing, and MORE about helping you with your business — either by my successes or my failures.

So I was pleased to get at least a few comments from readers who said they would try what I was suggesting. One person, Jonathan, who is travelling the world with his bride while supporting themselves with their Internet Marketing business, wrote me to say that he started to email his list more often, and made an extra $1,000 in sales in the last 5 days.

Now THAT was the purpose of my original post.

Jonathan didn’t mail his list every day, but he

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list building Marketing Tools Traffic & Conversion

What to Write About Every Day

Ever since I heard Tellman’s advice about mailing your list every day to increase your list’s trust in you, I’ve been thinking about that advice.

I also got a bunch of comments about my blog post from yesterday about that, wondering if it’d be a good thing or a bad thing if I wrote to you every day.

And like I said, I’ve been thinking…

I’m an avid talk-radio listener here in Los Angeles  (when I’m not listening to marketing audio books or teleseminar recordings), and I realized something pretty interesting.

Those talk radio guys talk at me every day, too…and I don’t mind.

Flash back to last week. Tellman is giving me his list-building advice about trust, your relationship with your list, and writing every day. And the question that I asked him was probably the same one that you want to ask.

And that’s

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Categories
list building Marketing Tools Traffic & Conversion

One (very valuable) piece of Listbuilding Advice

What I’m about to share with you had a big, immediate impact on me, and what I’m going to do over the next 30 days. I’m sharing it with you because, well, I think it will help you, too. A lot. Especially if you copy me.

No hype, by the way, but this little bit of advice is golden.  (Don’t discount the advice just because it’s free, please.)

I spent several days last week with some of the top internet marketers in the world. One of them was Tellman Knudson. You may know him as the slightly eccentric, ADD-powered marketer, and the creator of the MyFirstList listbuilding system.

If you don’t know about Tellman’s barefoot run across the USA, or how he went from a marketing newbie with a shaved-head to a millionaire with long hair and a scraggly beard, well you really ought to get to know him better, because he’s a sharp dude.

Really sharp.

And motivated.

Anyway, he was talking to this other new friend of mine, Lisa Sasevich (I’ll tell you about her in another letter) and I overheard him giving her some listbuilding advice. I didn’t catch all of it, but I had heard enough to know that I had to ask him about it later.

With a jack-on-the-rocks in my hand, and a glass of ice-water in his, I asked Tellman to repeat what he had told Lisa. Here’s how our conversation went.

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Categories
copywriting list building Marketing Tools

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

I thought I’d pass along this little tidbit of marketing wisdom that I’ve suspected for a while, but that was reinforced and proven a few times recently.

You need to know this, too.

I’ve recently been watching the webinars that Marketing Experiments conducts. Wow, they sure do put a lot of effort into figuring out what works and what doesn’t work in online marketing.

My only gripe (and it’s not really a gripe) with them is that they are more focused on the larger, corporate marketer than they are with the online entrepreneurs — marketers like you and I.

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