How to Add List Building Tools in your Blog

by | on May 6, 2012

In this day and age of internet marketing, having a list of prospects is still the key to finding clients. Imagine having a list of people you may contact who are willing to click on your links, read your newsletters, and purchase your goods online. Without this list, you’ll be lost before you even begin, so list-building tools are vital to building your internet business.

Building a list takes more than just putting a simple subscriber box with an email address field on your website. While it’s still useful, you must also find a way to encourage people to “opt-in” or put their email address in order to subscribe to your offers. That’s when you can really start building a relationship with them. The power of a list-building tool is that you can do all this automatically without having to personally attend to each prospect.

To add a list-building tool, you first should design an opt-in page (or capture page). This page is where your contacts will “opt-in” by signing up for your offer. It can be an image, some text, Javascript, a combination of these—it’s your choice. The important thing is to include fields for a person’s name and their email address. Of course, you should make it inviting and attractive as you can.

Second, decide what kind of tool you need. The right tools depend on the kind of blog you’re using. For example, there are tools designed specifically for WordPress, while there are others that will work with all other sites like Facebook and Blogger. Be sure to check out the plugin’s homepage to find out what blogs it’s compatible with.

You may also want to decide if you want a sign up page, a footer, a sidebar, or a pop-up kind of tool. Some types of tools even incorporate all or most of these features. It depends on how you’ve designed your blog, so pick one that works well functionally as well as visually.

Next, after you’ve made your design choices, select the tool you want. You have a choice of what kind of tool you want to use. The excellent ones like Aweber, GetResponse, UFA (Ultimate Footer Ad), and Digi List Builder require that you pay for them, but there also free ones you can use, such as Optin Crusher, Codebanter, and the WordPress plug-in mentioned above. Whatever you choose, make sure to follow the directions and that it merges seamlessly with your blog’s style and autoresponder system.

Download your tool and install it. In most cases, you will download a plug-in for ease of use. Once downloaded, you can install it at the settings menu in the back end of your blog.

For example, in WordPress, open up your Dashboard, and click on the menu bar item on the right marked Plugins. Select Add New. Browse your computer for your plug-in file and select it. From there, you can click on Activate Plug-in. You will likely have to click the plug-in settings and configure it. This is important if you need to define your opt-in page, as well as its dimensions and when or how often it will show up on your blog.

The installation may be different for each tool, so be sure to read the instructions on their website to make sure you got it right. Essentially, you have to download the application, upload it to your blog, copy-paste your auto-responder details, configure your settings, then activate the plug-in.

If you’re using WordPress, you can use its very own pop-up plug-in as an alternative to third-party ones. Once downloaded, you have two choices: to have the pop-up show for all your blog pages, place the plug-in in /mu-plugins/, or to let each individual blog control it by placing it in /plugins/. After doing that, activate the plug-in and go to Settings > Pop Overs. Here you can paste in the code for your ad: size, borders, background color, position, font color, and when you want it to display.

Putting pop ups and opt-in boxes on your website is great but if you want a quicker way to start building your list instead of building sales funnels and capture pages then do yourself a favor and Click Here.

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About The Author:

I hope you enjoyed this blog post! My wife, Lauren, and I like to write about useful and interesting topics, and heck, sometimes not-so-useful stuff, but it's all fun and we try to be entertaining. We have 3 crazy kids and a life that matches, but we try to stay sane the best we can. We love to help people obtain their dreams and become free, because the nay-sayers are WRONG; it is possible! Do you want to know the best thing about this online stuff? We make 100% commissions! You can too by using our viral blogging platform as you see here. To learn more about how you can make money blogging, click one of the banners on the site. If you want to know more about us (and learn the 1 thing you'll need to focus on to make money online) then simply go to our About Page. -Eric & Lauren-