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Break Your Blog Out of the Box with Mailing Lists and Cliff-Hangers

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August 27, 2007

Break Your Blog Out of the Box with Mailing Lists and Cliff-Hangers. (Photo Copyright by Lee Hinshaw. Use without permission prohibited, see Footer for Link)Here are two tips that can help you grow your blog or web site.

Most established blogs use the first tip, but few seem to leverage the second.







1. Email List:

  • Use a capture form to build your mailing list.


  • Give an incentive to sign up, such as a free report or tidbit of knowledge. You must be generous with your offer by giving away something of value. For example: I'm offering one of my full training courses as a subscriber bonus - fill out the signup form at the end of this article and receive it free!


  • Send an email to your list every time you update your site or blog, or when you release new products. This brings people back to your site and is an important part of keeping and growing a community of readers.


  • Unless you're a programmer, or have a programmer at your disposal, and have your own servers, I recommend a service such as aweber.com to manage your mailing list and subscribers.


  • Your mailing list will become one of your most valuable assets. Treat it as such. Make sure you have backups. Keep your backups in multiple locations.


2. Cliff-Hangers:

  • The objective of a cliff-hanger is to bring people to your web site or blog by "teasing" them with a little information that will generate enough interest to cause them to want to visit your site to get the rest of the information... here's how to do it.


  • When submitting articles, emails, or press releases, use a cliff-hanger to get people to take action. If your article has a list of items, publish the complete list on your web site. Leave off the last few items in your submitted article and in their place put a link to your web site with wording that explains to click for the remaining items.


  • Use a cliff-hanger with a long article too: split it into two parts and put the 'A" part in an article or email and put the complete article on your web site or blog.


  • Use this same method to build your email address list too. Put part "A" on your web site and then tell readers that you'll email part "B" if they sign up to your list. You will want to send out part "B" to your current subscribers if you do this, so that they automatically get the "B" part as well.


  • You can also use this cliff-hanger technique with an ad by giving one or two tips that people may not know about your product or service and then offer more information, either mailed, emailed, or hand delivered (depending on what you're selling) that contains x number of additional tips.


  • As mentioned above, you need to offer something of value to the reader to incite them enough to take action. You'll find that the more value you offer, the more successful you will be.

Until Next Time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on August 27, 2007 | Printer-Friendly

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  Comments:
  1. From: Jim

    Fred--- You are right on about aweber, it rocks! Setting up brief email reminders to your list when new posts are created is so easy.

    -J

    Posted by Jim on August 28, 2007 7:13 PM

  2. From Fred...

    Hey Jim! Good to hear from you. Staying in contact is really key to keeping people involved with your blog/site. It's one of those things that beginners don't always feel comfortable doing because they don't feel they have the authority or status. Even if you only have one or two subscribers, you need to keep them aware of what you're doing so that they remain actively reading your blog as you grow and get more subscribers. Otherwise, you'll loose as many readers as you gain and never get anywhere.

    Fred

    Posted by Fred Black on August 28, 2007 7:28 PM

  3. From: Paul

    I use Constant Contact for ecommerce mailing lists - but Aweber looks to be very good as well. Having a mailing list for my blog is something that I'd really like to do, but haven't thus far. Thanks for the great tips!

    Posted by Paul on August 31, 2007 3:56 PM

  4. From Fred...

    Paul, welcome to my blog!
    Fred

    Posted by Fred Black on August 31, 2007 4:15 PM

  5. From: tim

    When using the cliffhanger approach to building the mailing list, future subscribers via other methods may come across the partial post and never see the second half. Is there a way around this?

    Thanks for a good post!

    Posted by tim on May 1, 2009 10:52 AM

 


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