Your blog is one of the best SEO tools for your business. It’s going to drive traffic to your site. Keep those site visitors coming back by converting them into subscribers.

00:22 Andy Shore: Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Clues For The Clueless Email Marketer. We’re gonna continue talking about growing your list. And today’s focus is your blog. So why should you put a signup form on your blog, Daniel?

00:36 Daniel Miller: First of all, if you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out big time. If you google anything about how to generate more traffic to your site, content is king. We’ll have a whole episode probably focused on content later on, but first of all, that’s the case. Now, why is that the case? Why is content king? Why do you go to Google? You go to Google to find things to do research, to create awareness, whatever that is, you tend to go to a search engine and let’s just talk about Google for now. When you Google that, you get to that page which most likely most, nine times out of 10, has the response that you’re looking for. If they have that one response, they may have other responses to other questions that you may like.

01:13 DM: I follow tons of blogs from Sumo, Litmus, Growth Hackers, a bunch of other ones. And the way that I found them is through a Google search going to their blog and then I loved their content so much, I immediately wanted to sign up. That’s the same experience that you wanna try to create to your user, creating pieces of content that will attract the right type of person and then of course, you don’t wanna expect them to do that Google search to always find you, it’s the right time to capture their email and keep them updated with regular content through email marketing.

01:43 AS: Exactly, that’s how you establish trust. They get to know you as an expert because they’re familiar with your blog content, so sending them, getting them to subscribe and keep sending to them is the way you keep reminding them that you know what you’re talking about, you’re good at this, trust you, do business with you. And it’s also more of a long play, in terms of a quick sale because you’re not necessarily making a sale from your blog content, but when they are in need of whatever you’re talking about, you’re gonna be the first thing they think of, because they’ve been reading your blog content, and know you know what you’re talking about. So you’re getting customers, it’s just a little more of a long play. So that’s the why. Let’s talk about how, a little bit. Where should people put a signup form on their blog?

02:26 DM: Very similar to pretty much any other page on your site. There’s a few different areas that really make sense because of the intuitiveness of it, also because of the visual on your site. So, as we mentioned in a prior episode, above the fold is always very helpful, because for those people that may get there, who may not have enough time to kind of read through this blog. Let’s say that someone is sitting on a train and they’re reading through, they google something, they get to your blog page and it’s their stop, and they gotta go. They may not be able to read that full article, but guess what, they may wanna sign up to get your updates and to remember what that blog was about. Other options, as we’ve said, is the side bar, also the footer. One of the main reasons that I like the footer so much is because the footer applies to any blog page that your subscribers are on. So any page that they go to, they can easily sign up. And in regards to the side bar, it’s very easy, especially if you’re using some of the modern CMSs or WordPress, they really give you easy tools to customize and do different things on the side bar, footer and so forth.

03:33 AS: Yeah, and if you’re using Benchmark, we have a WordPress plugin that does exactly that for you on the side bar, among other things. It’s called Benchmark Lite?

03:43 DM: Benchmark Email Lite, yeah.

03:44 AS: Benchmark Email Lite, of course, we’re the experts on our own things, know exactly what we’re talking about, but it makes it easy. There’s tons of great widgets that you can use installed in the side bar and you’re growing your list wherever your customers may be, like Daniel said, put it in the side bar, put it in the footer. If you go to the Benchmark blog, you’ll see we have it in a pop-up that comes up as you scroll down the page. So, they’re reading your content and getting engaged with it. It greets them right there and like, “Hey, you’re enjoying this, you’re reading it, get more of it, sign up.” And one other thing we do with that process is for each different category on our blog, we have a separate signup form, which lets them get exactly the content that’s of interest to them.

04:27 DM: Yeah, and I think that’s very important, because you don’t wanna just send out blanket content. And on the Benchmark blog, we talk about a lot of different topics, going all the way from just a general topic to a very specific topic that may be how to leanify your business. So just because of that, we wanna make sure that people can subscribe to the topic or category that they prefer. And in regards to the pop-up, we did a lot of testing in regards to how that pop-up should really function. And we specifically saw that, we didn’t want the pop-up to come up right away. We felt that that scared some of the possible sign-ups away and we noticed that showing a little bit of engagement, example, somebody scrolling, was the perfect time to possibly show that pop-up to try to get them to subscribe to us. So again, that’s just how it worked for us. I highly recommend for anyone listening here, do your own testing and see what works best for your audience.

05:22 AS: Yeah, you might hear us say testing on every single episode we record…

05:26 DM: Exactly.

05:26 AS: That’s the way you get clued in. Tune in next time. Thanks, everyone, for listening, we’ll catch you the next time. I’m gonna say “next time” a few more times. Next time, next time, next time. Bye, guys.