When you write, you expect to be read. If you wanted to read your own writings, you would’ve simply written into a Word document. If you wanted someone to read your writings, you would’ve sent that Word document. But you want everyone to read what you write. People might come and go to your website, but as a writer, you’ll crave for followers instead of visitors. So, you’ll need a way to turn the visitors into followers. And in this post, I’m going to guide you through turning those visitors into regular readers and get more email subscribers.
Let’s get started!
First Things First: Set Up a Newsletter
In WordPress, there are a whole lot of ways to set up a newsletter service. Off the top of my head, I could think of five easy and efficient ways:
- Use the Jetpack plugin to quickly create a newsletter and even put up a form in your sidebar (or any widget area).
- Buy the MailPoet plugin to create a more comprehensive subscription service for your readers.
- Make use of FeedBurner or FeedPress to send daily emails of your posts and power up your RSS feeds.
- Subscribe to services like MailChimp or GetResponse to outsource your email activity and keep your server clean.
How to Ask Visitors to Sign Up
After you set up your newsletter, it’s a good idea to promote it. (Otherwise, how on earth would your visitors know that your website has a newsletter?) You can create a page to insert the HTML form and guide people there, or you can use one of the following email optin form plugins:
- Bloom Email Opt-In Plugin: The best looking email opt-in forms I’ve ever seen. Hands down.
- Optin Forms: A free plugin with five pretty form designs.
- OptinMonster: The most popular premium opt-in and it lives up to its popularity.
- Hello Bar: An interesting way to arouse visitors’ interest.
- SumoMe: A set of “website traffic tools” including analytics, sharing widgets and a “Smart Bar” for collecting emails.
If the plugin of your choice has the features, you can utilize slide-in forms, popup overlays, header lines, sidebar widgets or after-content forms to get more email subscribers.
Tips to Get More Subscribers
- Regularly post to your social media profiles and ask for people to subscribe. Doing this every day or every week would be annoying but once or twice a month is okay.
- Don’t just send new posts in the newsletter. Make your subscribers feel more special by sending special updates and ask for feedback.
- Offer something to people in return for subscribing. It could be an ebook you wrote, a WordPress theme you made, or some discount coupons for your product or service.
- Share your newsletter subscriber count as social proof. Over two newsletters, one saying “Subscribe!” and the other saying “Join 1456 Subscribers!”, which one would you choose to subscribe?
- Make sure your emails are readable and have a decent design. Check those emails in different browsers, email clients and devices.
- Post regularly for your subscribers to “expect” your emails.
What Else?
I tried to wrap everything up in around 500 words, but there’s always room for improvement. If you believe you have something to share, maybe an idea or an experience, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. If you liked the post, don’t forget to share it with your friends!