Using Your Blog To Build a Prospects List…Quietly

Using a service such as AWeber to manage and build an email list is a well-known marketing technique and is the mechanism that I use to deliver both of my email based courses. However, each individual list requires it’s own form to be displayed on the site and if you have several lists that you want to manage like I do, it can be cumbersome to try and offer them all prominently on your blog. What to do?

List Building For the Future

If you have a current list that you want to heavily promote then it makes sense to put your AWeber form somewhere prominent on your blog so that it can be accessed anywhere. You’ll see that I do this in my blog header which is seen on every page and I also use a popup which appears after a few seconds to most visitors.

However, what if you are working on something new and you want to start collecting details of people who may be interested but you don’t yet have anything to offer them? This is known as a prospects list. This is the situation I find myself in with regards to my software project.

The project is slowly taking form and I am getting an idea of the kind of target market that I am aiming for so I want to use my existing blog traffic to start collecting potential prospects who may be interested in the software when it is released. Specifically I am looking to capture that traffic that comes in from search engines because these people visit once and go away again.

My regular subscribers are not an issue here because you guys are on my RSS list anyway so I can sell to you later :-)

List Building With No Value to Deliver

In general, to entice people to give you an email address, you need to give them something. Many people choose to offer a download such as a free report though I prefer to offer something that provides value on an on-going basis such as the free lessons in both my Traffic Rush and Bloggers Bible courses. The trouble with my software project is that I don’t have anything to give away yet.

I’m slowly forming ideas for something that might be useful later but it’s not ready yet however with hundreds of daily visitors and now around 40% of them coming from search engines I feel I am missing out on potential prospects.

Building a Notification List

Sometimes you don’t have to entice people with freebies. There are times when you can be totally honest and say that you are working on something related to XYZ and ask people to join a list if they would like to be notified when there is more news of its availability. That is exactly what I have done with my software project.

I know I am building some tools, but I don’t yet know much more than that so I just tell people what I know now and invite them to join the notification list if they’d like to know more. Although this will only build a very small list compared to when you offer a freebie it is more powerful because those people aren’t just freebie-seekers and have actually shown an active interest in your product.

Embedding AWeber Forms Into Individual Posts

Regular readers may well be wondering where this form is… I’ve hidden it! Well it’s not exactly hidden, it is just placed only where it will be of most interest. I’ve not said much about my tools yet but my initial thoughts are that I want to build tools to help automate the process of building backlinks. There are lots of these on the market already but I have some ideas to set mine apart from the crowd :-)

Anyway, the point is, this blog is fairly diverse. I talk about blogging, niche sites, social media and all sorts of other stuff. Only a small percentage of the visitors to this blog would be interested in these tools but I can target them by embedding the form into specific posts that are on-topic. One such post is the very popular list of do-follow social bookmarking sites. It was whilst employing the technique on my own AdSense Project that I began to get frustrated with the shortcomings of tools such as social marker and decided to write my own.

If you look at that post and scroll down a little bit to the heading ‘Social Marker’, you’ll see that I have added a paragraph discussing my tools and I have embedded a very small and simple AWeber form directly inside the post. This is very easy to do in the newer versions of WordPress.

You build your form in AWeber and as you can see here I have used just the simplest form possible – nothing but an email address. You then get the code and select the piece of javascript. This is what it looks like for this form:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://forms.aweber.com/form/60/1295879360.js”></script>

Now this piece of code is appearing as text right now in the blog post and that is because I am currently typing in the Visual mode of WordPress. To embed the form into the post all you need to do is switch to HTML view, paste the same code in and then it is translated into the real form like this:

See how easy that is? What I like about this method is that it allows me to specifically target only the search engine visitors that are searching for queries that relate to the product I am building. In the future I’ll probably be discussing more topics that relate to what I am doing and will embed the form in a similar way but it doesn’t dominate the blog in the way that the Bloggers Bible popup does.

I’ve had the form running for a few weeks now and it only has 16 subscribers but that is better than none. Hopefully over time as I get closer to releasing my software I’ll be able to build a small list of people who are genuinely interested in what it can do. I think this is a really neat way of experimenting with list building in general if you’re new to it and don’t really know what to offer your subscribers.

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