Instead of having people stumble upon your blog only to leave and perhaps never return after an initial visit, the idea is to capture their email addresses (with their consent, of course), so that you can continue to update them whenever you publish new content.

Converting as much of your web traffic into to subscribers becomes a crucial strategy to succeed with your blog, especially now that RSS users are becoming a rarer breed.

You’ll want to sign up with a mailing list management service such as Aweber or Mailchimp and embed (or at least link to) your sign up form on your site. You can see mine in the sidebar, and here is a link to the standalone signup form.

In order to entice as many visitors as possible to sign up with your blog mailing list, you’ll want to offer up a worthwhile freebie to potential new subscribers. This freebie is sometimes called a lead magnet.

It should be something that is appealing to your visitors. Something that provides value to them. After all, you’re asking them to provide you with their personal information in exchange for such.

At the moment, I don’t have any such freebies available on my sites, but creating them is definitely on my to-do list for all of my blogs. [1] It’s that important.

There are a few common lead magnets that bloggers use:

• Ebooks
• Courses [2]
• Videos and screencasts
• Reports / White papers / Blueprints
• Resource guides
• Coupon (discount) codes

It might be tempting to think that the more effort you put into your freebie, the more signups you’ll obtain. The common experience among digital marketers, however, disproves that.

It’s more about providing value and soliciting curiosity in your readers than the size of the gift. No need to go overboard. If you create a 250 page PDF as your lead magnet, you might be surprised to see that it doesn’t work as well as you hoped it would.

The reason for this is quite simple. People are busy. You’re essentially asking your readers to commit to reading a full-sized book. And they may or may not get the value that you put in it, and the weeks or months you spent writing it.

It turns out that the best bang for the buck in this regard is offering resource guides. They take little time to create and tend to really capture the visitor’s attention. An example of a resource guide for a fitness blog might be a one page PDF file titled, “Top 5 Apps Used by Elite Athletes”. [3]

Creating resource guides requires little effort, but will immediately draw new signups. Since you’re not spending months creating a lead magnet, you can focus more on your blog content (to draw more visitors to convert to subscribers), as well as possibly creating multiple freebies.

You could, for example, develop a different freebie for each category within your blog, and then entice people to sign up for your site’s newsletter by promising the most appropriate freebie within a given article (depending on the category that it belongs to).

Your articles on exercise could use the aforementioned type of guide, while your weight loss articles could use a different one that was oriented more towards diet and/or nutrition. Perhaps, “10 Superfoods for People Who Are Dieting”.

No matter what you choose to provide your readers with, go through the trouble of creating at least one enticing freebie. And if you simply are not able to do so right now, then at least make sure that you have a signup form on your site, so as to start building your subscriber base.

You can always add the freebie at a later stage to sweeten the pot for your new and existing readers alike.

The post Creating a Freebie to Convert Visitors into Subscribers appeared first on Technical Blogging.

Federico Clapis

Truth be told, most of his videos are silly. Going on a date with a rubber vagina, type of silly. [1] He made people laugh though and his persistence in publishing good, bad, or ugly videos no matter what, led him to attract a following of 800,000 Facebook subscribers, along with over a hundred million views.[2]

His story[3] is interesting because at the height of his success, Federico decided to quit publishing such videos. He announced that he would stop publishing silly clips and instead focus on his art. This was his 5 year strategy all along. People expected him to crush and burn. After all, out of the million or so fans who followed him for his funny videos, how many would be interested in his serious modern art?

Was Federico’s following reduced to a few thousand faithful? Surprisingly for many of his critics, Federico was left unscathed. Not only did his follower count fail to drop, but he actually continued to grow his social media presence, making him one of the most popular canvas artists online. His art, in fairness, is good and may have vast appeal, but it was still quite the departure from his usual videos.

Outside of ethical concerns you might or might not have (some people might feel this is a bait-and-switch), there is no denying that this is a legitimate marketing strategy. Establish an audience through wide-appeal content, and then publish your deeper, more meaningful content (or your sale pitch) to the audience that you have built.

I share this story here because I see some important take home lessons in it:

• Persistence does pay off. He published hundreds of videos to build his following. He experimented a lot. He wasn’t afraid to publish crap and make mistakes. Doing so proved to be highly rewarding for him in the end.
• I think it illustrates the importance of creating a large following. Once you have a huge audience, it doesn’t necessarily matter – that much, at least – what you are trying to sell them (within limits). In Federico’s case, it’s his true artistic self which is much more vulnerable and emotional than his earlier persona. A real departure in form and content, and yet it still didn’t impact his “tribe”. In a parallel universe somewhere there is an unsuccessful Clapis who started an art YouTube channel  from day one.
• It’s actually fairly hard to lose large amounts of followers once you have them unless you seriously screw up (like the FineBros did with their React copyrighting fiasco, after which people unsubscribed to them en masse in protest).[4]
• Once you reach a certain level of popularity, it becomes as much about you as it is about your content. People become loyal not just to your output, but to you as a person. You become a trusted public adviser of sorts, and people in turn are eager to hear what you have to say.

I’m not adopting his strategy, but his story has nevertheless inspired me to create more and grow my audience. I hope it does the same for you.

The post What We Can Learn From Federico Clapis’ Success appeared first on Technical Blogging.