Before answering the question, “Should you use pop-ups?”, let’s start with two facts:

1. Your mailing list can be your most important asset on a blog.
2. Pop-ups are extremely good at capturing emails.

Essentially, they are a very effective, if on the nose, technique. Not having a pop-up signup is literally leaving money on the table. And that’s why they are so ubiquitous.

When you don’t see one it’s often either an ethical choice (the site owner decided to maximize user experience, not profit) or lack of knowledge of how effective these pop-ups can be.

I recently decided to run an experiment on Math Blog, going from an embedded form to a pop-up one, plus the existing form. I was blown away by the results.

On average, I received 20 times more email signups, and my mailing list is growing like never before. I thought I would receive some complaints about it. Surprisingly, so far nobody has opted to say anything negative about it. For this and other reasons, I now actually regret not adding one there years ago.

So should you use pop-ups? The answer thus far would seem to be, “absolutely”. I think that for most technical blogs, we don’t need too many qualifiers or caveats.

A tasteful cookie-based pop-up that appears only once some 10-20 seconds after the user has landed, or when they are about to exit, will probably do more good than damage to your blog.

Where it gets trickier is with programming blogs. Programmers are notoriously adverse to pop-ups and marketing in general. To date I have not placed a pop-up sign up on my programming blog. Following my Math Blog experiment, I’m really tempted to do. If anything, to see what happens both in terms of signups and complaints.

I suspect that submitting a post from my programming blog with a pop-up enabled to Reddit or Hacker News will likely generate some backlash. But I can only speculate until I give it a try, which I’ll likely do and then report back here.

Maybe I’m underestimating how much people, even programmers, are accustomed to pop-ups these days.

Ultimately, it comes down to a delicate balance between ROI and user experience. On the one hand, you want to maximize the number of people you capture, transforming them from random passerby to – hopefully – regulars.

On the other however, you want to provide a user experience that doesn’t disrupt whatever the user is doing (e.g., reading an article) or irritate their individual sensibilities (e.g., the stereotypical anti-marketing programmer).

It’s really up to you in terms of what you are comfortable doing. Knowing your audience is key as well. I think you don’t have too much to worry about there unless your blog is about programming.

Generally speaking, I would say don’t be afraid of trying pop-up email form out for a short amount of time before making a final decision.

And last, but not least, if you’re in the market for a smart pop-up that will let you customize cookie duration, when it appears, and so on, then I highly recommend Optinmonster or WP Subscribe Pro.

The post Should You Use Pop-Ups on Your Technical Blog? appeared first on Technical Blogging.

Sign up with MailChimp, then follow along on YouTube.

This is my first video and I’m not entirely happy about it, but I think it will do for now. Please let me know if you find this type of video useful and I’ll create more.

The post How to Automatically Send Your Blog Posts to Your Email Subscribers via Mailchimp appeared first on Technical Blogging.

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.