List building: we all know we ought to be doing it, but either we are dragging our feet or don’t really know how to get anyone to actually subscribe.
Either way, the following list building webinar is for you.
My guest is Shane MeLaugh and he definitely delivered some of the best list building content I’ve even heard - bar none.
He’ll share some practical strategies on creating the best optin forms and freebies to go with them, show real example of forms that don’t work and how they could be changed to actually convert, plus several tools to build your email list.
Mentioned in the video
1. Color Scheme Designer
If you are not much of a web designer, you are in a good company - most bloggers aren’t.
That’s why Shane mentioned Color Scheme Designer - a free tool to help you choose the perfect contrasting colors for your next optin form or whatever else you are working on.
2. Aweber
Shane uses Aweber to power his email marketing, as do I.
Aweber makes it easy to start your list building for just $1 and will remain affordable as your list grows.
As a matter of fact, I don’t think you can afford NOT to use Aweber or any other email marketing company of your choice. Just imagine all the money you are leaving behind by not having a responsive email list to tap into.
Most of my income from Traffic Generation Café does come from my email list - not my reviews, advertising, or any other means of promotion.
You can learn more about Aweber and how to use it in your business in my Aweber review.
3. Hybrid Connect
There are many list building plugins currently on the market and I’ve even tested most of the big ones, including MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet and WPSubscribers.
Some of them work better than others, but the one thing that most of them have in common is how difficult they can get to set up.
Sure they’ve got a lot of features.
But who cares if you can’t figure out how to actually use those features, right?
That’s where Hybrid Connect is so different.
It was created by Shane for his own websites because he couldn’t find a list building plugin that was perfect for his needs.
Hybrid Connect is…
- easy to set up (the very few settings are all explained in quick videos),
- highly customizable for those who like to tinker,
- comes with a great selection of pre-designed forms if tinkering is not your thing;
- can be connected with any email marketing platform of your choice;
- has be tested with most WP themes, including Thesis and Genesis;
- is ready to fine-tune your list building through testing;
- includes Facebook Connect option - the best one I’ve seen so far.
In short, it’s a winner in my book.
Shane is offering a special discount for Traffic Generation Café readers as well: 20% to 35% off (depending on the license you get) for the next 7 days.
To apply your Hybrid Connect discount, simply follow this link.
Again, it’ll be available to you for the next 7 days only - till Monday, April 22, if my calculation are correct.
Get your Hybrid Connect at 20% off here.
Side note: there’s an upsell to Hybrid Connect as well - WP Sharely, another great plugin by Shane.
Take it or leave it, the choice is yours, but I do recommend you take it.
I’ve been testing it at Traffic Generation Café for the past few days and got a lot of social media shares to my brand new Bite-Size Traffic Hacks email series just by locking down my posts asking my readers to share the page before they can read further.
You can use WP Sharely in conjunction with Hybrid Connect to send social media shares and traffic back to your optin page.
The reason I am mentioning it here is because the best deal you can get on WP Sharely is as an upsell to Hybrid Connect.
Get both plugins for the best price here.
Have fun storming list building!
Hello Ana
These are great tips for a blogger like me or all newbie as it is difficult to get good traffic in initial days.Increasing subscriber without large traffic is good idea.Thanks for sharing these valuable tips.
You are very welcome, Mahendra.
Shaun says
This came at a good time, I was looking for a light box for a few days but none on the market were suitable. I really wanted split testing, but the only half decent one (On paper) I could find with that was Popup Domination. I’ve tried that before though and had to refund as wasn’t working.
This was a lower price then the competitors and had better templates, as well as better features. Just added it to one of my sites, seems to work well. Going to add it to others, split test and see how things go. I will say though that it works well from early impressions. Thanks for the recommendation, I made sure I bought through your link.
Glad to hear you found it above par, Shaun. Great value for the money; that’s for sure.
thanks for sharing the great idea to have more subscribers even if we have less traffic.
by implementing these resources, it will be of great help for the bloggers which have lesser traffic on their accounts.
Thank you Anna and Shane for a great presentation. As an absolute beginner I found it fantastic!
Will this work with the Socrates theme? In addition, how do you integrate this with Weber or Mail chimp.
Yes, this works with the Socrates theme.
To integrate it with Aweber, Mailchimp or any other autoresponer, all you have to do is copy-paste a web form into a field. In your autoresponder, you just generate the HTML web form for the list you want to connect and then paste it in Hybrid Connect and that’s it. 🙂
I haven’t heard of any theme it doesn’t work with, Tony, and the integration instructions are in the plugin dashboard.
Thanks for the great content. It’s greatly appreciated!
And I always appreciate you giving me thumbs up on my posts, Tyronne!
Call it stubborn if you want but I tend to leave a site when what I’ve started to read locks down unless I take an action. I’m ok when I have an option to like or not like a page, but when it’s “do it or you’re locked out” I usually always say, “goodbye”.
I do see your point, Virgil, and my personal view is it all depends on the site.
If I am on the site that I trust and learn from, I am only happy to give the post a thumbs up.
I use hybrid connect for some months now - and it is really awesome.
In addition: The support is really fast (and they know what they are talking about). This makes HC even more awesome!
Just some praises to Shane and his team! 😉
Greetings from Germany,
André
Thank you very much, André!
Definitely, Andre!
Mark Cowtan says
Good webinar Ana. I’ve been looking for a better OptIn tool, most of them are one-trick ponies. The social LIKE gate is great too, have been looking for a while to find a Like gate that actually works with my template. But best of all is advice on how the combination of Like gate and OptIn work together.
I agree, Mark - I’ve been looking at ways to implement FB Connect into an optin form and Hybrid Connect seems to be the easiest solution.
Yea,if you dont have a list,then you are Loosing Money,money is in the List as people will say! Thanks Ana for the webinar
You are welcome, Molak.
Ana - Hybrid Connect looks pretty interesting. I currently use Optin Skin on several of my sites and this seems to be similar. I do like the fact that it’s responsive, so that’s cool. With Optin Skin there are issues with some versions of Internet Explorer. Do you know if this plugin supports all versions of IE?
We do extensive browser testing for each new version of the plugin we release. The forms built with Hybrid are fully optimized for Internet Explorer, as well.
I’ve used OptinSkin at Traffic Generation Café as well, Kenneth, and here’s my main problem with it: you are somewhat stuck with predesigned forms.
For instance, I liked a form, but didn’t want to collect subscribers’ names, but couldn’t change it. And vice versa: don’t like the form design, but good layout, etc.
With Hybrid Connect, there are no issues like that.
Amazing webinar Ana - great information and products - so glad it showed up in my inbox! Have actually been looking at, and testing link building tools this past week. Hybrid Connect will be the end of the search for me. Couldn’t resist Sharely either - pretty awesome combination! Cheers!
Thanks so much for your patronage, Brent.
I see you changed your color scheme at EchelonSEO - I like it; very clean and orange definitely makes a statement.
You are very welcome, Ilia.
Where are you from, by the way? The name sounds Russian…
Color scheme? That’s interesting. I know some blogs could really use that. But I’ll check that out for my blog as well. Thx!
It’s pretty handy - among other things, it makes suggestions of opposing, but complimentary colors, like for an optin form submit button.