This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, an AWeber user who blogs about WordPress marketing at Sparring Mind.

The simple truth when it comes to collecting more email subscribers for your AWeber email campaign is this: Add more web forms to give people more chances to join your list.

But over-used and badly placed web forms can leave your readers feeling bombarded and annoyed, while ruining your site’s layout and crowding out your content.

There are, however, a few spots on your blog that readers will be primed to opt-in. These locations are great because they are inviting to readers and stand out, but aren’t intrusive to their enjoyment of your content.

So where are they?

From my experience and through numerous split-testing experiments, I’ve identified what I believe to be the 5 best places to put your web forms.

You don’t necessarily need to use all 5 at once. Decide for yourself how many feels right and what is best for your readers, using the feedback that you get from them.

Readers are generally most ready to submit their email address in these locations, so take a look below and see if you can implement your AWeber opt-ins in these spots on your blog.

Above The Fold Feature Box

This may seem to be a bit confusing, but hear me out.

The feature box is a large box above the fold near the header of your website.

You can see one featured on my site, Sparring Mind, or on Derek Halpern’s site SocialTriggers, as he is one of the bloggers who first suggested the feature box strategy.

Generally speaking, your feature box should be right below your logo and should include a title and a brief description (think 3-4 bullet points) of what your blog is and why a reader would benefit from getting your updates.

DIYThemes (makers of the Thesis Theme for WordPress) implemented this and saw subscription rates go through the roof. This is something that people will definitely notice, yet it is not annoying like some other methods to grab potential subscribers’ attention.

The Classic: Top Of The Sidebar

You’ve definitely seen this one before as it is used on most blogs, including the one you’re reading right now.

You might think people would be blind to this location, but it simply isn’t true. People have a tendency to opt-in at a higher rate on sidebar web forms — as long as they are at the top of the sidebar.

This is most likely due to familiarity: They’ve seen these opt-ins before, and aren’t as hesitant to put in their email address if they see your form in this comfortably familiar location.

Make sure that your form stands out, but in a good way!

It helps to use a color that contrasts with your site’s background. You can use AWeber’s web form generator to do this or use these forms created by graphic designer Alex, built specifically for AWeber.

At The End Of Each Post

This is the most underrated location in my opinion.

Say someone reads your 1000+ word post, each and every line.

I’d say that they really enjoyed your writing if they are willing stick around that long, to the very bottom of the post.

So why not politely ask them if they’d like to get updates?

The point is, a reader who is inclined to finish your whole post is generally very engaged in your content and primed to get updates when you post again. So make it easy for them and include an web form at the end of each post.

Your “About Me” Page

This location works for the same reason as the last one. If a reader is going to read all about you and you make your “About Me” page a really compelling and interesting one, then they certainly might opt-in.

Other “resource” pages are also great for a web form.

Think “Start Here” pages, or pages where you list all of a certain type of post, or long resource pages that were too important for a blog post so you made them a page.

Generally speaking, any links on your homepage are going to get clicked a lot in comparison to other parts on your site, so make them count with an AWeber web form and you’ll find your list growing faster in no time.

A Dedicated Subscription Page

You might think that having a feature box and a sidebar opt-in would be enough, but then you’d be greatly underestimating the value of a dedicated subscription page.

While offering a “freebie” for your opt-ins using an AWeber autoresponder is great for any form, it works especially well on subscription landing pages that promise a free e-Book or other gift in return for the visitor’s email.

This page is also going to specifically highlight the benefits of opting in and since it’s a separate page, it can include a lengthy description rather than short bits of information to truly convince people who may me holding out.

It is wise to link to this page from your homepage and really sit down to explain why a visitor will benefit from your newsletter, making sure you put the emphasis on what they will be getting from you that they simply cannot find elsewhere.

Are you a WordPress user? Want to see how you can get the most out of the amazing AWeber + WordPress combination? Head on over to Sparring Mind to see how you can build your AWeber list with quality content on WordPress.

If you’re running your blog with WordPress.org, you should know the power of the plugin and how it can benefit your email marketing campaign. Plugins can help your campaign go from average to awesome.

What plugins can make that happen? We’ve picked out some good ones you can use.

Build Your List

AWeber WordPress Web Form Widget
What it does: Adds your AWeber web form to your WordPress blog.

Why it’s good: It’s a quick and easy way to start gathering subscribers from your blog! You can create beautiful forms using our templates, then just log into WordPress to connect the form with your blog!

What Would Seth Godin Do
What it does: Popular marketer Seth Godin recommends using cookies to distinguish between new visitors and returning ones. This plugin adheres to his advice by welcoming new visitors with a special message and invites them to subscribe to your mailing list.

Why it’s good: New people coming in may not know who you are or what you do. This plugin gives you the ability to differentiate how you approach new visitors vs. repeat ones. This means you can give new visitors more background information while also asking them to subscribe.

CalendarPress
What it does: Allows you to include upcoming events plus a signup system on your blog.

Why it’s good: People can see what you’re doing and when. You can list the schedule of topics you plan to talk about, webinars and podcasts, or live events you’ll be hosting. This can be a way for you to set expectations for subscribers, and get them curious to see what’s in your emails.

Include your calender near your web form, so those that are interested can immediately sign up.

Encourage Sharing

Facebook Share
What it does: Facebook Share adds a link that allows Facebook users to easily share your post.

Why it’s good: Facebook currently has over 500 million users! You want your material shared on Facebook so more people can come back to your site and subscribe.

Make sure you have one of the list building plugins set up so any new visitors coming from these Facebook links can subscribe!

Twitter is another popular social media site with over 200 million registered accounts. There is a plugin called Tweet This that you can also include for Twitter users.

Sociable
What it does: Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us.

Why it’s good: Readers are able to use links to bookmark posts via different platforms. If people continue to bookmark and go back to your posts, they are more likely to want to subscribe. They will have seen that your content is helpful and they continue to go back to it and share it.

You can set up a form that allows subscribers to choose which list they would like to subscriber to, and one of those lists can be for just your blog posts.

Learn What Subscribers Want

WP Polls
What it does: Allows you to set up a poll on your blog for readers.

Why it’s good: You can learn more about what your audience wants. You can ask questions about how often they’d like you to email, what you should talk about, or learn the demographics of your audience. Once you have more information, you can use it for content ideas when creating emails.

Post Ratings
What it is: Blog readers have the opportunity to rate your posts.

Why it’s good: Letting readers rate your posts can give you insight on what they like and don’t like. You can try presenting your content in different ways and see how your readers respond.

The blog broadcast feature can be set up so you can choose which posts go out to subscribers.

Optimize Your Marketing

All in One SEO Pack
What it does: Optimizes your blog for search engines.

Why it’s good: This particular plugin is good for both beginner and experienced marketers. A blog that’s optimized for search engines will get more traffic, so you’ll have more potential subscribers coming to your site.

Make sure you have a form on every page of your website, so no matter what page visitors are landing on they have the opportunity to sign up.

StatCounter
What it does: Gives you stats for how many visitors you’re getting on each page, where visitors came from, visitor behavior, etc.

Why it’s good: You can see what pages are popular, so you know where your web forms should go if you don’t want to have it on every page. You can also learn more about your audience, and you can use this information to set up split tests for your web forms.

Engage Subscribers

WP-Members
What it does: Restricts certain content to show only for registered subscribers.

Why it’s good: Allows you to share premium content to a select group. AWeber integrates with many shopping carts, so if it’s paid content you’re offering they can be sent a confirmation message for your list upon purchase. You can offer sneak peeks for your “premium content” to get people interested, but they have to subscribe to get everything.

Instant Highlighter
What it does: Readers can highlight parts of your page and then share that page.

Why it’s good: Your blog broadcast can be set up to include the first paragraph of your post and a “Read more” link for your subscriber to go to your site. From there, subscribers can use the highlighter.

It’s a fun way to get subscribers engaged and note their favorite parts. Sharing the highlighted version with friends can bring out what they/their friend find interesting, potentially bringing in more subscribers.

What AWesome Plugins Do You Use?

There are lots of plugins, so surely you know some that we don’t. What has helped your campaign?

True or False: Many marketers report that their blog is the most popular entry point for online visitors.

The answer is: true! A MarketingSherpa study has found this to be a new trend!

Which means if you haven’t started working your blog into your email marketing campaign, it’s time to start! Fortunately, AWeber helps make this easier for you with the blog broadcast feature.

If you’re ready to set up a powerful tool to improve your email marketing efforts, we’ve got you covered on how to do it and how it helps.

How Blog Integration Helps You

The blog broadcast feature makes it easy for you to reap the benefits of integrating your blog with email marketing. Here are some of the benefits:

• Increase sign ups

  If you’re getting a lot of traffic to your blog, that’s another opportunity to ask visitors to join your mailing list! Whether your blog is your website or just a part of it, you want to have a form available for potential subscribers to enter their information. If you’re using WordPress, we’ve got an app for that!

  You might also want to set up an email subscription just for your blog posts, in case that’s all some subscribers want. This can be done by creating a separate list that’s dedicated to blog post emails, rather than having one list for all emails. It’s good to offer options for receiving your emails, so subscribers aren’t just locked into one thing.

• Increase interaction with your site

  Your blog content gives your subscribers more to interact with. You can set up the blog broadcast to include a “Read More” link to get subscribers to click through to the website in order to see the rest of the post.

• Communicate a more personal tone

  Your blog can read as if you’re addressing a friend, so a blog broadcast can give your company the chance to set a more friendly tone.

  Opening up to your subscribers and connecting with them on a more personal level can help build subscriber loyalty.

• Provide more content for your emails

  The blog broadcast will allow you to send regular broadcasts to your subscribers. However, even if you don’t use the blog broadcast tool you can still integrate with your blog.

  You can simply link to a blog post (or a few posts) in your regular email newsletter. This way you’re still able to share more valuable content with your subscribers.

How to Set Up a Blog Broadcast

The blog broadcast will take content from your blog and automatically create that content in an email newsletter.

The way it does this is by checking your blog’s RSS feed. When you have a new post, the blog broadcast tool will pick it up and create a broadcast message for it. You can set your message to send at a certain time or after a certain number of posts.

You can also choose a template for your blog posts to appear in. The RSS variables will automatically pull your blog post (the dynamic content), but you can also set up your own text in the template that will be pulled in every time until you change it (the static content).

What Integrating with Your Blog Can Look Like

Here’s an example of AWeber customer Steven Aitchison’s blog:

Notice he has the sign up form on the right for interested visitors. You can also see his most recent post. This post was picked up by the blog broadcast tool and changed into an email:

Already Using Your Blog with Email Marketing?

Let us know if you’re already using your blog and how it has helped you!

When we released this tool, our thinking was that it would be a way for you to get email subscribers back to your blog in order to read your post, comment on it and take any other actions you wanted after getting to your site. So we designed the broadcasts to include partial blog posts rather than full posts.

While this has worked beautifully for many of you, some of you have asked us to provide a way for you to include full posts directly in the emails.

Now, you can. Here’s how:

Use The {!rss_item_content} Tag

While editing your blog broadcast template, if you want to include full posts rather than partial posts, simply replace the {!rss_item_description} tag with {!rss_item_content}.

{!rss_item_content} will merge the full HTML and images from your posts into your blog newsletter.

Do You Prefer Full or Partial Posts In Your Blog Newsletter?

With this available, will you send full posts in your blog newsletters? Or will you send partial posts?

What about as a recipient? Are full or partial posts better for you?

We’ve put together a quick 2-question survey to find out what you and all of our readers think!

Once we have your answers, we’ll share the results via Twitter and Facebook, so be sure to follow or “Like” us!

Update 7/26/10: Results are now available here – thanks everyone who took the survey!

Often, that valuable content is timeless, but only appears on the most-viewed part of your blog – the homepage – for a short time. Other posts push it off into your homepage and into oblivion.

This is frustrating – after all, other subscribers could benefit from this content, right? Even if they sign up days, weeks, months or years after you first published it?

Fortunately, with a simple email marketing tactic, you can resurrect your content from the depths of your blog and keep it in front of your ever-growing, ever-changing audience.

Turn Your Blog’s Best Content Into an Automated Email Newsletter

There’s no reason to put all that hard work into creating great content, then get just one round of clicks, comments and other actions from it. Why be satisfied with that?

Much of your blog’s content isn’t only relevant at one particular time. And to borrow from an old NBC slogan, if subscribers haven’t seen an old post, it’s new to them.

Get that old content out to them and make it fresh again!

Create an Autoresponder Campaign For Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps

1. Identify Your Best Content

Go through your old blog posts and figure out which ones are the truly high-quality ones that all subscribers need to see, even if they’re years old.

2. Turn Each Post or Group of Posts Into an Email

There are a handful of ways to go about this:

• The fastest, simplest way is to just copy and paste your full post content into an email, style as you see fit (if necessary) and save. No introduction, no conclusion, just the post as a standalone.

  I don’t necessarily think this is the best solution for everyone, but it’s far better than doing nothing – and if you’re really too pressed for time to do more than that, then at least do that.

• Copy and paste a compelling excerpt from your article, add a link to read the full post, and then add a brief introduction and conclusion to the email.

  I like this method because it encourages clickthroughs, but you may find that including the full post is better.

  Either way, including an intro and conclusion is a good idea because it gives you a chance to build context and continuity into the series of emails you’re sending.

• If you have two or more good posts on a topic, write an email that combines the ideas in those posts and links to them in context (this is something you might be doing with blog posts already).

  The more posts you have on a topic, the less you need to write.

  In fact, if you have say, 10 posts on a topic, you could write a simple introduction (“a lot of our readers want to learn about ______ because ______, so here are our most useful resources about that”) and then just provide a list of links to those posts.

3. Add Your Emails To Your Follow Up Series

Once you have your emails together, create them as follow up messages.

As you create each one, think about how much time you want to pass between those messages and schedule accordingly.

Remember, new subscribers will also be getting your new posts (right?), so spacing the emails too close together could be overkill, especially if a subscriber gets your new posts and your old posts on the same day.

• One way to get around this: deliver your follow up messages only on a certain day of the week – a day when you don’t send your regular blog newsletter – using Autoresponder Send Windows.

  For example, if you normally email your latest post/s to subscribers on Tuesdays, you might tell us to only deliver your follow ups on Fridays.

  That way, you could deliver these emails as automated weekly tips without sending subscribers 2 emails on the same day.

As you create more quality posts, you can either continue adding emails to your follow up series or edit your existing ones to work those posts into the emails you’ve already created.

Examples of Email Campaigns That Do This

1. Darren Rowse shares how he did this for his site digital-photography-school.com.
2. In our recent video interview with Ramit Sethi, he talks about doing this for his site iwillteachyoutoberich.com

3. At AWeber, we do this in some of our own email campaigns.

   For example, if you join AWeber and subscribe to our customer training series/newsletter, you’ll see some emails that take posts from this blog and rework them into email messages designed to expose you to educational content that you might not have ever seen otherwise.

Do You Revive Your Blog’s “Oldies But Goodies?”

What results have you seen from doing this? Any tips on this for the rest of your fellow readers?

Share your thoughts below!

Update: I happened across a recent post from AWeber customer Lynn Terry with some good thoughts on this topic.

Now that the idea that RSS and email can and should coexist has taken hold, what can bloggers learn from the email marketing world and use to make RSS to email (even more) worth their while?

RSS to Email Tips

While this is by no means everything you can do to make the most of RSS to email, hopefully these tips will form a list of best practices we can all build on to better engage our blogs’ email readers.

OK, here goes…

1. Start With a Plan.

   A number of articles I’ve read on “emailing for bloggers” (like this one) set this as the first thing you should do.

   And no wonder. This is step #1 for any successful email campaign.

   After all, if you don’t know why you’re converting RSS to email, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone to sign up, let alone deliver the kind of value that will effectively engage your readers.

   Ask yourself: What is the goal of my email campaign? How will I know if I am meeting that goal?

   The answers to these questions will help shape decisions about what content to include in your emails, how often you will send emails, and other tactical questions.

2. Decide How Often To Email (and How Much To Send In Each Email)

   Frequency and scheduling aren’t typically the first things you should think about for your email newsletter.

   However, with a blog I recommend thinking a bit more about them at first – especially if you have an established blog, or if you post frequently (if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, you might be better off focusing on creating content and getting potential subscribers to your blog).

   And it’s important to think about how much content to send in each email – you don’t want to overload subscribers, but you want to make sure there’s enough to make opening and reading your emails worth their time.

   Ask yourself: Will I send an email every time I have a new post? Once every few posts? Once a week? How much content is appropriate for one email? How many emails per week/month will my subscribers want to get?

   The answers to these questions will help you decide how often to schedule your emails.

3. Define Why People Should Subscribe

   One of my favorite lines (as anyone who has come to a webinar knows) is “Nobody wakes up and says, ‘Gee, I’d sure like to sign up for some email today.’”

   If you don’t give people a good reason (better yet, several good reasons) to subscribe, well… they won’t subscribe. Even if they love your blog.

   Sometimes the selling point is the simple convenience of being notified about new articles on your blog. Or only getting notified once a week instead of every time you post.

   Other times it’s getting something of value that non-subscribers don’t – this tip was offered by a couple people when I asked for RSS to email tips on Twitter:

   

   Whatever your “hook” is, clearly define it and then come up with a few (2-4) simple phrases or sentences that sell visitors on subscribing.

   These will serve not only as headlines for your signup form, but also as calls to action to help you get more subscribers faster.

Use these tips to develop your own effective blog newsletter (if you’re not already doing so, you can discover why you should here and then use AWeber’s RSS to email tool to automatically turn your feed into an email newsletter).

What’s Your #1 RSS to Email Tip?

If you blog, and convert your RSS feed to email, I (and the readers of this blog) would love to hear your best-loved tip on using email with blogs effectively.

You can either share your tip here or reply to me on Twitter – your tip just might make it into a future RSS to email post here…

So you can now use AWeber to convert from RSS to email to Twitter – and get your message out to your audience even more easily than before!

To tweet your blog newsletter, edit it – you’ll see the “Syndicate” and Twitter sections now appear:

Also, we fixed an oversight where personalization tags were being included in some tweets – so now, if you personalize your email subject lines with say, {!firstname_fix}, that field won’t appear in your tweet.

Enjoy – and don’t forget to follow AWeber, Tom, Sean and Justin (me) on Twitter!

While it’s not an email marketing event per se, it gives us an opportunity to learn about and discuss complementary media and marketing technologies and tools. (Plus it gives us a chance to get out from behind our computers and talk to local business owners and publishers in person.)

Just like last year, it was a great event with a lot of quality discussions on web publishing and building communities.

To give you an idea of what went on at the event, below are some of my notes from the event, as well as my presentation slides.

Email Newsletters and Podcasting

In the discussion, I aimed to point out that while email often gets denigrated in discussions of new media publishing, it still has an important role to play (not least due to its continued widespread use).

The discussion then turned to how bloggers and podcasters can incorporate email into their communication strategy, as well as some specific content/tactic ideas.

Here’s the slideshow from my presentation:

Interestingly, most if not all people at the talk were already on-board with the idea of incorporating email into their blogs and podcasts – they were mostly there for the tips!

So we spent a lot of time on the last handful of slides, talking about content ideas (see slides 12 and 13 above).

Do you have any other suggestions for email content? Share them below!

Meeting and Listening to Debbie Weil at PodCamp

In addition to presenting, Tracey and I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of quality sessions.

In a couple of these, Debbie Weil (author of The Corporate Blogging Book and pictured at right with me) discussed executive blogging and critiqued a couple of blogs live.

One of the most interesting points she made – that the success of a blog isn’t best measured by the number of comments or the sheer amount of traffic that it receives – applies quite well to email marketing, too.

We often get caught up in judging our email marketing success by those things that we can most easily track over the shortest period of time. Opens, clickthroughs and yes, even orders are important, but they don’t fully determine the value of your email campaigns.

That’s an important idea to keep in mind when building an email marketing program for the long haul – it helps to keep us from getting too promotional too often (and driving away subscribers who feel there’s not enough value in our emails) rather than building the relationships that drive repeat customers and referrals.

Debbie was also kind enough to give us a copy of her book and chat about email marketing for a while (thanks!).

We’re getting HTML email templates published at a faster pace than ever before, and today we’re happy to announce an addition that should be welcomed by bloggers who send a newsletter to build a stronger blog readership.

Something to Impress Your Blog Readers With…

What’s So Special About This Template?

The first, most important thing to mention is the fact that “Meadows”, like all the templates our designers make, has been tested across all of the major email applications email subscribers tend to use.

It just can’t be overstated how important testing is for all HTML email.

In addition, although it can be adjusted for general newsletter use, “Meadows” is geared specifically toward blog newsletter senders because it has:

• A built-in “Subscribe via RSS” block so subscribers can gracefully switch to getting your content via RSS if they eventually prefer that option.
• A “Related Blog Posts” block so you can link up other articles your subscribers can read.

Other Unique Features

If you’d like to use this template for your non-blog email newsletter marketing, just remove the two blog specific blocks mentioned above. There will still be other sidebar content left-over:

• This is the first time we’ve integrated a special “Share this email” box into a template. See if sharing your newsletter helps you to boost your subscriber numbers.
• There’s an explicit “Unsubscribe” block. We hate to see subscribers go, but it’s better they leave easily when they want to rather then making them jump through hoops.

Enjoy the free template, and let us know what you think!

Want To Know Right Away When New Email Templates Are Released?

Fill out the form below to join our blog newsletter and we’ll let you know when we post useful tips, advice, and other free content (like these templates) for your email marketing campaigns.

The newsletter goes out 1-2 times per week.

Naturally, as a permission-based email marketing company, we respect your privacy.

• Adding subscribe opportunities within posts
• Creating a dedicated blog subscribe page
• Getting current readers to bring you new ones

Today, let’s take a step back from these online and email marketing tactics and look at how you can grow your blog newsletter away from your website.

Blog Newsletter Grower #4: Find Outside Subscribe Opportunities

In the past week, how many people have you talked to face-to-face (either in a business or casual setting) where your business came up?

What about on the phone? Anyone?

You have ample opportunities to ask people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, even when they’re not on your blog!

For example, near the end of each of our live webinars we ask attendees if they’d like to subscribe to our blog newsletter. We import the folks who say yes shortly after the webinar ends.

Since we started offering the blog newsletter to webinar attendees, we can directly attribute an increase of 15.97% in our readership – that’s a lot of potential readers we’d have lost out on if we didn’t ask them to subscribe!

Where Can You Find These Outside Subscribe Opportunities?

Here are a few possibilities:

• In Person

  Whether it’s at a trade show/conference, a Meetup, your office, or any other appropriate setting, “face time” is a great time to offer up your blog and newsletter.

  If you exchange business cards with someone, bring up your blog in the conversation and ask for the subscribe. Write his/her response (“yes blog newsletter” or “no blog newsletter”) on the back of his/her card, so you know who to import and who not to.

• On teleconferences, webinars, training calls, etc.

  If you provide value on the call, attendees/callers are likely to want to get more value. Where better for them to get that than on your blog?

  Your webinars/conferences/etc, like your blog posts themselves, are sales letters for your blog.

  Put the effort into making them great, ask for the subscribe, and watch your blog newsletter grow.

• In your email signature

  There’s no law that says you have to put your site’s homepage in your email signature (well, unless you work for a company that mandates it).

  Your blog, or even your blog subscribe page, may be a more useful landing page for people clicking from your email signature, and may lead to more subscribers.

  This isn’t likely to bring in as many people as the other tactics discussed here, but every subscriber counts, right?

• On articles or guest posts you write for other blogs

  Typically, when you write an article (either for an article site or a news publication) or a guest post on another blog, you’re allowed a signature at the end of your article.

  Just as you should add subscribe opportunities within posts, you should give people who read your articles and guest posts the chance to easily join your blog newsletter too.

• Other business communications

  Do you ship physical products? Take a recent post (or highlights from several recent posts) and print a one-page insert that exposes customers to your blog and encourages them to subscribe.

  Do you give away or sell digital products (such as ebooks/whitepapers)? Include references to your blog and blog newsletter on the “about” section or in the footer of each page.

  Can customers/readers reach you by phone? Mention your blog in your outgoing voicemail message, or in your phone menu.

Opportunities Are Everywhere… Take Them!

In reality, there’s an infinite number of ways you could translate “expanding beyond your blog.” These are just a few of the ways you can get more blog subscribers outside of having them find your blog on their own.

So let me close this 4-post series with a reminder: there are always opportunities to grow your blog newsletter. Keep your eyes open for them!

Do you promote your blog and blog newsletter in other “outside” situations like the ones mentioned today?

If so, where and when? What have you found to be effective? Share your experiences below!