6.How To Build Mailing Lists

You have worked through sections 1 through 5 of my ’10 steps to creating a successful affiliate marketing website’ and it’s time to learn how to build an email list. In this lesson, you will learn how I created a popup subscriber that sends out an automatic email, using WordPress PopUp and MailPoet to create a FREE working system that’s good for up to 2000 subscribers. By the end of this lesson, you will have created a popup subscriber similar to this. Incidentally, you will notice a scrollbar on this example but it will not show on the live PopUp. First Step In Building Mailing lists. Download WordPress PopUp and MailPoet, install and activate. I will take it as read that you are happy with downloading and installing WordPress plugins. Now open WordPress PopUp and follow these instructions. With WordPress PopUp installed, look to the left-hand navigation in WordPress and select the PopUp button to open, then select the ‘Add New‘ button on the top left of the main page. In this image below, you see I have one popup created called FREE E-Book!, now we are going to create a new popup called ‘Twitter E-Book’. Selecting the ‘Add New‘ button’ opens a new offering. I have given it the name of Twitter E-Book and below this, we are presented with editable areas, PopUp Contents, Appearance, Behaviour, Displaying Conditions, and Custom CSS Edit PopUp Content All I have done is add a heading, subheader, some copy on the main page, then I added a photo and checked the ‘Hide image for Mobile device’ and aligned the photo to the right. I hid the image in mobile devices because after testing I feel the image takes too much room and gives a poor user experience. You will also notice at the bottom of the pane the ‘Call To Action Button’ which I have left empty. Edit Appearance Settings With the free version, you can only use the ‘Simple’ appearance option and either round or square corners, but can choose the color schemes for headers, subheaders, links and button text. I choose not to use custom sizes because I want the popup to be responsive. Select how you want the popup to appear using the ‘Popup display animation‘ and ‘Popup closing animation‘, There are a few options in the free version which you should try for yourself to see which one suits you. I like Bounce and Bounce Out. Edit Behaviour Settings You will notice some of these options are not available in the free version but we have enough to make a working popup. Firstly, I set the popup to appear after 10 seconds which I feel is long enough for the reader to know if they want to subscribe, based on reading my post for the initial 10 seconds. I then checked the ‘never see this message again‘, allowing the reader to dismiss this and never see it again as a common courtesy. Then, I also checked the box ‘Click on the background does not close PopUp‘ and finally, select from the Submit Form dropdown ‘Always close on submit‘. Edit Display Conditions For this purpose of this exercise, I chose not display on mobile at all because the popup takes too much real estate on a small mobile device. Then I also selected ‘PopUp shown less than‘ and specific ‘2‘. So if the reader has seen this less than twice, the popup will ‘pop’ Preview Now SAVE and press the ‘Preview PopUp’ button on the top right of the page That’s nice, but something is missing, right? Where is the data capture? Where does the reader add their name, email, and hit the subscribe button? This is where MailPoet comes in. How To Use MailPoet Create The Email Reply First, let’s create the email reply the subscriber will receive. Under MailPoet in the navigation, you see four options, Newsletter, Subscribers, Settings, and Premium. Select Newsletters. Select the same options as I have set and give it a subject line. Then NEXT STEP You'll now edit the email the subscriber will receive as their newsletter or download, whatever you have promised the reader will be delivered with this email. Now add the copy and images for your branding. My super simple example has my logo, two images, and two readers Select Next Step and make sure you enter your contact details specific to this campaign, which could be anything, like contact@yourdomain.com or subscribe@yourdomain.com and Activate it. The form has now been created and you now see it in your list of newsletters. So, let’s take a look at it. Preview More Settingsr In the settings section, you will see six tabs Basic, Forms, Signup Confirmation, Send With, Advanced, and Add-ons. We will not need to look at Addons but the other tabs have some configurations we need to be aware of. Basic Tabr The basic tab contains the common settings for your domain rather than individual campaigns, so fill this out once and leave it. Form Setting In the forms area we create the data capture which is eventually going to be added to the popup we’ve already created, so, select the form tab and create a new form. Drag and drop the required data capture elements from the right side into the form on the left. First name, Last name etc… Edit the submit button by hovering over it and selecting edit display Select mailing list from drop down Add the confirmation text to let the reader know subscription has been successful, and they will be receiving an email. Save your setting and then look below to see the option to use HTML, PHP or iFrame for using in a widget. I will be utilizing this option not to put in a widget, but to add to our popup. For this project, I am going to use the iFrame by clicking on iframe in the highlighted copy you see above. Now copy the iframe and paste it into the popup. For this to work, we need to select the TEXT tab of the Main PopUp Content area and paste in the iframe. Now save it and check it outr Finished Result Now you have added your iframe the final result, give or take any tweaks you may want to make you have the finished popup with data capture that looks like this’ What Next You have created a popup and a reply email but you still have a little configuring for this to run automaticallyr Sign Up Confirmation Tab This is an email that is sent to the subscriber asking for them to confirm opt-in to your mailing list, and what you see in this area is the copy they receive, so make sure you are happy with the content here. Then save and move to Send With Tab Send With Tab Not much to do here, just select the radio button * Your own website *Delivery method PHP Mail, and add your email account to test everything is working. Save and move to Advanced tab. Advanced tab Again, not much to do here, just add your name and email address for replies and bounced email. You Are Finished Now you have a working data capture popup on your website, which sends an opt-in email, followed by your automated email that you built to deliver content and news. MailPoet builds a database of subscribers so you can build email marketing campaigns and send out automatically to your subscribers. But this is a tutorial for another day as it is beyond the scope of this introduction to building a free mailing listr To view your subscribers, simply select to subscribers button below MailPoet in the left-hand navigation in your WordPress dashboard. I hope this has been helpful but if you think I have missed something let me know. Don't forget to work through all the 10 steps of creating a successful affiliate marketing website. 1.Build your free site 2.Hosting 3.Niche Market 4.Keywords 5.Google analytics 6.Mailing lists 7.Writing content 8.Affiliate links 9.Traffic generation 10.Testing! My next post will be on writing content so until next time, take care and I look forward to seeing you back here soon.