Some websites or themes come with built in optin forms, but most don’t. However there are some plugins we can use, and you can usually get the code from your email service.
I use Mailchimp. A lot of people like Aweber. Both are free to start but get increasingly
expensive. Mailchimp lets me get the code to add to my page or sidebar.
The style won’t always look right though, it depends on your blog’s CSS.
And you shouldn’t use “Subscribe to my list.”
You need to give them a reason. What are they going to get? Why should they? Otherwise they’ll be ignored. At the very least,
On my blog, I had “sign up to get four free books” – but that wasn’t focused enough, so I changed it to this:
On my book covers site, I have an optin form that looks like this:
The books on top is an image, the dark form is a WordPress Optin Plugin made by Codeleon.
There are other optin box WordPress plugins so you may need to test a few; or it is often worth paying extra for a premium one that looks better and has more functions.
I’m going to talk more about popups later, but for most author websites you should avoid them (I’ll explain why in another post).
However, a lot of people will say that you shouldn’t even put an optin form on your site, because you’ll get higher conversion if you use an image promising the benefits and “click here” button – people are more likely to sign up if they see the optin form after they’ve take action. For that reason, I made some sidebar optin offer templates you can use and put them here
I could also add a direct link to my signup form like this.
