What Did BizSugar Taught Me About List Building?

Are you always looking for the right list building techniques that really work? If the answer is yes, then welcome to the club which consists more than 50 million bloggers around the world.

List building is a technique used by bloggers (like you and me) to build more followers and subscribers. 

If you think that finding the right opt-in form for a website is hard, think again.

Previous, I had shared on my email list building technique from scratch. If you have yet to read it, I suggest that you take a quick peek at it here.

Briefly, I wrote which opt-in form works the best and how to go around it. As for the record, about 35% of my signups come from the featured opt-in form like this one below:

If you finding for list building techniques or ways to extend your mailing list, I suggest you to do that (the above) NOW!

But here’s the thing; featured call to action (CTA) could easily backfire you especially when you are trying to get ‘involved’ with the big boys.

I was lucky to be able to have a quick discussion with BizSugar support team on using the right list building techniques. More juicy parts below!

*Important disclaimer: Kudos to the team over at BizSugar who took my inquiry seriously and they were more than just patience in answering them. I know I am a tough customer but thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Link building catastrophe

I am always a website speed junkie and really passionate about link building. Recently I was building my authority with BizSugar and I came to something so catastrophe. Here’s the snippet of the email:

 

 

I was stunned and speechless. The featured CTA which had been serving me well with 35% of total signup,  got to be either removed or I’ll lose my backlinks from BizSugar.

The concept here is having a featured opt-in form is rather distracting. Agree to disagree?

I wasn’t happy about it and decided to discuss over the matter with BizSugar. And finally, the last reply which connects the dots together.

 

 

This was huge!

I doesn’t blame BizSugar for their terms and conditions but this incident really thought me something about list building.

Over using your featured opt-in form is a bad, bad move. And yes, I have a featured CTA on every page!

Immediate action plan: Change all my featured opt-in CTA!

Now this got me thinking. Will there be more established websites that sees this as an issue? Of course, this wouldn’t be good right?

Related article: The battle for the best email marketing service – AWeber vs MailChimp

Research that could change my list building techniques forever

I decided to check if BizSugar is the only one who enforces that rule. I don’t want to have all my articles or backlinks being deleted just because I was crazy about building an email list for myself!

Out of 10 websites that I checked (and read their terms and conditions), 8 of them does not allow advertisements to be placed right above or below the title. Of course, we can debate that opt-in box and ads banner are two different things but do you really want to go down that road?

I was chatting with Corina and she basically ‘confirmed’ that as well.

If you have no idea who is Corina, she is the woman behind Work From Home Concepts. Getting her insight on the matter was a great boost and proof for me.

Enough said!

Did BizSugar taught me anything about list building?

List building lessons:

1. Do not over use featured opt-in forms

2. Using featured opt-in forms are accepted if they are right in size

Yes it does and it is a great advise indeed!

Even thought building an email list with featured opt-in forms could be a good move, but some readers don’t really like it. Honestly speaking, having an oversize and featured CTA could be very distracting instead.

Big sites such as BizSugar doesn’t really have the time to ‘check out’ each post. Therefore, this is probably the best way to control the quality of the posts submitted.

Now, what should I do since I have to live without my lovely, featured opt-in form? I wasn’t ready to kiss good bye my list building plans and thus, here are some counter measures I did:

1. Enable floating opt-in form on sidebar for all posts
2. ‘Overhaul’ all my opt-in forms with the hopes of increasing the sign up rate

Of course, the biggest question is, “Will these email list building techniques work?”

Sadly, I can only judge the performance of this method after a month or so but I have prepare myself mentally to see a drop of my signup rate … mentally 🙂

I am sure this obstacles will not deter my link building plans but certainly, there is something call side effect right?

And if you STILL not building an email list right now, you REALLY need to see these slides.

 

Back to you

I hope this article is able to ‘tickle’ your thoughts a little especially when it comes to list building.

Tell me if you are using a featured opt-in form for your website and how is works out for you.

Yes, do it right NOW using the comment form below and please hit the red button (below) to share it with your friends.