If you don’t know how to set up a blog to automatically drive new visitors to your site, then please subscribe to my “insider tips” newsletter (see form at the top of the sidebar), or go here to learn more about my “step-by-step” tutorials on how to set up a blog.

Now, if you have been involved in any type of business marketing before, then you are probably familiar with the concept of lists, e.g. customer lists, email lists, prospect lists, opt-in lists, customer database, etc.

And if you have ever subscribed to any newsletters or update lists from professional internet marketers, you will soon also become familiar with the popular list building edict that “the money is in the list”.

In other words, if you are not building a list for your business, then you’re leaving money on the table. A lot of money!

As most marketing experts will tell you, it is much easier to sell your products and services to existing customers, than to keep investing time, effort and money searching for new customers.

If you offer real value and genuine products and services that benefit others, then it only makes sense that someone who has already bought something from you will be more likely open to hearing from you again, than someone who has never done any business with you before.

Putting this principle into practice, then, means that every time a prospect visits your site or a customer buys something from you, you should get their permission to keep in touch with them (e.g. via email) for the purpose of keeping them informed about anything that comes up in your business in the future that you believe they would benefit from knowing about – like new products, tips, “how to” information, sharing other customer experiences, etc …

To do this requires you to have a process in place to get their contact details (e.g. name and email address), and their permission to stay in touch.

Fortunately, you can incorporate both of these processes into one simple and effective strategy with an opt-in or subscription form, and begin building your list even before someone becomes a customer (i.e. before someone actually buys something from you).

An opt-in form placed on your web site or blog helps you collect the contact details of visitors who would like to stay in touch with you.

Your opt-in form process also includes things like:

• Letting people know why you are asking for their contact details (i.e. what specific purpose you will use their details for, e.g. to send them regular tips and updates, new product releases, etc.)
• What you will and will not do with their details (e.g. you will not sell their details to third parties).
• How they can unsubscribe from your list if they no longer wish to stay in touch with you

Once you have worked out the “front-end” of your customer list building strategy – i.e. where you want to place an opt-in form, and what aspects of your opt-in form process you will communicate to your customers to encourage them to join your list, then the next step is to set up the “backend” of your list building system, which refers to all the aspects involved in managing the information collected.

The most basic types of list management scripts simply collect your visitors details from the form fields you set up on your site, and then forward the information to you (e.g contact forms). You then manually extract the information from the form that is sent to you and input these details into your own list management system, be it an excel spreadsheet, or a more advanced type of application.

Sophisticated professional list management systems will automate all the essential tasks of list building, such as adding new subscribers to your database, setting up and scheduling sequential auto-responders, managing your messages, broadcasts and opt-outs, segmenting customer lists into targeted subgroups, split-testing emails, tracking how many users click on your message links, creating reports, and so on.

The service I personally use and recommend for all of the above is aweber.

Aweber offers a professional and highly affordable list building, auto-responder and email marketing solution. Some of their features include:

• Send Email Newsletters – Aweber lets you send engaging email newsletters to your opt-in subscribers.
• Publish A Signup Form To Your Website Or Blog – Publish a signup form to your site using a simple and intuitive point-and-click Web Form wizard.
• Create Autoresponders – Autoresponders allow you to build relationships with your subscribers. Autoresponders can welcome new subscribers, educate them about your products and services and drive your email readers back to your website, all on auto-pilot.
• Manage Unlimited Email Campaigns – With Aweber you can not only create unlimited sequential email newsletters for your subscribers and set the frequency for each message, but you can also create unlimited lists (e.g. for building lists on different niche markets, segmenting different types if users, etc …), send email messages as often as you want and manage all of your lists and messages from one account.
• Email Templates – If you want to send colorful, image-rich newsletters, Aweber offers over one hundred HTML email templates that have been tested for readability in all popular email clients, or you can paste in your own template, or create one from scratch using their point-and-click message editor.
• Email Deliverability – Aweber has one of the highest deliverability rates in the industry and has built relationships with most of the major ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This means that while many small businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to get their email delivered with all the spam blocking and filtering in place, your emails are almost guaranteed to get through just about every time.
• Free Expert Customer Support – Apart from the fact that AWeber is extremely easy to use and offers excellent educational materials such as a blog, knowledge base and video tutorials, they also provide access to free customer support staffed by real people via phone, email and live text chat.

In addition to the above services, Aweber also offers advanced email marketing tools such as:

• Send Blog Newsletters (RSS to Email) – The Blog Broadcaster feature automatically turns your RSS into email that you can send to readers daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you have something new on your blog.
• Email Web Analytics – You can easily see what’s working and what isn’t in your email campaigns with Aweber’s powerful testing tools and easy-to-read reports.
• Easy Shopping Cart Integration – You can integrate e-commerce with email marketing into your business.

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CLICK HERE FOR A FREE TEST-DRIVE
OF AWEBER’S EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

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Adding An Opt-In Form To A WordPress Blog

Adding a subscription form to a wordpress blog is quite simple. For example, I have an account with Aweber (I’ve been with them for several years now!).

Here’s how I added the opt-in form on the sidebar of my blog:

1. First, I created an opt-in form in my Aweber account using their web form wizard.
2. After creating and saving the form, I then copied the subscription form code to my clipboard.
3. Next, I logged into my blog.
4. I then added a text widget to the sidebar.
5. Finally, I pasted the code into the widget and saved.

As you can see, adding a subscription form to a blog is a pretty simple and straightforward process.

There are also plug-ins available that allow you to add an opt-in form to your Wordpress blog. One that I especially recommend you check out if you don’t want to mess around with code is MBP Optin Form Adder.

This FREE plugin from MaxBlogPress allows you to create optin forms to match your blog’s look and feel in just 4 easy steps. MBP Optin Form Adder is a very flexible plugin that allows you to style your opt-in form any way you want, place the form almost anywhere in your blog, and easily add (or switch) details from your autoresponder or email marketing solution providers.

Please note: Although plugins make it easy to add an opt-in form to your blog, you will still need to have an account with an autoresponder / email list management provider like Aweber or Get Response, etc.

I hope you have found this information on adding subscription forms to your blog useful. For more tips on using autoresponders and email marketing to improve your sales online, please consider subscribing to my “insider tips” newsletter. It’s FREE to join and I guarantee that you will only receive practical strategies that will improve your business, as well as learn about new methods, tools and resources before your competitors do.

CLICK HERE FOR A FREE TEST-DRIVE OF AWEBER’S EMAIL MARKETING,
AUTO-RESPONDER & LIST MANAGEMENT  SYSTEM

The main problem for most business owners when it comes to using social media to grow their businesses (and especially small business owners), is that there is too much new information to take in and so little time, that most people end up feeling either overwhelmed, or frustrated that they are missing out on some powerful ways to expand their business online and take advantage of all these new emerging technologies.

Take Twitter for example. Everyone’s talking about it. Many businesses are using it quite successfully to get their message out to a growing number of potential prospects and to keep in touch with existing customers, and some very successful Twitter marketers have even created guides on how to make money with Twitter (see Twitter Marketing Product Reviews for a review of some of the more popular guides on Twitter marketing.)

Part of using Twitter successfully to grow your business online is to get people “following” your tweets. To achieve this, however, you’ve gotta be tweetin’ often and follow some of the people who are following you. This means that there are tasks you have to perform on a regular basis (e.g. writing and posting tweets and clicking on links to follow people), which means piling on more work on your daily “to do” lists.

In this post, I am going to share with you a couple of simple strategies I use to help grow my businesses using Twitter that you can easily duplicate by following the instructions I am about to give you. At the very least, the automated strategies I am going to share with you will get your finger in the “Twitter pie” until you can devote more time to learning how to maximize the benefits of using social media for growing your business.

The strategies below assume you already have a Twitter account set up. If not, visit twitter.com and set up an account now (it’s best to set one up sooner rather than later, before someone else takes up the username you may want).

Step 1 – Set Up A Blog

A blog allows you to easily publish content online. If you don’t have a blog yet, then check out my “step-by-step” training product on how to install, set up and configure a fully optimized blog that will help you grow your business online fast.

Step 2 – Get TweetMyBlog Plugin

I have written a whole post about this fantastic free plugin for WordPress blogs here.

TweetMyBlog is free, very easy to install and it automatically notifies Twitter every time you publish a new post on your blog. It then links your automated Twitter post back to your blog, so visitors can read your post. (When I downloaded the plugin, the software developers also included a great and really useful FREE guide on how to use Twitter – what to do and what not to do, etc …)

Once you have set up a simple system for automatically notifying your Twitter followers about your new blog posts with TweetMyBlog, it’s time to take things to the next level.

Step 3 – Automate Twitter Account Management Tasks

When you first get started with Twitter, it can be fun to try and follow everyone who is following you and get to know what’s going on. After a while, however, it just becomes too hard to try and keep up with all of the messages flowing into your account. More importantly, however, is to develop a routine of regularly broadcasting and promoting your business to others.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just spend a couple of minutes each week writing a few great tweets about your products and services and special offers, then scheduling these messages to be delivered over the following week, say once or twice each day, or at a specific time to coincide with a particular event you will be attending or presenting at?

Well, this is what Social Oomph allows you to do.

Social Oomph is a fantastic FREE tool that allows you to automate and schedule your Twitter feeds, send welcome messages to new followers, and do so much more to help you promote and grow your business on Twitter. This tool has a free signup and a paid option. Obviously, you get a lot more benefit and functionality with the paid version, but the free sign-up option has many great features too, such as:

Auto Welcome – You can automatically send a message to new followers (and even rotate several different messages using their spinnable welcome message text feature).

• Auto Follow – Automatically follow people who follow you.
• Vet Followers - You can manually approve a new follower before you begin to follow them.
• Auto Unfollow – SocialOomph will automatically unfollow people who unfollow you.
• @Replies Digest Email – If you get too busy to check your replies in Twitter, this option will email you a digest of the replies other people have sent you.
• Keyword Alert – This is great and really useful feature that allows you to set up an automated search for tweets containing certain keywords. (One great use for this feature for example, is to see what other people are tweeting about your business, by simply adding your business name or domain address to the list.)

You can see a full list of all of the features and a comparison table when you visit their site.

I suggest you take up the FREE trial offer for the Professional level when you register for your FREE account, and get a feel of just how powerful this tool can be. Then, if you don’t think the upgrade is for you, just don’t renew at the end of your trial period and you will automatically revert back to the FREE membership.

Your first step, then, should be to open a free account with Social Oomph.

Once you’ve got your account set up, take a few minutes to go through the video tutorials that explain how to use all of the features and start automating some of the tasks you need to do for growing your business using Twitter.

Let me show you just how useful this tool is, using my audiobook store business as an example.

1) After setting up my account with Social Oomph, I then clicked on “Tweets’ > “New Tweet” and scheduled a message promoting one of my monthly special titles.

2) I then went ahead and scheduled several more tweets, using the “publish at exact time” feature.

3) In just a few minutes, I added and scheduled an entire week’s worth of posts. Each day, a new post will be automatically added to my audio book store Twitter account and sent to everyone following my tweets.

A terrific time-saving feature of this tool is that it allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts and schedule a ton of messages ahead of time.

Now, I can just go ahead and keep working on my business as usual, while my business marketing goes on happening 24/7 thanks to:

1. A blog that has been set up to notify search engines and feed directories automatically each time a new blog post is published (go here for more details: How To Set Up A Blog Step-By-Step Tutorials),
2. A plugin that automatically notifies Twitter of my new blog posts (TweetMyBlog)
3. A tool that automatically manages my Twitter posts and followers (Social Oomph)

After setting up all of the above (a one-time only effort), the total time required to keep growing my business online using blogs and social media tools like Twitter using the method I’ve just shared with you here is less than 2-3 hours per week (writing new blog articles and Twitter posts).

I hope you have found this information useful and I wish you great business success using these great new technology tools.

(click on the banner above to sign up with Social Oomph)

PS: If you want more special “insider” tips on how to grow your business using Twitter, then sign up to my FREE Newsletter below where I share with subscribers many proven strategies for growing your business online fast.

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PPS: Follow me on Twitter here: @internetadworks