What do all successful internet marketers and online business owners have in common? They have a loyal list of subscribers, or a mailing list, that they can use to draw REPEAT visitors back to their website over, and over, and over (okay, you get the picture) again. But first…
Jonathan Beebe from the Online Income Blog shares how he achieved blogging success and made money from having repeat visitors on his blog.
Why Should You Care About Repeat Visitors?
It’s been proven time and time again that most of the people who visit your website DON’T follow through with your intended course of action. Even worse, they NEVER return to your website. Don’t believe me? Take a look at your stats.
It’s not necessarily that you have bad content, or that they are uninterested in what you have to offer. There are a lot of scenarios that could cause a would-be client/customer to click off of your website and never return.
For example, what if they came across your blog, thought it was interesting but had to get ready for work right away? Sure, maybe they planned on returning later, but that’s easy for anyone to forget — no matter how remarkable your blog was.
However, if you were to encourage them to either subscribe to your feed, or to enter their email address, YOU could then remind them about your website by sending them quality content on a regular basis (what you’re already doing on your blog, right?!).
For that reason, along with the fact that it’s been proven most people need to see what you have to offer before they do anything, should be more than enough reason for you to CARE about attracting repeat visitors to your blog or website.
What Repeat Visitors Did For My Business
When I first started online, I didn’t really care too much about attracting repeat visitors. Sure, I’ve always heard “the money is in the list,” but I wasn’t willing to pay monthly fees for an autoresponder since I really didn’t know what to do with my list once I started building it.
Needless to say, my “online business” (if you could call it that back then) was making close to nothing because I was relying on “hit and run” traffic to make my money online (or lack thereof). Hit-and-run traffic are the people who come to your site and never return.
Long story short, I found a way to encourage my readers to give me their name and email address, built my list, and a relatively short time after I accomplished two of my main goals:
- I quit my job to work full-time online.
- I can fully support my family with the income I make online (so my wife wouldn’t have to work either).
Start Building Your Readers’ Trust
Like I said, one of the main reasons I avoided “building my list” was that I had no idea what to do with my list once I got one. I didn’t want to be like the “gurus” and send promotion after promotion — I knew that would just cause people to unsubscribe (since I’m not a “guru” myself).
So instead, I decided to do everything I could to increase the chances of people trusting me. After all, if people trust me, then they will also be more willing to purchase what I recommend to them (affiliate sales, and my own products), as well as take the advice I was posting on my blog.
So here’s what I did, and what you should do to start retaining your visitors right away:
- Create a short, free report related to your niche (could be as long or short as you want, just make sure it’s useful).
- Put an opt-in form on your blog that will give your report away to your visitors in exchange for their first name and email address (your autoresponder will give you the code you need for this).
- Now, every six days or so, send them your latest useful blog post, except every THIRD mailer…
- On every THIRD mailer, send them a link to a product that you recommend, or a review for a product that you are affiliated with. Make sure it’s a high quality product though or people will unsubscribe!
What’s Supposed to Happen Next?
If you follow that schedule above every single week as you continue to post to your blog regularly, you’ll start noticing a few positive things happening.
- First, your traffic will increase on a regular basis without any extra effort on your part… and it’ll be the best type of traffic: repeat visitors.
- Also, your profit will always increase as your list grows. With the 6-day schedule I just described, you’ll have an average of 1 – 2 promotional mailers go out every month (with high quality article mailers going out way more often than that). I guarantee that the days your “promo” mailers go out, they will be your most profitable days… especially as your list grows.
- You’ll also notice that your “unsubscribe rate” will be very low, and your “open rate” will be very high because your subscribers will be used to getting high quality information from you.
If you don’t want to promote to your mailing list, that’s fine too, just use your list as a way to drive traffic to your blog. Whenever I post a good article to my blog and announce it to my list, I always get a huge spike in traffic that day. And guess what? Most of them are repeat visitors (once again, very valuable).
Start Retaining Your Visitors Now
So if that’s not enough to convince you that repeat visitors are what you should be striving for, then I don’t know what will! However, a business (whether online or offline), is about testing and seeing what really works well for you.
So don’t take my word for it — try it out for yourself! Build your list in the manner I described above for six months to a year, and tell me if it doesn’t improve your “making money online” and/or blogging efforts ten-fold!
23 Discussions
you make it seem as though retaining visitors is so simple, most of us know why its so important, doesn’t mean we no how to retain visitors,
Retain the visitors. That is the most important thing, especially if you are trying to make money by selling products or promoting affilate products. There are many ways to get traffic. But, we all seem to concentrate on those more than our own blog. If we can’t make our blog a useful resource for visitors, then they will just come and go. So we need to make sure those visitors come back. We can achieve this by producing quality content in regular basis. Offer things that will benefit the visitors for free.
Stop seeing your visitors as walking wallet and start looking at them as person, who can help you to learn. Build a strong community arround your blog.
Adam @ Selling Manager Ebay´s last blog ..10 Most Effective Ways to Sell Your EBook
I love how you explained how and why this works. This is the reason right here why building a list is important to your business.
I always tire of getting emails which are constant offers about the next greatest product. It’s nice to sign up to something where people offer content and actually talk to me. Great post
Christopher´s last blog ..An Easy Solution To Solve All Your Problems
Building a mailing list is definitely on my to do list but it always seems to get pushed down and down. I think this post may give me the kick up the bum that I need.
Glen´s last blog ..5 Security Tips For Your Forum!
Thanks a lot for the great post! Many bloggers don’t know the importance of building a mailing list.
Thanks,
Onibalusi
Onibalusi Bamidele´s last blog ..7 keys to build a better website
Thanks for the comments so far everyone! I’ve got individual replies below:
@Peter – I understand it can be complicated, and seem like a big hassle at first (which is why I avoided it for so long in the beginning), but you can start by following the steps I described in the article. If it’s too over your head, I’m offering a free report on my own website that goes through the above steps in great, step-by-step detail.
@Adam – Great advice! That’s exactly the message I was trying to express in my article
@Christopher – I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I think everyone’s getting tired of being on those mailing lists where you get pitched promo, after promo, and so on. There’s a demand for quality content, and those who are able to provide it to their lists will make way more money despite the fact that they are sending way less promotions, and even have way smaller lists!
@Glen – Definitely don’t wait to build your list! It’s something you should do from the beginning… I know that because I waited and I regretted it later. It doesn’t take THAT much effort, especially if you consider how much more money you’ll be making (as long as you do it right).
@Onibalusi – Nope, many bloggers don’t… and I think that’s why 95% of blogs (according to NY Times 2009) are in “abandoned” status.
Thanks for your comments everyone, look for more guest articles from me here at Blogussion again in the near future!
Jonathan Beebe´s last blog ..Is Your Blog Eco-Friendly?
Thanks very much, i will check out your report.
That’s very good practical advice there. If I create a report as a carrot for opting in, how do I present it nicely to the reader? Guess there should be a Java script type of ‘report’ and opt-in form?
Jorgen Sundberg´s last blog ..How to Get Speaker Bookings: Write a Fact One-Sheet
@Jorgen Sundberg – It’s probably best to answer your question with a ‘practical’ example. You can visit my blog (just click my name in this comment) and see how I entice them to opt-in there. I use a DHTML alert window the first time they visit my page, but that’s not required. You can also see an attractive banner link at the top of my sidebar that links to my free report page. It’s unobtrusive, yet very attractive and presents a good “benefit” to make them want to subscribe for free.
You can also see it in action here at Blogussion (Alex uses a free course to ). The top-right (or top of the sidebar) seems to be the universal “opt-in” place, but I’ve also seen embedded in big header areas. I took a look at your site (VERY nice by the way), and you have a good spot for your email subscribers form, but I think I’d bump it up one. I would replace that though with a mailing list opt-in form, and possibly give them an incentive and place a picture above the form… I think your retention rate would go WAY up if you did that.
Most people don’t really care to ‘Subscribe to Email Updates’, but they do like getting a valuable free report that’s directly related to the content on your site. You can even re-package some of your existing content into an eBook (report) and use that as your free report. It’s useful information, and while they can visit your archives to get it, it’s very convenient and people would love to have that.
Great question! Hope that helped.
Jonathan Beebe´s last blog ..Is Your Blog Eco-Friendly?
You made a small but very important point of ensuring that if you’re going to recommend an affiliate product, it needs to be good or your readers will unsubscribe. Oftentimes, we should review and recommend the ones we’ve actually used.
Julius´s last blog ..Why Is Braille on Drive-Through ATMs?
Thanks this is my first visit in your blog and i have got a great post. Yes. If we could get trust at first then every thing will be according to your wish. But getting trust Isn’t too easy. We need to work hard to get that
I agree that building an email list is the #1 most important thing in actually making money from a blog – and getting people to come back. And it’s amazing how many bloggers don’t put an emphasis on it!
It’s also interesting to see different people’s takes on what type of content you should email to subscribers. I’ve personally noticed that when I email subscribers of my lists stuff I’ve posted on a blog, they sometimes realize it’s duplicate content – and unsubscribe!
On the other hand, it’s a lot of work to write totally unique content for a list. So it’s a balance. And sometimes people appreciate an update without having to actually visit the blog.
The power of having a great relationship with your subscribers and being able to recommend a product to your list and know that you’ll make sales is pretty awesome.
Nice post!
Forest´s last blog ..Blogger vs. Wordpress: What’s The Best Platform For Your Blog?
First I would probably want to find out the percentage of list subscribers that are also blog subscribers. if it’s HIGH then I might rethink the blog post idea; isn’t that just duplication and likely to annoy?
This percentage should be high, quite high when you first announce it on your blog, but keeping an eye on those numbers over time, seems like a good idea to me.
Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Blog Subscriptions – Methods to my Madness part 2 of 2
@Julius: I also recommend trying out any products before promoting them to your list, your credibility with your subscribers depends on it.
@Alamin: Trust isn’t too hard. As long as you’re genuine, give them some background information, and provide value to your subscribers… that’ll build trust better than you could imagine.
@Forest: It can be hard to come up with a lot of unique content for both your blog AND your subscribers, which is why I highly advocate being passionate about the online topic you decide to pursue.
I personally put more emphasis on my mailing list subscribers because they’ve already proven to be more loyal readers than people who might’ve just stumbled across my blog. The mailing list has also proven to be much more profitable (as long as I continue to treat them right).
What I do is create a separate, noindex page on my blog that’s not displayed publicly, but is where I post content that I direct my mailing list subscribers to in order to avoid the duplicate content issue.
@Denis: As I mentioned in my reply to Forest, what I do is just create a separate page that’s not publicly shown on my blog, and host the articles that I send to my mailing list there. If you need to, tune down the posting frequency on the blog so you have time to make at least one article (or promotion, depending on if it’s that time) for your list that week.
Thanks a lot for your comments everyone, glad you enjoyed the article
Jonathan Beebe´s last blog ..Is Your Blog Eco-Friendly?
Now that’s an interesting idea, thanks man.
Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..What are YOUR Top 3 Social Sharing Recommendations
Hi Jonathan – thanks for the info. Is there a certain autoresponder that you would reccommend? Thanks!
@sara: I’d recommend either Aweber.com or GetResponse.com, they are very reliable and have a large user base of very happy customers.
Jonathan Beebe´s last blog ..About Me: The Long Version
Hey Jonathan,
Awesome Post. This is defiantly in my to do list. Great post worth reading!!
Thanks for sharing this great post.
Thanks,
Dev
@Dev: No problem, I’m glad you liked it!
Jonathan Beebe´s last blog ..About Me: The Long Version
I tend to agree with you that retaining customer is too important and the points you mentioned can be helpful in retaining customers and readers. I think it’s all about the trust once you got it you win the bet. In addition, writing simple and to the point text is in your favor as well. Sometimes people turn away your blog if they find it hard to read and understand. So use as much simple vocabulary as you can.
You Can Get Free Tips Now – You Will Learn How to Make Money Online
First you need to spend some time online and decide how much you want to put into building your future? Like anything in life that is worth doing you must do it right. Do searches and map out a plan of attack so that you don’t jump in and spend a lot of time doing it wrong.
Learn Great: Wealth Tips
It is amazing to me that now with the internet how easy it is to make money online. Probably now more than ever it is great for a person who want to make some extra money to help with the bills and the mortgage, or for the person who is looking to start a new career with making a really great living with their own online money making business. It is good to sit down and decide which one of these categories you fall into so you know how best to spend your time.
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Learn how to: Make Money Online
There are others ways to make money online such as blogging, eBooks and more. I suggest that you do your research on all of these and see which fits you best. They all are proven to make money online and can make you successful.
pttugas´s last blog ..Make Money Online – Sure Fire Tips For Success
Quite agree with you but article should also cover other aspects or you should write a chain post on this topic.
Web Marketing Tips´s last blog ..Rand Fishkin: Search Engine Landscape 2010
really interesting read. will make sure to take this into account for my “to-do” list…
Teh Tarik Drinker´s last blog ..So Close Yet So Far Away
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