What is the single most important thing to do if you want your readers to become subscribers?
It is true that “The money is in the List”. The wise men in Internet Marketing said this long ago. But like most things that we tend to ignore, we often ignore the most obvious and the simplest of things only to find that our strategy is not working.
I picked it up from one of my favorite bloggers on the internet – Brian Clark at Copyblogger.
The Single Most important thing to do to improve optin rates is to win the trust of your reader.
I am a frequent reader at Copyblogger, though not all posts are my kind. I spend some time browsing through content that I love and when I find them, I thoroughly enjoy reading it. I loved Copyblogger so much that I even tried to imitate Brian’s earlier design partially when I created Dkspeaks.com.
But, Why am I discussing Brian Clark and Copyblogger?
There’s a reason to it. A couple of days back as I was browsing through Copyblogger (I really love the new design of the blog and I was actually admiring it), I stumbled upon something on the sidebar of the blog. It was a small banner that read “the Free Copyblogger Newsletter – Internet Marketing for Smart People”. It immediately attracted me and something prompted me to click on it.
It took me to a totally different page, albeit on Copyblogger itself. It looked as if it was a custom sales page designed for Copyblogger to gel into the existing blog design. It indeed was a sales page, but with a difference.
Brian used this page to to sell his free 20-part course, that he was offering to anyone subscribing to his newsletter. There was no gimmicks, no images of ebooks, cd covers etc. It was a simple sales page. Brian is a master at copywriting, so the sales page obviously had to be good.
But there was something special about the sales page. Brian, kind of explained the crux of whatever he was offering to his subscribers for free, in his sales page and that too, in a very simple language.
The headline, grabbed my attention. I was forced to read the rest of the page. On reading the rest, I began to trust Brian and his words. There was some kind of a trust that kept building as I read through the page. By the time I came to the last paragraph, which was a detailed explanation of the privacy statement and my next actions, I was completely won. I signed up for the newsletter.
What was so different about this page at Copyblogger and What did Brian Clark do differently here?
Somewhere in this page Brian won my trust. He was very transparent and I somehow felt that I would get something valuable if I subscribe to his newsletter.
It is extremely important to win the trust of your reader so that you can convert them to a subscriber and then to maintain that trust so that you can enjoy a long term relationship with them. Win trust and your optin conversions will see a manifold increase.
BTW, I am currently working on something similar to what Brian has done, though I know that I will not be able to match the Copyblogger copywriting skills.