Article Marketing Strategies: How To Get Readers To Subscribe To Your Email List

What can you do to entice a reader to your site?

Reader question:

I’m really new at this and I’d like to hear several suggestions. I know the trick is to entice people to sign up for your newsletter, but how? Offering something free is great, but what if you don’t have anything?

Excellent question!

Alright, let’s backtrack a little…

The job of your resource box is to entice your reader to click the link there and go back to your website.

When they get to your website, the next step (for you) is for them to sign up for your newsletter.

A common technique for engaging a person into signing up for your list is to offer them something of value for free, such as an e-book, an audio with helpful tips, a coupon, or something else.

Now, what sort of information could you put in your resource box that would make someone want to go to your website and subscribe to your newsletter when you have nothing free to offer them?

1 – You can create something free to give away–that is what I do.

I consider it part of my marketing materials. Here’s an idea that you should be able to put together with minimal effort and expense.

With the articles that you are writing, after a while you will have enough to form an e-book.

Your articles should be educational, offering valuable information to your target readers, and after you’ve amassed enough of them you can organize them into an e-book (perhaps each article being a chapter). Then you can give that away as your incentive to sign up to your email list.

The e-book does not have to be of epic length–it could be just 10 or 20 pages long, but it must be chock full of helpful info.

Or here’s another way to think of it–create an outline for your e-book (what topics you’d like to cover), and then start writing articles to fill in the outline. Submit the articles. When you have written and submitted all the articles to fulfill the outline, then you will have your e-book.

You will have to do some editing and tweaking, but for the most part this “free gift” is already in your possession, just waiting to be assembled.

I really encourage you to make your articles do double duty. Writing articles does take commitment, time and mental focus, so why not use your content to serve several purposes rather than just one?

2 – Alternatively, you don’t have to give something away for free.

What you do need to offer is something that will be of value to the people in your target market. Here are some other suggestions for resource box incentives:

Sometimes the newsletter in itself is enough of a free gift. You might want to have some sample newsletters on your website that people can view, so they can see the value that you are offering ahead of time.

If you do not have a newsletter, but simply want to create a resource box that will lure readers back to your website, then in your resource box you still need to come up with a reason why the reader should go to your site.

A great service: Maybe you are offering a valuable service that your reader is in need of. You can tell the reader what they have to gain by learning more about your services at your site.

A great blog: If someone liked your article, then they will be tickled to hear that you have a blog with more helpful content.

A ’sneeze page’: Why not create a page on your website that lists your article titles, a short description of each article, and a link to each article? That is a sneeze page for your articles, and it makes it easy for you to show off your previously published content in a way that is appealing to readers.

Conclusion

These free gifts we’ve talked about here can be created at virtually no cost to you. The most expensive part of creating the free gift is your own time, but you only need to create it once and then you can offer it as an incentive to sign up to your newsletter list indefinitely. A little work goes a long way.

Photo credit:

Presents Presents Presents! by danagraves

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