Creating products and features to help our publishers thrive is our mission here at FeedBlitz HQ. After being contacted by today's guest blogger and told of her great success using our SmartForms, we were more than happy to feature her on the FeedBlitz Blog. Read on for how this publisher used our SmartForm Subscription Forms to increase her signups and her sales!
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I’ve been a FeedBlitz client for about 8 years, and while my business as a full-time author and writing coach has changed drastically since I first read Phil Hollows’ Listbuilding for Bloggers and signed on, it’s been awesome to discover that each time I need a new feature, FeedBlitz already has it in place.
Coincidentally, FeedBlitz’s recent “
Growing Your List” blog post series launched around the time I hired a consulting firm to restructure my business and redesign my website. While the firm’s professionals worked behind the scenes on tech details far outside the bounds of my skill set, I was able to keep pace on a parallel track using FeedBlitz’s blog to grow my list and increase accessibility to my blog, seasonal newsletters, and income-generating autoresponders.
When restructuring my business first began, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed – I confess to getting lost down the rabbit hole of business webinars, lunch hour online chats about IT features beyond my understanding, and even enrolling in a few e-courses that just weren’t right for my business needs at the time. But one take-away from all that self-guided learning was that everyone seemed in agreement about at least one thing: getting a person’s email address via a pop-up form on your website would be essential for continued, successful online marketing and engagement.
Cue, Feedblitz’s
blog post on SmartForms, which I’d been aware of for quite some time but hadn’t yet made time to understand. Within minutes of creating the form, I had a customized template set to my liking, and within hours, new subscribers were signing on. Thanks to additional blog posts in FeedBlitz's series, I also understood I ought to offer an incentive to folks for sharing their email address, and thanks to pro tips from folks like
Janelle at Zen Courses, I was finally starting to understand that my archive of over 2,000 blog posts in 10 years was a gold mine waiting to be upgraded, shared, re-linked, and properly tagged.
So I customized my SmartForm to match my new branding, then tied it to a brief autoresponder that starts with a free downloadable PDF titled "Top 5 Tools that Changed My Life as a Self-Employed Writer." My list doubled in two months and continues to passively grow every week, slow and steady. Some of these subscribers were readers who had followed my blog for years, and had simply never seen or opted to enter their email address into the sidebar widget I used for subscriptions. Now—they'll never miss a post, AND I can assure they get "first dibs" on discounts or limited time offers I only make available to this select group.
"My list doubled in two months and continues to passively grow every week, slow and steady."
More importantly, new visitors to my site get to meet me first and foremost through the positive experience of a free PDF. They opt-in, so there's nothing SPAM-like about it, and after a few messages from me about what I do, plus links to
several free trials, the autoresponder finishes. They don't hear from me again until my seasonal newsletter goes out, and click-through rates on those have also doubled.
How does it all add up, you might wonder? SmartForms helped me expand my audience, first and foremost, and that's priceless. They also help me gather key information about my clients and audience, via custom fields. But more than all of that, this self-running feature helps me generate income.
Because of the positive experience folks are having getting a free PDF and a tasteful, SPAM-free set of emails linking them to free trials they're interested in, eventually a handful of those subscribers become paying clients. And it all started with the SmartForm…
Katey Schultz is an author, writing coach, and founder of Maximum Impact: Precision Courses for Writers, Artists, & Trailblazers. Learn more at www.kateyschultz.com.
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Thank you, Katey, for taking the time to talk about your experience with FeedBlitz SmartForm Subscription Forms. If you are a FeedBlitz Publisher and would like to share your experience and possibly be featured on the blog as a Case Study or Guest Post, please send us an email and let's get the conversation started.
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