As the saying goes, “the money is in the [e-mail] list”.

If you don’t listened to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, you are missing out on some great information.  A few months ago, I listened to Session 78 with Clay Collins from LeadPages.  According to Clay, there are tons of tips and tweaks to increase email opt-ins.  Two ideas that jumped out at me was adding an opt-in form to a 404 page and hiding the opt-in fields until the visitor takes a first step.

Making a custom 404 page is not difficult, especially if you are using WordPress with a good theme.  I’m using the Genesis framework with the Focus child theme (affiliate link) on my other site, http://ScanThisGuide.com.  If you are not familiar with custom 404 pages, check out this post for a little help.  I just copied the 404 page template from the Genesis core and made some changes such as adding my own wording and the code for my opt-in form.

For this post, we’ll discuss hiding (or more specifically, unhiding) your opt-in form.  Let’s get to it.

Step 1 – Get A Form On Your Site

The first step to implementing an email list opt-in form is to have an email list provider.  I use MailChimp but other popular choices include AWeber and Office AutoPilot.  We won’t get into setting up the list itself or the differences between the services here, but if you want more information, check out this page to get started with MailChimp. [Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.  This is the 107th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here and last week’s here (106).   Below are the results as of Sunday, 2-9-14 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #4 – Alan Reeves on Twitter (down 2 spots from last week at #2)
• #5 – Book Worm Laser & Design’s Photostream on Flickr (down 2 spots from last week at #3)
• #18 – My Pinterest profile (up 2 spots from last week at #20)
• #21 – This site, BlueCapra.com (up 1 spot from last week at #22)
• #22 – My Vimeo profile (up 4 spots from last week at #26)

This week I’m at #4.  Overall, my top 5 results increased 3 place with 5 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 14 times in the top 100 search results. [Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.  This is the 106th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here and last week’s here (#105).   Below are the results as of Sunday, 2-2-14 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #2 – The About page on this website (no change from last week at #2)
• #3 – Alan Reeves on Twitter (no change from last week at #3)
• #20 – My Pinterest profile (no change from last week at #20)
• #22 – My Vimeo profile (no change from last week at #22)
• #26 – Book Worm Laser & Design – My laser engraving business (down 1 spot from last week at #25)

This week I’m at #2.  Overall, my top 5 results decreased 1 place with 4 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 13 times in the top 100 search results. [Read more…]

Have you started an e-mail list yet?  If not, you really should consider starting one.  E-mail lists are a great way to communicate directly with your customers and visitors in a more personal way.  From a sales perspective, the conversion rate for e-mail list subscribers is much higher than random visitors to your site.  So, if you haven’t started an email list, it’s a good idea to get one going.

You have a bunch of choices around the web for e-mail list provider.  I personally use MailChimp but other popular choices include AWeber and Office AutoPilot.  We won’t get into setting up the list itself or the differences between the services here, but if you want more information, check out this page to get started with MailChimp.

Once you have a list setup with pages, opt-in forms, code, etc, it is time to get subscribers.  But, where do you put your opt-in form?

Full Width Opt-in Form

Depending on who you talk to, there are several good places to put an opt-in form.  For my site, I decided to put the form just above the content on the home page.  I didn’t want to alter the page structure too much but I wanted the opt-in form to be full width.  Luckily, using the Genesis framework and a plugin, Simple Hooks, it was pretty simple. [Read more…]

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.  This is the 105th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves.  If you missed any of the posts, you can find the first one here, and last week’s here (#104).   Below are the results as of Sunday, 1-26-14 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

• #2 – Alan Reeves on Twitter (no change from last week at #2)
• #3 – The About page on this website (no change from last week at #3)
• #20 – My Pinterest profile (down 7 spots from last week at #13)
• #22 – My Vimeo profile (down 1 spot from last week at #21)
• #25 – Book Worm Laser & Design – My laser engraving business (down 1 spot from last week at #24)

This week I’m at #2.  Overall, my top 5 results decreased 9 places with 5 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places.  As a whole, I showed up 16 times in the top 100 search results. [Read more…]