Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Emile and I have talked about, tested and tried a variety of different ways to build our email newsletter list and we’ve hit upon a way that really works. We’ve also found a few things that simply don’t work – and one of them is having an email newsletter sign up box at the left top of every page.

For several years, we’ve had the sign up box on every single page of TraderInterviews.com and a few of our other sites in the top left corner just below the header and under the main navigation. On a good day, we’d get 5 or 6 new subscribers to the free newsletter. It just wasn’t working.

I was skeptical to try anything that was more “in your face” for fear of driving our visitors away. But with 2009 being the year where we agreed to do whatever it takes to make our sites successful, we installed the Action Popup lightbox on several of our sites and held our breath. It instantly resulted in 25-30 new subscribers every day on sites that don’t have a ton of traffic yet. It simply worked and has done more to increase our newsletter subscribers quickly than anything else we’ve tried. And according to Google Analytics, our bounce rate on our home page (the percentage of visitors who visit the home page and leave without visiting any other page on the site) hasn’t risen.

The great thing about this particular script is that you can tell it when you want the lightbox to appear:

1) Right away (as soon as the page is done loading)
2) After a specific number of seconds (we think 7 seconds is working well but we’re still testing)
3) When they go to leave your site (by clicking on the browser back button or clicking an outbound link)

Are some visitors annoyed by the lightbox? At least one was. I received this email last week:

I found your Web site by searching for “small business podcast” as I’m looking for some new podcasts to listen to. However because the first thing that happened was a box asking for my details that I had to close, before I could even see the quality of the site content I won’t be listening to your podcast.

Fair enough. I thanked him for his feedback. Turns out he’s a “home page usability expert” so perhaps there were ulterior motives for letting me know.

On the other hand, I can’t argue with the data – the light box is working so it stays. On that particular site, we had the lightbox appearing almost immediately when the visitor came to the site so we’ve backed it off to 7 seconds and haven’t had a complaint since.

The bottom line for us: although it may annoy some visitors, the lightbox is working and it’s worth implementing on all our sites which we’ve done. My sense is that the people who are most annoyed are the same folks who get riled up at the sight of a single banner ad – believing that all content online should be free – and thus aren’t our target market anyway.

One note: We have seen that when we offer a free report or eBook and show the cover in the lightbox, the number of people subscribing goes way up. The more general “Subscribe to our email newsletter for expert tips and tricks” doesn’t convert as well. So be sure to offer a free report or other piece of content they can’t get elsewhere and you’ll see your conversion go much higher.

Now I need to figure out what we’re going to give away on this site!

building your list, site marketing ActionPopup, building an email list, lightbox marketing