I had to write this down for EJ Insiders because it’s a realization that I am continually drumming into my own head over and over again.

When I started blogging I cared about how many people visited my blog as the most important thing.

Then as blogging took off, it was RSS that seemed to matter most.

I quickly realized it wasn’t RSS subscribers that mattered, it was email subscribers.

I saw what the direct response email marketers were doing. They could write a message to their list and money came back. It seemed almost like magic.

Bloggers back then were focused on Google Adsense advertising and hence traffic is what mattered most. Email marketing was not a priority, everyone cared about SEO and writing lots of articles to bring in more pageviews, a tiring business model for sure!

Thankfully most of the blogosphere has caught up with this critical concept today – email subscribers matter.

Most bloggers who spend any time studying how to make money from their blog will have an email optin form. The best will make email the center point of their whole strategy (as I hope all EJ Insiders are!).

However, that’s not quite the right answer either.

There is one more mindset change you have to make. One more subtle strategic shift towards the metric that actually matters.

The Metric That Matters Most

If you’re blogging as a business then there is only one metric that matters. Strangely enough the corporate world makes this a priority, yet possibly because blogging has evolved from a hobby, it has taken a long time for this “sound business practice” to seep in.

What matters is how many buyers you get from subscribers and how much they spend. 

It’s return on investment (ROI) that matters most.

It’s called a return on investment because everything you do to acquire a customer is an investment. That might include writing blog posts and marketing your content, or buying facebook ads, or creating a podcast or youtube channel – it’s all an investment (some call it a cost) designed to attract people to you and turn some of them into paying customers.

This is why your overall strategy is critical. You need to attract the right type of audience to your blog to get the right type of subscriber to your email list so you make sales.

If you’re not making sales, then everything else doesn’t matter, no matter how much traffic you have or how good your optin rate.

A 50% optin rate on your landing page that doesn’t lead to any customers is much worse than a 10% optin rate that leads to one sale a day.

The added benefit of this attitude shift is that it forces you to focus on selling, to create products and make offers. You can’t come to any meaningful conclusion if you do not have the most important data points – are you making sales and how much is each customer worth to you?

You Must Make An Offer

Right now if you are feeling bad because your traffic is low or your optin rate is terrible, you’re worrying about the wrong thing.

The only variable that should push you into action is how can you get as fast as you can to making some kind of offer.

Once you are making offers, then the rest of the data you have gains meaning. 

Ideally you should remove the emotional component from your analysis. You’re not doing bad or good, you’re simply looking at each point in your conversion process to improve it.

Once you are making sales, then you can start working your way backwards to find the weakest links and then focus on improving them. This is when it becomes valuable to work on things like improving your optin rate. 

If you increase your optin rate from 40 subscribers a day to 60, and that results in one more sale per day at a value of $30 ROI, then you have a meaningful result.

When you have ROI, you can look at things like optin rates, email open rates, email click through rates and sales page conversion rates, and draw conclusions that matter. You can see how these things influence your cash flow. Once you have cash flow, then you have the ability to scale and it’s much easier to scale when you know your numbers.

Start With Your First Offer

For most people in the EJ Insider the key take away from this article is knowing that until you have a product for sale, you have no means of truly gauging how well you are doing.

Yes you should celebrate every little step, from setting up your blog, to attracting your first email subscriber and beyond. However, it’s the day you make your first sale that you truly begin running a business, hence you should focus all your efforts towards making that first offer.

This is why for many people just getting started, I recommend you focus first on offering private coaching or some kind of service you can sell. This is an offer you can make tomorrow and immediately use as your base metric to test your whole system.

Now go get busy and do whatever it takes to get your first offer in front of people and make that sale!

Yaro Starak
Making Offers

This article is from EJ Insider member Colin Grey.

Over the past month I’ve been doing a lot of work on Opt-In forms, trying to capitalise on my growing traffic. Since it was requested in the forum, I thought I’d share it in a blog post. I’d love to hear what works for you with regards getting people to sign up to your mailing list – leave a comment below.

But to the project, what was I looking to do?

My Aims

In the past I’ve always had an optin form or two dotted around my sites, but I’ve never concentrated on it, and I know this has meant missing out on thousands of possible newsletter signups every month. I wanted to put some good looking, prominent opt-in forms at the bottom of every post on three of my highest traffic sites. They all run on WordPress, so I needed a pretty solid solution for that platform that’s totally portable between sites, and template agnostic. 

I don’t mind paying for things if they save me time, so I was looking at paid platforms too. I could probably knock something up myself, but again, better to pay for a ready-made solution if it’s cheaper than the time I’d lose developing it. I use Mailchimp as my provider but just about all of these work with Aweber and the others. Here’s a look at the tools I went through.

Mailchimp: Both Auto and Plugin Based

So, the first option was just to use plain old Mailchimp forms. As you’d expect, Mailchimp lets you create forms within it’s own platform. The problem is, there’s no easy way to make them stay on the same page after signup, as opposed to directing the user off to a ‘Thankyou Page’. You can direct the user to another page on your own site, but not keep them on the same page. This was a big requirement for me as I wanted the user to sign-up, and then still be on the same page to take whatever other actions are available.

For example, one of my highest traffic pages is a resource guide, earning affiliate income through kit sales. I want to gain signups from this big source of traffic, but I also want them to stay on the page, and perhaps click an affiliate link. Sending them off to a Mailchimp thankyou page is pretty useless. So, no-go for Mailchimp forms. 

MailChimp for WordPress Plugin – This is a great little plugin. Really flexible, and keeps the user on the same page when they signup. Setup and integration with Mailchimp was a Breeze, and I had it running in no time. But….. the free version only allows 1 form per site. So, I couldn’t have two different offers on one site, which I required. I want to capture people for a standard newsletter, but also for a Free course I’m offering.

There is a PRO version of this plugin, but it’s $100 for multiple sites. I’m not averse to that – it’s a good plugin – but that pricepoint brings in a lot of competitors. For some the free version of this will be perfect. If you’ve got one list and one offer for your site, this will do the job perfectly – dive in.

Opt-In Skin

Opt-In Skin (aff link) – I’d heard a lot about this plugin, and the features list is pretty convincing. I ended up buying the top-end package for $99, thinking it would solve my problems. I was attracted by the A/B testing, and by the nice looking templates.

To be honest, in action it’s a good tool. It does the job well. But… it sends the signup off to the Thankyou page. So, another possible lost affiliate comission.

This isn’t an issue for a lot of sites at all – often you’ll want to direct a signup to a thankyou page of your own, for example, with further reading, resources, etc. But, for my purposes on one particular site, I needed to keep the reader where they are.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms (aff link) – This is the one I really wanted from the start, but it’s got the big price tag. It’s $200 for the developer version which allows unlimited sites, and all the payment integrations. But… it has a massive range of features, and tonnes that I’ll use in future, such as surveys, polls, quizzes and ecommerce functions. Having used it now, it’s so easy to work with, create forms, tie it into other tools such as Mailchimp, etc. I’ve now created two forms for my site with Gravity Forms, both tied into a different Mailchimp list, and it’s working perfectly. It can either keep the user on the same page with a refresh, or it can use Ajax to even keep them at the same point on the page, so pretty seamless.

How to Implement Your Forms

I’m actually tying it in with another tool I use called MaxBannerAds (aff link). MaxBannerAds lets you set up a set of adverts, and place them on your site either with a Shortcode, or in the source code itself. Currently I’m placing the forms manually in posts with the Shortcode. The advantage of this is that it randomly cycles through the 2 forms I’ve created, showing one or the other to each reader. It offers stats on views and conversions, so this is giving me the A/B testing that I thought I’d use Opt-In Skin for. 

I hope this little project proves useful to others, and saves you a little time in research. I like to log these strands of thinking as sometimes I look back a year later and wonder why exactly I chose one thing over another, even though it’s way cheaper. This way I can remember why it’s worth renewing Gravity forms rather than downgrading to Opt-In Skin.

Again, I’d love to hear what you use. Let me know in the comments below!

Colin Grey