Converting Blog Visitors into Subscribers - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight you're here for another community education hangout, one of our events. And the subject tonight is converting blog visitors into subscribers, and then also very importantly, to keep them once you have them. So our guests tonight, we have two on the panel. Joanne Ozog is going to be speaking on the subject, and Julie Delly is going to be asking us some questions and helping out. With everything. If you have questions, put them in the comment box below the picture. I would tell you if you didn't see the picture to refresh your screen, but it wouldn't do any good if you can't see the picture to tell you that now. Right now we're going to turn it over. Like I said, keep your questions. JoAnn's going to go through her presentation. Take notes. If you have points, then you can come back later and ask once we break and go into the Q&A period. Alright, so Joanne, go ahead.

Alright, hello, I'm Joanne Ozog, I'm the creator of the food blog 15spatulas.com. This hangout is going to be geared toward bloggers and people with websites who are looking to build their following and their audience. So I'm going to be talking about email marketing, converting blog visitors to email subscribers, why it's the key to long-term sustainable blog growth, and how to keep them. So I've been focusing on email subscribers for the past year, and it is tremendously powerful stuff, and I don't think people are paying enough attention to it. It has done amazing things for my blog traffic and growth. Before I implemented the techniques I'm going to share, I would honestly get a couple email subscribers a day. Now it isn't uncommon to get 150 subscribers in a day. Granted, I have more traffic now, but in a year, the difference between a couple a day and even 25 or 50 a day, it just makes such a big difference. It really just builds up as your blog grows. I think people focus really hard on trying to get traffic, and that's great, but unless you're converting your traffic and your visitors into followers, it's, it's kind of shortsighted. You're kind of wasting that traffic. Food blogs have very high bounce rates. This is because people might be visiting from places like Foodgawker where there's hundreds of other thumbnails and other bloggers featured, or maybe something in Huffington Post where you're featured with 15 other bloggers there. And most of these people, they might come, they might look at your dish, for maybe 30, 60 seconds, and if you don't capture them in some way before they leave and get them to follow you, they're probably going to leave and never come back again. So it's really great to focus on trying to turn your traffic into a way to create like a sustainable base for your blog. And something I'll note too is I see a lot of people focusing really hard on getting Facebook followers or Twitter followers, Pinterest followers. And social media is definitely useful, but it doesn't compare to email. When someone welcomes you into their inbox, there's just huge engagement potential there. And I don't think I need to explain why Twitter followers are not as good as an email subscriber. And another thing too is, you know, people are so unhappy lately with Facebook. They keep on lowering the amount of people that are seeing our posts unless you pay. And I just think in general social media shouldn't be focused on as much as email because you don't have control over social media, and you really do have control with your emails. So those are kind of some of the main reasons why, you know, you want to be focusing on email. So now that we know that we want to focus on email subscribers, I'm going to talk about how to get those subscribers. And the caveat here is that you do need visitors and traffic. So you do need to spend some time trying to get people to your website. If you're a newer blogger, definitely implement these techniques. It will help you grow faster, but you definitely need to spend some time, you know, trying to get people to come to your website. So you want to place multiple email subscription boxes around your website. Some of the best places are above the fold. It's said that something like 80% of web time is spent above the fold. So you definitely want email subscription box there. Um, you also want to put an email subscription box at the bottom of every post. If someone has actually gotten to the bottom of your post, they've probably read what you wrote, looked at your pictures. Um, so there's a good chance they might want to subscribe. Um, kind of the same idea is to put an email subscription box maybe in the footer. Someone's gotten to the bottom of your page and probably looked around a bit, might be a little bit more likely to subscribe. A great place to have an email subscription box is on a landing page. I'm going to talk about landing pages in a couple minutes. And then the last place that I see a lot of email subscription boxes is in those pop-ups. I know I personally hate pop-up boxes. I know a lot of people do. I don't, I don't like them. Suggest them necessarily because I think it can turn people off. However, I have seen other people who have tested this and results show that they are very effective and they convert a high number of people who see them. So you just have to decide if, if that's something you want to do. So right now you're probably thinking that this is a lot of places to have your email subscription box. I mean, this is just too many email subscription boxes everywhere. And I definitely felt like this when I first, you know, put them in place. However, most people don't spend a whole lot of time on your website. You can go into Google Analytics and look at what the average time is spent on your website. And, you know, especially if you have a design where there's lots of things everywhere and kind of, for lack of a better word, a cluttered design, people probably aren't going to notice an abundance of email subscription boxes. And you need to kind of hope that they'll at least catch one because people probably aren't going to subscribe unless they're presented with the option. So you definitely want to have multiple email subscription boxes around your website. Most people will not notice or be bothered by it. And a note for that as well is you don't want to put your email subscription with other social media icons. There's something called paradox of choice. If you give someone too many options they're not going to pick any. So in general, you shouldn't have too many social media icons. Maybe this is your blog, or you've seen blogs like this. There will be like a string of 10 social media icons at the top of the page. And you know, you should really just pick a couple of social media icons that are important to you, maybe the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, something like that. But you most certainly do not want to put an email icon within those, because as I mentioned earlier, you don't want to let Twitter compete with your email. So on my website, I separate out the email subscription box entirely from social media icons. I put the social media icons a little bit lower on the page. They're, they're I think out of sight when you first load the page. So I'm going to talk about the landing page for a minute, as I mentioned earlier. A landing page is basically like a welcome page. I have a little bar at the top of my website that says something like, "First time at Fifteen Spatulas? Start here." And it takes them to my landing page. And basically I just introduce myself, put a little blurb about me, put a little blurb about my blog, show them some recipes that are typical about my site, kind of what my mission is, and then I present an email subscription box. So basically you're just saying, you know, here's what I'm about, and if you want to see more, then subscribe. And landing pages, I recommend that if you're really trying to build your email subscriber base, that you have one. They convert extremely well, meaning that, you know, a lot of people, a lot of visitors, a high percentage of them will subscribe. And if you do decide to make a landing page, make sure that you customize your design so that you don't have any sidebars or ads or things to distract. You just want one column explaining what you're about, and the goal of that page is to show people what your site's about and try to get them to subscribe. So the next session— section is to talk about testing the emails. So there's a lot of information that says, you know, you should do things in a certain way. You should email out this time of day. You should tweet this day of the week. The problem is that you don't know what is best for your audience, and what might work for a writing or fashion blog might not work for a food blogger. For example, I have a fashion blogger friend, and we've kind of discussed the differences in our blogs, and she gets the most traffic on weekdays. I have always gotten the most traffic on weekends, um, probably because people have more time on the weekends. Maybe they're cooking more, but that's just kind of an example of, you know, these, these articles that say when you should do certain things, they're probably good as a guideline, but you have the ability to test that with emails and find out what is actually the best for your readers. So the first thing you want to test is the email subscription boxes. One of the most notable tests I did was strong wording versus weaker wording. So a lot of email subscription services, they'll give you this capability and they'll provide statistics for you. So basically 50% of the time I had an email subscription box appear that said something like, "Do you want to know when new recipes are available? Subscribe to Fifteen Spatulas." The other 50% of the time I had stronger wording. It said something like, "Don't miss out on a new recipe. Subscribe to Fifteen Spatulas." And the stronger wording got 4 times as many subscribers as the weaker wording. So what that means is for every 100 subscribers that I would get with the weaker wording, I could have gotten 400 just by changing the wording and saying something, you know, more pressing, like, "Don't miss out on a new recipe," instead of, "Oh, you know, do you want to know when new recipes are out?" So something like that can make a big difference, and you definitely want to maximize your subscribers. You can play with different sizes, different designs, different colors. You can test, like, different submit buttons, you know, submit, subscribe, join. Enter, go. Just test it in different ways to see, you know, basically what gets the most people to subscribe. So the next thing you want to do is test the actual emails. Using email services, you can pretty much put whatever you want in there. And some of the things I've tested, this was interesting and it was surprising to me. I've done this with multiple emails, but I would just 50% of the time, or 50% of my subscribers for an email, I just say, for one, spaghetti and meatballs, and then for the other, spaghetti and meatballs, parentheses, recipe plus video. And I thought, you know, if I say that there's a video, then more people will open the email because there isn't just a recipe today, I have a video too. And what's interesting is I found that people open those emails less, they click less when I say that there's a recipe and a video. I don't know if it's maybe because, um, I know for me sometimes if I know an email I get has a video in it and I don't have time to watch that video in that moment, I'll kind of ignore it and save it for later. Um, but just things like that. It's, it's interesting to, um, get some ideas about how you can optimize the opens and the clicks, and you actually get to test them out and see. You can test different times of day, you know, do people open and click your emails more during the morning, afternoon, or night? You can test different days of the week, you know, weekdays and weekends. I found that even an increase in the click to continue reading link, increasing it from 14 pixels to 18, it made a 25% difference in the number of clicks. You can also test showing different amounts of the post. I don't send out a full post in the email. It's like a teaser. So I've tested just showing one photo and a little intro, and then I've tested showing, you know, a couple of photos and a couple paragraphs. You can see, you know, just showing more kind of enticed more people to click and head over to your website. Or is it better to just show a little teaser and, you know, kind of hide the rest for later? You can test that. You can also test the wording in click to continue reading. I saw on Copyblogger, they tested click to continue versus continue to article versus read more. Click to continue did the best. Continue article did a little bit worse. And read more did significantly worse. Maybe people, they don't— click to continue, I guess, does sound a little bit more appealing than read more. But those are just kind of some ideas of things that you can test to optimize people opening your emails and clicking and get people to engage the most. So moving into the last section, now that you've got subscribers, you want to keep them. Definitely you need to keep creating good content. If, you know, you promised people more recipes, more fantastic recipes, whatever you do, you need to keep that content up and keep things interesting, of course. It's also important to be consistent. People will start to expect emails from you in some sort of frequency, so it's, it's good to kind of be consistent. If you disappear for a while and send an email, they might not remember who you are, or they might mark it as spam or that sort of thing. Another great thing about the email services is it allows you to create a personal connection. So I have a follow-up responder so that when people sign up for 15 Spatulas emails, it automatically sends them an email that says You know, welcome, thank you for subscribing. You know, is there a recipe that you want to learn how to make, or is there some sort of cooking technique that you're wanting to learn more about? If so, simply hit reply to this email, let me know. Here's a link to the recipe index. If you're ever looking for a specific recipe for a holiday or for a quick dinner, you know, you can go to appetizers or holiday or that sort of thing. It's just a good way to kind of create more of a connection with your email subscriber and kind of increase the chance that they'll stick around and remain your follower for a really long time. You also might consider doing an email newsletter. There are just a lot of options. So that, that pretty much concludes my main presentation, and we just kind of brushed the surface of the things that you can do, but hopefully those are some, some good ideas to start out with.

That's definitely a lot of good information, JoAnn, and we've got some questions already, and some of them are pretty much about the same thing. Everyone wants to know what email service you use. That's the first one.

Okay, I personally use AWeber. However, I believe that MailChimp and Mad Mimi have similar capabilities. The reason I chose AWeber is because they have really great customer service and they have really good statistics. I, I can't speak for Mailchimp and Mad Miden because I've never used them. I imagine they have some statistics, but I don't know how it compares to AWeber.

Okay, great. Kristen Doyle just asked, how often do you send out emails?

So I send out— the way I have my email set up is it's kind of RSS style. When I have a new post, I send out an email. So for me, it's twice a week because that's usually how often I post. I know some people like to do kind of a newsletter style email where they'll have, you know, an email go out once a week that'll have a couple of different posts. I really think it's a matter of preference, and I do know some people offer both to their readers. I have not offered both. I just do the RSS style because I've had a lot of people who said that they sign up for the emails because they want to know the second that when a new post is up. So you can definitely customize that to fit your readers and kind of what you think might work best.

Okay. Yeah, and Arlene Mobley had asked the same thing, and Courtney Champion said what you were just talking about, whether you— do you think one's better than the other, the RSS service or the email or the— I'm sorry, the newsletter? Or you've chosen the RSS for now.

Yeah, I don't think that one is better than the other. There will be people who like one and not the other and vice versa. So as I mentioned before, I do know some people who do both. It's a bit more work, but if you want to offer both of those, then that's great. I just, I don't want to do both at the moment, so I just do the RSS.

Do you think it might be bombarding them with too much information then at that point if you're sending out both? Or I mean, is too much— I mean, is more too much at that point is what I'm saying. If you do the RSS feed and then you send them an email newsletter, I'm just wondering if I would lose people because I'm emailing them too much.

Sorry, I should clarify. What I meant is that they'll have a subscriber pick one or the other. So you'll have multiple lists of people. One list, you only send them an email once a week. The other list, they get, you know, an email twice a week or however often you post. So they're getting entirely different email marketing campaigns.

So they wouldn't get both of them necessarily. That's good.

Right.

Give the person a choice of what they'd rather have.

Right, one or the other.

Great.

The other, or one of the first questions we had was from Sydney Kirschner, and she wants to know if you knew of any email subscriber plugins or something that would help.

Okay, so I should talk about this. Services like AWeber, MailChimp, and MagniMe, they do cost money. I think MailChimp has a free option under 500 subscribers, I believe. Typically the services that you get, like I know that Jetpack, which I used first, that's built into WordPress. I used their email subscription stuff when I started. The problem with that is that you don't have any control over the emails you send or really over your list or anything like that. So, um, I don't recommend anything like that unless there's some sort of plugin that I don't know about that lets you kind of customize emails, do the testing, send the autoresponder follow-up, do all those little things. So I recommend paying for, you know, an email service. I know it's kind of hard to do, but, you know, maybe start out with MailChimp with their free option if they still have it. Like I said, I don't use them, so I don't know. Something I will say too, I don't know if it's appropriate for this Hangout, but you know when I first started blogging and you know you're not making any money really, it feels so hard to spend money on things. If you really build up your email subscriptions, you will build up your blog traffic because you know the people that you have as email followers, they're going to get an email whenever you send out a new post. And there's, as long as you've kind of done those steps to create a connection with them, these people are going to be probably the most loyal followers you have. And you'll get pretty good click-through rates. And that'll definitely help with traffic on your website. And I think, you know, even though I've had to pay for email service and I was, ugh, So upset about paying for it at first, it has been extremely worth it. And I mean, you know, there are some things that you just kind of have to pay for, and I think that email subscription stuff is one of those things. But I know I can't speak for everyone.

Is there a sliding rate on the payment, or does it depend on how many subscribers you have, what you pay? Or so, I mean, if you're not a really real high— you can start out slowly, so the pain won't be quite as great when you're You're paying them.

Yep, exactly. It is tiered, or at least all the main ones seem to be tiered. Definitely the more subscribers you have, the more you're going to pay. And the more subscribers you have, the more traffic you should be getting, and if you have ads and such, the more money you should be making. So it should be kind of growing with you as you go.

Yep, so you're not really losing anything. You're making money at that point. You shouldn't be worried about spending a little of it so you can make even more. That's basically what you're doing. Okay, we have a question here from Heather Toulos, and she says, I've noticed that many blogs I follow will post in the morning, add to social media in the morning, and then email delivery is the following day. As a reader, I feel like I'm out of the loop when there are already a zillion comments by the time I get to the email. On my blog, I get more stats from traffic to one post on two days. What have you seen better results with, email as soon as you post or later as scheduled?

Oh man, there's a lot of stuff there. I don't know if I fully understood.

It seems like she's asking, uh, when she sees bloggers that post to everywhere but their email subscribers at one time and then the next day they send out the email.

I kind of agree with her, you know, there's a couple of blogs that— there's a few blogs I subscribe to, and sometimes I get the email the next day, and like she said, there's already a bunch of comments, and it feels like it's not as fresh. So that's interesting. As a reader, I feel that way too.

That's very strange. I send out the email immediately, usually actually before I post to social media. Maybe there's a possibility that this person is doing a test and they're sending— testing different days of the week, but that wouldn't make sense if that's happening consistently. I don't know if I have an answer for that. That's very strange.

Well, she mentioned many blogs, so I mean, I would assume it's more than one, but it's— I wouldn't think it's a good habit to get into. I mean, I can't say those people must obviously possibly know what they're doing if they're doing it, but it doesn't seem like it would make a lot of sense.

The one I noticed it with, she uses FeedBurner, so I wonder if it only checks once a day or something like that. And I completely agree with you, Joanne, about paying for email service, only because I feel like when we do sign up for free services and we complain about things going down or having errors or not giving us good statistics if we didn't pay anything for it, I don't think it really gives us the right to complain about it.

Yeah, I agree with that too. You hear that too often, people complaining about free services. And even in the food service world, when I feed people, it's always the people complain about the free meals more than they do about the ones they pay for.

Isn't that interesting?

Okay, let's see if we have any other questions here. They're talking about Mailchimp amongst themselves right now.

Oh yeah, and I've actually used Mailchimp and I use Mad Mimi right now. I like both services and anyone that always asks me, I always give them the pros and cons of which one I like better for. I prefer one for RSS and I prefer one service for newsletters better.

Interesting. I haven't used MailChimp or Mad Mimi. I've always used AWeber. I actually did play with Mad Mimi one time, but I didn't switch. I stuck with AWeber. I think they all have their benefits to them.

Yeah.

Seems like Mad Mimi is— it sounds like it's very design-oriented and like easy to use.

It's very, very easy. It's very drag-and-drop. I do newsletters, so I find their newsletter creation tool a lot faster for me than MailChimp, even though I feel like I'm an advanced user. But I like MailChimp's RSS to email a lot better. And their pricing tiers are different. I got to a certain point with MailChimp where it was going to be a lot more expensive. Where if I just hopped on the MailChimp— Mad Mami, after I tried it a little bit and I liked it, it was actually more subscribers but less money. So it gets to a point where, you know, it just depends for everyone, I think.

Well, Donalynn Ketchum just wanted to know what you prefer, Julie. So you're saying right now you use MailChimp?

I use Mad Mimi.

Oh, Mad Mimi.

I see your doggy. Sorry, I get distracted. Yeah, right now I use Mad Mimi, and I used to use MailChimp. And I do a newsletter, a monthly newsletter, which now it's April, I need to get an April newsletter out. But I really like their newsletter generation tool, and I think Mailchimp is great, it's very powerful. You can hire someone to do a template for you. I felt like when I was trying to do my monthly newsletter, it took longer to do it, and it shouldn't— I felt like it shouldn't have taken me that long to get a newsletter out. Having said that, I really liked the powerfulness— that's not even a word— how neat you can make and how you can really structure your RSS emails. The kind of emails that Joanne sends out. Immediately you have a post, you can add a little widget at the bottom of the MailChimp email to show links to recent posts. Stuff like that. You can customize your RSS email a lot better in MailChimp than you can with Mad Mimi. So I wish that the two could merge and I could have my really, really easy newsletter and my customizable RSS email. So if you just want RSS to email, I recommend MailChimp.

Okay, great. We have another question here from Leah Short. How much info should you put in an email to encourage people to keep getting the email, yet visit your blog to read more? Is there a rule of thumb to get the best of both worlds?

That's, that's kind of what I was talking about earlier with the testing. Basically what you can do with these, I assume with Mailchimp and Mad Mimi, but definitely with AWeber, is you can create an email and you can set a certain percentage of your subscribers to get that email. So usually I just do a 50/50 test and I'll have one email that only shows the first picture and a little paragraph and then I'll set, say, click to read more. And then I'll have the other email going out to the other 50% posting, you know, maybe you could do the entire post but not the recipe. You could do maybe half of the post. Like, I do long step-by-step things, so maybe showing people 3 pictures or, you know, kind of more of the steps. And then you can see, look at the statistics after you sent it and given it a couple days. You can see how many people clicked and opened those emails. So you may find that posting more kind of made people more interested in the post and they are more likely to click, or you might find the opposite. That's just something that you have to test and kind of figure out what works better for your audience.

Okay. Lindsay Lannis wants to know, she's curious— nope, I just lost it here. "How do you turn your email subscribers into page views since page views are where the income is, and how do you encourage them to click through?" Yeah, so like you kind of alluded to, getting people to click those emails is how you turn that into, you know, visits for your website.

In terms of optimizing click rate. Definitely the last question, you know, how much or how little you post can affect the click rate. I also mentioned that for a while I had a fairly small font size for the click to continue reading link. It was the same size as the font for the paragraph above it. And just making that bigger to like a size 20 or 18, I forgot what it was, made like a 25% difference in the amount of people clicking. And even saying something as simple as like, click here to continue. I've seen— I just read an article on Copyblogger the other day, though there are plenty of articles, you know, on this out there. But it's amazing just by saying something like click here how many more people click. I think in general, it's good to use kind of direct language whenever possible. And I think I kind of talked about that in a lot of this, like whether it's trying to get people to subscribe or that sort of thing. Just try to play with different kinds of wording. And, you know, definitely in order to keep the click rate up, you got to keep that open rate up too.

Mary Plattis wanted to know if you had any tips on newsletter ideas or what works best. Julie, you do a newsletter, right?

I noticed the same thing that Joanne was saying. Just the last couple newsletters I started, Mad Mimi sends like an email every so often with email marketing tips, and I'm a fan of their Facebook page, and sometimes they'll put up a cool email that someone just sent out recently, and one caught my eye, and I was like, okay, if it caught my eye, maybe I should change the style of my email. And I started making the pictures bigger, and I did change the font of the, uh, you know, I used to just say, for the recipe, and that was it, and like, that was the hyperlink. Um, instead of just kind of like what you were saying, using weak language versus strong language, basically said, click here, and it was really big and a different color font. And I saw my click-through rates get bigger. Other tips? I mean, I just— I usually share like a non— or try to share like a non-food picture in my email and share a personal story of something that recently happened or something that's going on. I mean, a couple of months ago my dog had surgery, so I mentioned that and I had a picture with him in his cone. I think you should share what you want to share in the email newsletters that you want to do. If you want to— sometimes I'll highlight old posts too if I don't have that many that week going on. Do you have any other tips, Joanne?

Yeah, I don't do a newsletter, but I've seen other people who have done newsletters, and I think a newsletter is a great way to to kind of enhance the connection and relationship with your readers. It's a good opportunity to kind of post something that might be more personal, or at least that's what I've seen some other people doing, and I do enjoy their newsletters to kind of go beyond the recipes that are on their website and learn something about their life on a more personal level, kind of what they're up to. So that might be something that you would focus on for a newsletter. Okay.

Courtney Champion has a question about RSS emails, and she wants to know, do your readers seem to mind if you don't include the full post? She says her feed is truncated, so she feels like readers would expect the full post in the email, and she just wants some more clarification on that or ideas on that.

Um, so yeah, I don't think people mind. I've read articles where people complain about not putting a full post in, but also like the people who I've seen who test this out, there's not as much engagement on your website when you put the full post because it's all right there. There's no reason for people to go. So I personally don't think it's a good idea to put the full post in because then when are people ever going to go to your site? I would say even if it does bother a few people, who cares? Definitely, I think it's perfectly reasonable to just post a teaser kind of thing. If people are interested, then head over to your site.

Isn't that a good way now to stop some of those scrapers too that are just taking content? If you don't have the full post, they can't just scrape it as easily, or?

Yeah, I've read that as well. I've read that about actually Google Reader, which is now going away, but I've read that putting your full posts in there, it's easy for people to scrape that. So I'm not the expert on that though, it's just what I've read.

Something about MailChimp, they let you do a truncated post, kind of like you can check that box in WordPress to say, for my feed I only want the truncated post or if I want the full post. And I actually have on WordPress, I check the full post and I use a plugin to truncate my post for feeds because I feel like the truncated post in WordPress is too short. I subscribe to a couple of blogs I love. I love them so much and I know them in person, but it's so annoying to me when I only get one sentence. I don't even get a picture, I just get one sentence. Or I get a picture and one sentence. I want to know a little bit more and I'm going to click through. And so that drove me nuts. So something that drives me nuts, I want to make sure I want to not do that same thing on my site. And I use something that Lindsay Landis told me about is the RSS No More plugin. You put the tag, it can use the more tag that you can click, that you can use. I'm sorry to the Blogger users out there, I'm talking about WordPress here. You use the more tag or you use their markup tag which is RSS-cut. I put that into wherever I want my feed to be truncated at. I give them a little bit more, sometimes I'll give 2 pictures. 3 pictures and 4 paragraphs or whatever, sometimes I do it right before the recipe. What's nice is if you do it in MailChimp, if you do your RSS email, it honors that RSS. I've noticed that it honors that cut or that more tag. So it doesn't go further if you have that plugin. You say, MailChimp, I want you to take my full post. It will honor that. Wherever you put that markup to truncate your post. I hope that makes sense.

Good to know.

Okay, Vicki Bensinger wants a little clarification. She goes, she knows most people probably know this, but when people click on your blog and stay longer, how does that make you more money?

More— yeah, go ahead.

More pages.

What were you going to say, Julie? I was going to say you don't want them to stay on that page, you want them to click around to other pages. So more pages to use.

You want them to stay on your blog but you want them to move around your blog and check on more things, not necessarily one page.

Yeah. I think it's a good idea to like make them want to click more, give them reasons to click around. If you have everything in your sidebar and your footer clicking to other sites, to Pinterest or wherever else, and Instagram, You're giving them reasons to leave your site.

Yeah, and I think that's why the full post emails are a bad idea. You'll never get them onto your site and kind of being in your little online home and engaging with your brand and your design and your recipes. So I think it's another reason to do just the partial emails.

And once you get them there, like you told me before, you have your popular posts on the sidebar or some other posts they can look at. That they may have not seen, so you can keep them there a little bit longer. So I'm buying into that big time too. I like that advice.

Yeah.

Okay, Laura Alves wants to know, do you do exclusive content as a draw subscribers— as a draw to get subscribers into newsletters? If not, what is your thought on that? So I guess something different than you would post on your on your blog. You touched on that a little before about personal items.

Yeah, so kind of along those lines, a lot of people will offer something like even like an ebook, or, you know, it might be exclusive content like you just mentioned, as, you know, kind of a bribe, which is what it really is, to subscribe to your emails. You will get more subscribers if you offer something. However, you'll probably also get more unsubscribes because oftentimes people just want whatever you're offering. They're not really— they might not be interested in your emails. They might unsubscribe. So I've never done that. I've just said, you know, if you want to know when new recipes are out, you know, subscribe. Occasionally I've thought of doing things like Christmas time or something like that, having just like, I don't know, a giveaway just for my email subscribers or something like that, just to make them feel, you know, a bit more special and kind of thank them for being email subscribers. But, you know, as far as whether or not you should offer something, I think that's up to you. It kind of reminds me of that pop-up box thing is you'll get more subscribers with the pop-up box. However, I know that those oftentimes will get more unsubscribes because people, they may not really be interested in subscribing for the long run. So I think that's just a personal choice.

Okay. All right. Joan Hayes asks, what do you think about the wording, click here to continue? Pin and save to recipe box. Do you think the reminder about pinning might give them a push to click through?

Hmm, I don't know, I don't know if you want them— they might try to pin your email and you really want them to pin your site, so I don't know if I would use pinning, the word pin in my email.

Yeah, I don't know if that would get more— my inclination is to say no, however I've had, you know, kind of some anticipations on what the results would be of a test, and then it's turned out that it's the opposite of what I expect. So the only way to know is for you to test that. And if you do test it, email me and let me know.

All right. Jocelyn Delk Adams wants to know, if you're currently using FeedBurner, can you transfer your subscribers to MailChimp or another service?

Yeah, so I, when I started out, I was using WordPress, the built-in plugin for email. Then I used FeedBurner for exactly 2 days and I hated it. And that's when I moved to AWeber. And I emailed them and asked them if I could bring my subscribers over, which wasn't that many, but you probably have a lot, it sounds like. And they said yes. So basically I just downloaded the zip file or whatever from FeedBurner and I sent it to them and they put in everything. So, you know, I think you'd have to contact them or contact whoever you'd like to sign up with, but you should be able to transfer those people. One thing I will mention too though is basically confirming subscriptions. So there are a couple of ways that you can have a subscription go through. There's, let's say there's a subscription box on your website. People type in their email, click subscribe. You can have that set so that that's it, they're subscribed, they're on your list. The way I have it set up is someone enters in their email, they click subscribe, they get an email and it says, you know, thank you for opting in to subscribe to 15 Spatulas. In order to get on this list, you need to click here to confirm. I forgot what the term is, but it's just basically a confirmed email subscription. I noticed this with FeedBurner, but you'd be surprised how many people type in their email on that first page and they, they don't confirm it. So depending on how your settings are on FeedBurner, AWeber or whoever might not accept all the people because they might not have been double confirmed. And I will add the purpose of double, or I guess just single confirming, is that you'll get less spam markings. People who have email services know what a pain in the butt it is when people mark your email as spam because if you get over a certain number, you'll kind of get in trouble. So I definitely recommend if you go with one of these email services that you do the, you know, confirm.

So, well, I think the other reason why you want to do that is because anyone could enter anyone's email address on any site. That's another great point. You know, Spammers can do it too, just to kind of try to bring— get you marked as spam or something. I don't know. I don't know what the ulterior motive would be, but a prank? I don't know. So you want to make sure, did you sign up for this newsletter kind of thing. I agree.

Yeah, that's another great point.

Once you move your emails from FeedBurner, you want to make sure you turn off the FeedBurner emails too so they don't start getting two and then they'll get really mad at you. Every time you post and you forgot all about it, one thing I recommend is to sign up for your own emails. If you're on FeedBurner, you need to sign up for your own FeedBurner email because you'll be the first to know if there's something wonky with the fonts or the colors on FeedBurner. Or if you're on MailChimp, you need to make sure that you sign up to your own email so that you can actually know that it's actually coming into your inbox and that you're getting it. That they're going out correctly. And then you would actually know if you got a duplicate email if you're getting FeedBurner and you're getting Mailchimp if you moved over to whatever service.

Kevin Lynch just mentioned that AWeber requires that your current subscribers reconfirm, so you're going to lose subscribers when you move, he says.

Okay. I didn't have that with Mailchimp and Mad Mimi.

That's interesting that's required. I couldn't remember. I mean, since I require the confirmation anyway, it sounds like they do too. So thank you for sharing that.

Alright, are there any questions right now? Is there anything else you wanted to talk about or that we need to touch on?

Can I say something?

Absolutely.

If—

please don't sign up other bloggers or other random people to your email list. If they didn't sign up for it, don't add people to your list. It really, it causes animosity and— Oh my God, yeah. It's really, you know, I really want someone to sign up for my email list because they really want to see my recipes or my stories or whatever. I'm not going to push someone or go look at other blogs and copy and paste emails from groups or Facebook groups or Google+ groups or whatever. And copy and paste and put them into my email list. I think it's just, uh, it's not warm and fuzzy when I get an email for a newsletter or I start getting someone's RSS emails and I don't know the blogger or I just don't know the site or the company and it's very frustrating.

I agree so much. That ticks me off. I know it makes a lot of people mad and I I will mark those emails as spam to dingy.

I do too. I'm sorry. I see MailChimp at the bottom or Mad Mimi or AWeber and I know they're going to get upset and they'll see that my email marked it as spam because you can actually see who marked it as spam too. But it's like what Joanne said in the beginning, when someone lets you into their inbox, it's like they're letting you, you know, they're letting you into some private area because we all know how hard email can get. We can get overwhelmed with email. And it's so frustrating when I get bombarded with emails that I never asked for, I never signed up for. And I remember, I have the memory of an elephant, my friends make fun of me, and I remember those people. I'm like, I don't know who this person is, but they signed me up for an email. And I get them a couple times a week, and I think other people have gotten them too, and we've discussed them online, and it's very annoying. So please don't do that. Rule number 1.

Amen.

I had never heard of that. I can't imagine. I can't imagine people doing that, that they would really be that— I don't want to use the right word or the wrong word on that, but that crazy to do something like that.

Yeah, and I would think that if someone did that to them, they would get really annoyed, but it's like, oh, when I see that, I'm like, ah. And same thing with when I get pitches, when I get put into their email list, and it's like It's one thing if you're sending out a pitch that says, "Hi Julie," or "Hi Joanne," but when they put you into their mail list of any company, blog, or whatever, it irks me. It's a pet peeve.

Yeah. Yeah, this is news to me, but I have seen some and I've often wondered, did I sign up for that? So maybe that's what I'm worried about.

Probably not. If you don't remember, then probably not.

At my age, my memory is not quite as good as Julie's.

Sorry.

I don't always know for sure. That's okay. Kristen Doyle says one thing she loves about MailChimp, and she's assuming other mail services, is you can see what the person clicked on last before unsubscribing. Maybe they received 10 emails and never opened a single one and unsubscribed, or maybe they clicked on a certain link and unsubscribed. So the statistics prove good insights.

Yeah, that's a great point. You can do so much with those statistics. It's interesting, I've seen people who have subscribed to my list and they only open emails that say giveaway on them. I'm like, oh, you are, you are not interested in the recipes, you are just interested in the free stuff. You can learn a lot about people with the statistics.

Don't tell them that we can learn a lot about them right now.

Cindy Kirschner just asked, is there a good way to invite people to subscribe, people to join email versus Facebook following you? So I'm trying to figure out, is there another way to ask them to subscribe to your posts like they do with the Facebook kind of thing where you can invite people?

I have a little subscribe box on my Facebook fan page. Is that what she means? I'm not sure.

No, I'm not really sure. Cindy, can you give us a little more clarity on that if you can? It says, is there a good way to invite people, to subscribe people to join email versus Facebook following you. So I'm a little lost on that too, so we'll wait and see if she types something else back. Alright, so, but definitely the email is a lot more important than the Facebook follows. I've gathered that much already. Not just because Facebook keeps shooting themselves in the foot with all their new rules, but just the fact that they don't convert to even the page views. I mean, I know the traffic coming from from them or Twitter is just really nothing compared to everything else you can get.

Oh yeah, it just doesn't even compare. And I know that I don't have as many Facebook followers or Twitter followers as I would otherwise if I didn't focus so much on the emails, but it's just— the email is just so much more valuable. It's like I don't even care, to be perfectly honest.

Kathy Strauss just pointed out to Cindy that she thinks— we think what she was saying was offering the option to subscribe to your blog. Wait a minute, here she says, "Any way you can get people to follow you through email instead of Facebook?" I think like what Joanne was saying, have multiple places.

I have 3 places on my site. When you go to any page on my site, I have 3 different places where you can subscribe. I think I love what Joanne said about not everyone is going to be all over your page. We spend so much time on our blogs and we know exactly what it looks like. We think like a blogger. When we first started discussing this, and I was getting so excited about what Joanne was going to share today, when the 3 of us were discussing this on a Hangout a few weeks ago, I'm losing my train of thought. Oh, what I was saying was think like a reader, don't think like a blogger. Because what Joanne was saying, have 4 different places, 5 different places, however many different places to get them to sign up because they're not poring over every inch of our site like the way we do. And we know every inch of every page. And we think, oh, well, I don't know if I should have my posts, my popular posts in the sidebar or whatever. Maybe I should put Pinterest or I should put Instagram. And I firmly believe that if you want people to— if you want a higher click-through, or what's the term for the number— is it pages per visit or pages per— you know, if you want to up your number of page views, you want to get people to not just click on one page and leave. You want them to click on multiple pages. So like what JoAnn was saying, get them to click through your email and then have other places for them to see older recipes, the most popular recipes, whatever, to get them to stay on your site.

Yeah, absolutely. I think she's referring to the email subscription boxes, but hopefully she can clarify.

Yeah, because there is— someone else asked, how do you put the subscribe to newsletter on your Facebook page? Is there a way to do that? For your blog?

Oh yeah, so there was a little tool that I can use through Mad Mimi and I click like 2 checkboxes and a button and I integrated it into my Facebook fan page. I don't know how it is with MailChimp and I have yet to— I've been trying to help my friend do it for FeedBurner. I don't think that there's a way that you can do it. Facebook used to let you do FBHTML markup, like you used to be able to do like a lot more powerful stuff on Facebook, but they removed a lot of that stuff. Then you have to pay for services to create those markup pages. If you go on my fan page, there's a little thing that says sign up for my newsletter. I might change it to use stronger language like Joanne said, and then maybe I'll convert more people. It's actually a button that I was able to use from Mad Mimi. Then I actually was able to— you can customize these little buttons at the top. It came with a thumbnail from Mad Mimi and then I changed the thumbnail too. I bet there's a MailChimp one.

There should be. I know AWeber has one for Facebook as well, so I'd be surprised if MailChimp didn't have one also.

Yeah, Donalynn Ketchum just said MailChimp does integrate with a Facebook page.

Cool.

Right, good. Gail Watson wanted to know, Julie, what prompted you to start a newsletter? Isn't your fabulous blog enough?

What prompted me to start a newsletter? I don't know. You know, I basically was kind of getting tired of the whole FeedBurner thing and I wanted to leave FeedBurner and I wanted to I tell all of my friends, because bloggers are always worried about FeedBurner going away. We're upset that— and you know we're on Google+ now. Google's listening. You know—

They don't mind. That's okay.

If you're worried about FeedBurner going away, I would say once a week, once a month, every couple of weeks, go on and download your email subscribers, because the worst thing I would think to happen for a blogger, especially if they've been around for 3 or 4 years and they use FeedBurner and it go away overnight and you lose all your subscribers. I always tell all my friends to download the subscribers every so often. I just decided I wanted to, to leave FeedBurner and when I went to MailChimp I just decided I wanted to do a newsletter. Once I did, I basically decided I'm going to convert all those FeedBurner people, subscribers into newsletter subscribers. Right now when you sign up for the email, I need to fix it a little bit. It's a lot harder to do lists in Mad Mimi than it is in MailChimp. You can actually have them check a box to say, "I want RSS also including— I want the newsletter and I want the RSS." It's a little harder to do that in Mad Mimi, but I do have I have some subscribers that check that box, so they get an email every time there's a newsletter, but they also get an email every time there's a post. I kind of leave it up to them how they want to do it. I didn't really answer your question. I'm like a politician. I don't really know why I started a newsletter. Sorry.

No problem.

Newsletter good.

Okay.

Kimbaloo wants to know, where you see who marked you as spam. She says she's looking at it right now and can't figure out who marked you as spam.

Is she in Mad Mimi or MailChimp?

That she didn't say.

In MailChimp you can definitely do it. I'm not sure exactly where in Mad Mimi. You can look at the last email that was sent, I think, and you can find— there's a little thing that says you know, so many, you know, 3 marked as spam, and then click on that and you could see all the emails that did it.

So it'll give you that information, then you just have to go through it.

Yeah, and I don't know if there's a good way, because I think people, some people honestly forget they signed up for something. And that's why when you convert, if you ever convert FeedBurner to another service, FeedBurner holds on to all the emails that are unverified and verified. If you've been blogging for a couple of years and people have signed up, it actually shows you the date that they signed up also. If they've been there for a long time, if you automatically convert them over to AWeber or MailChimp and you go ahead and leave them unverified, those people might mark you as spam because they never got an email from you because they never confirmed their, their FeedBurner email. That's something else too to think about.

I know that Kim is on AWeber. So you go to the tabs at the top. It says subscribers and you can click on search, which is the first thing. View segment, you select unsubscribed and then it'll bring up a list of people who've unsubscribed. And if you click on the email address, it'll give you more information. As Kristin said earlier, you can see their activity. And see what the last thing is that they opened and how many emails they opened before they unsubscribe, how long they were a subscriber, that sort of thing.

Okay, great. Cindy Kirschner just wrote back about what she was asking about. She wants to know, is there any way to get your Facebook followers to become subscribers? Is there anything? Oh, because all they see is what you post on Facebook and you don't get any clicks with that.

Well, Joanne mentioned a tip to me about getting YouTube subscribers. Maybe we could do— you could do the same thing, like maybe mention every so often on as a Facebook status saying, hey, are you a newsletter subscriber? Do you subscribe to my emails? And then give them the direct link to it. That's an idea. If that's something that you— that your readers would be open to.

Yeah, I think just ask. Maybe it'd be even better to say something like 'Facebook is only showing this percentage of my post to you, so if you'd like to know or stay in the loop for all the emails I'm sending out, then here's how to subscribe to my email list.' It's so true, but it always drove me nuts only because the people that can see it are the people that can see it, and the people that you really want to reach are the ones that can't see it.

It's like, I don't know, I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot.

Absolutely. God bless them.

Google rules.

The one nice thing about Google, since we're talking about it, is we always see those things where you can pay $10,000 to talk to what's-his-name from Facebook, and all you have to do is send one of the people in San Francisco an email that you want get live with them on the Hangout and they'll come talk to you. So make your difference right there. It's not about— it is about money. Everything's about money. Who are we kidding? But it's not about money as much right now to them since they know they're going to own it eventually. Vicki Bensinger wants to know, how do you get YouTube subscribers that view you from YouTube? Every time I enter my blog address, it gets deleted.

Add the blog address where?

Yeah, Vicki, I put my blog URL in the caption and it doesn't get deleted.

Put it underneath the description generally and then it's a link.

Yeah, I have it linked in the description box and I also have it linked as an annotation in the video, but I'm curious I'm curious where she's talking about.

Vicki, can you let us know where exactly you're talking about? Let's see if she comes back with that. No questions right now. They're talking a lot amongst themselves about Mad Mimi and MailChimp.

I wish Mimi and the monkey Maybe I would get married and I would be really happy.

Vicky says when she has a video, I add my blog address but it gets deleted. So where are you adding it, Vicky? That's the question. Because I have them and I add it and it doesn't get deleted.

Where?

Describe about my video. Oh. So she's talking about using YouTube, not about email subscriptions. I'm— if it's her own video, I would say why is it getting deleted? I don't know why.

She says where she describes about her video. So that I don't know, Vicki, because I add them in also.

Does she mean on Facebook or on YouTube?

You're talking about YouTube, right? That's what I think the original one was. So, I don't know. We'll wait for her to answer. All right, we're coming towards the close of this. Have you guys got anything else you'd like to talk about? We've had a lot of good discussions on email, that's for sure.

Thank you, Joanne. I have lots of notes. Good. Thank you.

I've been taking them too here, so.

Thanks for participating.

Thanks for having me. I kind of just butted in and said I want to join in on this. No, it's good.

We're happy to have the company, that's for sure. All right, well, Vicky did say it was on YouTube, so we don't have an answer for you, Vicky, on that one other than I know ours stay on. Might be something you need to ask their help desk. It might be a bug in the system.

Yeah, YouTube is buggy.

Oops, I took a screenshot with your eyes closed, sorry.

As long as the mouth isn't open, that's okay. So she wants to know, she wants to get YouTube subscribers to subscribe to her blog and how does she do that?

Oh, I think that's just as simple as asking. Ask either like with a slide in your video or just ask like during the video, say, oh, you know, here's my website and I invite you to subscribe. Definitely like at the end of my YouTube videos, I always, I don't try to get subscribers for 15 Spatulas the blog, but I always say, you know, subscribe to my YouTube channel, don't forget to like the video, leave a comment below. It's just It's amazing with all this stuff what a big difference it makes to just ask because most of the time people won't do it if you don't ask. They won't even think of it. When you ask, there's a good chance that quite a few people will be surprised.

So never hurts to ask. I mean, it doesn't take you that much longer. And a lot of people just don't— like I said, they don't think about it. They're at the end of it and they're going to go on their merry way. But if you you nudge them a little bit, it might help.

Mm-hmm.

So very good. All right, well, that brings us to the end of our community education Hangout on emails. I know it was very informative for me. I hope everyone else got as much out of it. And everyone's thanking you for all you did. And Julie, thanks so much for being here. Joanne, thank you so much for everything you did for us tonight.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

We'll look forward to having you on again soon. I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and thank you for coming to the Community Education Hangout for the G+ Food Bloggers Community. If you're not a member, why not join? We'll love to have you there. Thanks so much for coming tonight, and we'll see you again next week.

Have a great night. Thank you. Bye, everyone.