If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I love developing affiliate products for others to enjoy. One of the ways I do this is by creating free products for my readers and subscribers to try. If you’d like to create a similar product for your own niche, this is one of the best ways to do it.
One of the most successful products I’ve ever created was a blog post series that taught readers how to start a food blog from scratch. Because this was such a successful post series, I decided to create a free product out of it: the Food Blogger’s Guide To Starting A Food Blog.
As my readers know, I provide tonnes of free resources on my website to help bloggers and content creators launch successful blogs and businesses. In order to continue providing these resources for free, I need to create ever more powerful tools to help my readers grow their businesses.
Enter: the Food Blogger’s Guide To Starting A Food Blog. This is an optin form with an embedded optin box that I’ll provide to you below. When someone submits their email address in the optin form, they’ll be added to my list. From there, I’ll send them instructions on how to get started with a food blog (of their choosing).
What’s great about this is that you, as the product creator, retain complete control over how your product is presented and promoted. You get to craft the perfect message to pull in the right audience. And if you can’t seem to convince someone to try your product despite all your best efforts, you know you’re on the right track.
How to Add This Form to Your Blog Posts
If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that I don’t usually do product launches on my blog. That is, I don’t like to promote products on my blog that I don’t feel comfortable recommending. For example, I wouldn’t feel right about promoting an insurance product that I don’t believe in.
With that in mind, when I created the Food Blogger’s Guide To Starting A Food Blog, I decided to forego any kind of product placement or affiliate marketing in the content.
Instead, I wanted to provide an optin form throughout my blog posts so that I could grow my email list quickly and effectively. While some people prefer to hide their optin forms in the content, I prefer to pull them up in the sidebar so that my readers can get to them easily.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you have two options when it comes to adding an optin form to your sidebar. You can either upload a standalone.html file or embed the optin form directly into the.html file containing your blog post.
If you go with the former, make sure that you keep the code clean and uncluttered. You don’t want to bombard your readers with too much content.
For the latter, you’ll want to use a free WordPress.com account or a self-hosted WordPress blog.
Either way, when you’ve uploaded your optin form, you can hit publish and your blog post will then be available to anyone who happens to come across it. Of course, you can always go back and edit the content at any point in the future.
Get A Free Email From Me Signup Form
On my site, I provide a variety of free resources to help bloggers and content creators grow successful businesses. One of the most popular is the Get A Free Email From Me signup form. This form allows users to sign up for my newsletter so that they can stay up-to-date on all the latest tips and tricks as well as products that I believe in my heart to be of good quality.
What I love about this form is that it takes only a few seconds to load, and then it disappears—leaving you with a clear field for the subscription form below.
This is one of the most popular forms on my site, not only because it’s effective, but also because it’s one of the only free forms I offer. When I get a free form like this, I know that I’m going to end up using it often because it’s proven to be so effective. I love creating free resources for my readers, and the Get A Free Email From Me signup form is one of my all-time favorites because it provides such an easy way to grow my email list quickly and effectively.
Pro-Tip: Use An Autoresponder To Get Started
An autoresponder is a tool that’s quite similar to a drip marketing system. It’s essentially a tool that will take care of all the email marketing for you. As its name suggests, it’s designed to send out regular emails to people who’ve subscribed to your list. With an autoresponder, you get to choose whatever emails you want to send out and the frequency with which you want to send them out—creating a perfect email marketing system without all the stress.
What’s great about this is that you don’t need to have a huge list to get started with an autoresponder. Anyone who signs up for your email list will get regular email updates from you—helping you to grow your email list quickly and effectively.
Depending on how you use it, an autoresponder can be quite affordable. This is why I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a way to grow your email list quickly and effectively.