Poker69's Affiliate Blog

Creating a Site From Scratch - Part 4 - Email Capture

Continuation from Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of my blog series, go read them now if you haven't yet.

Part 4 - In this post I am going to be talking about something I am fairly new too, but seems to be very important when creating an affiliate site – E-mail capturing.

Because I am fairly new to this stuff I would love feedback in the comments!

Site Update - The site was indexed after my last post ... some people in the US have already been telling me it's ranking #1 for "March Madness Predictions", but I see it at #3 here. Either way I am pretty excited to see it ranking so quickly and hopefully I can stay up there, and rank for some other searches as well. Here is a screenshot of traffic stats for 4.5 days worth of being indexed.

Capturing Emails:

Many internet marketers outside of gambling pretty much swear by this. If you go to any site or blog from the top internet marketers you will see they are trying to grab emails. Creating a list of emails that you can email at any time with a "special offer" or whatever is a pretty smart thing to do, and not doing it is most likely leaving money on the table. One of the most important things with email marketing I think is building trust with your visitors (read some of Dave's posts over at PAL, he seems to swear by this).

For my March Madness site I am trying to capture as many emails as I can before the tournament starts, and will of course try to capture throughout the tournament as well. I am using Aweber which is an awesome service (even though it’s the only one I have tried I have heard only good things).

I have included an email capture box in the top right of template design, so that it is always there above the fold. Right now I have a pretty plain looking design that reads "Enter your e-mail for an exclusive March madness Predictions Guide and $250 in Free Betting Credits". The SIGNUP NOW button is blue to match the template.

With this email capture form I am going to start testing out a few different things. I am going to start testing out different looks to the form, what it reads, and even different colors for the submit button to see which generates the most sign ups.

My most popular pages will probably be my homepage and bracket predictions page leading up to the tournament. Because the teams aren't selected for the tournament until March.14th I don't really have any in depth predictions listed yet. This is a perfect opportunity to try and grab visitor’s emails.

On these two pages I have included a email sign up form in the content above the fold, basically saying "enter your email to receive an update when we have our expert's march madness predictions posted" (Check out an example on my March Madness Bracket Predictions page). These forms are already doing well, but I think I will try testing out some different variations as well.

I recently actually signed up for an "e-book" type thing at Jonathon Volk's blog. He is a really successful affiliate, so I decided to analyze how he did each step of his e-mail capturing and tried to use his as a guideline.

Something I hadn’t been doing so far with my e-mail capturing is using custom “landing pages”. When I signed up for Jon’s ebook I noticed how he customized the “thank you page” that gives you directions on how to confirm your subscription, and he also customized the message on the confirmation e-mail.

I used Jon’s as a guideline and made a custom thank you page and confirmation email very similar to his… because after all he is very successful with internet marketing and I’m sure it will help the % rate of people who confirm their subscription (not to mention it can also help build a bit of trust).

Check out my Thank you page (you can also see how I personalized the email a little)

The last step was to create a landing page for when they click the confirmation link in the e-mail … it will bring them back to my site in case they had already left the site and gives them the option to browse the site again.

Here is the “success” landing page

Conclusion – So there is a basic overview of my e-mail capturing I have set up for the site. This post was a tad rushed because I’m leaving for a mini vacay tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure I got all the points I wanted to down.

Part 5 - Calls To Action/Split Testing? Coming in about a weeks time (going away for a few days)

Any suggestions on things to change or try? What do you do differently for capturing emails?

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EDIT - After Spry's comment, I decided it was an excellent idea to customize it even more. I didn't know how to get the name into the "thank you" page and confirmation page before, but it was pretty simple through Awber.

I used a test version with the name "Harry"... check out the new customization:

"Thank You" page - after they fill out the form
E-mail subject line
Confirmation page - after they confirm