In this video, we’re gonna take a look at a real-life case study of one of my blogs where I implemented the Aweber blog broadcast and also the Aweber Opt-In Form to capture a lot of subscribers – over 15,000 subscribers – and then automatically send my latest blog post to all these 15,000 subscribers.
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So instead of building a huge RSS subscription list, now I have a huge Aweber subscription list. Now, the very critical or very important difference is that this list that I have built in Aweber, I can email them anytime I want with any other offer that I have other than what are the latest blog posts. So that’s very important for you to understand, but if you are building a list only using a FeedBurner email subscription or FeedBurner RSS, your subscribers will only be able to read, only be able to get your latest blog post.
So if you want to promote a product, or if you want to promote an affiliate product, then you have to write a new blog post; otherwise, all your subscribers will never even know about it. But in Aweber, there’s a lot of freedom for you to email your list whenever you want with any type of offer that you have.
So I’m gonna show you an example…I’m gonna click on Messages and Blog Broadcast. Okay, so you can see here that I have my blog broadcast. I’m gonna click on that. Okay, so here, you can see my FeedBurner feed…RSS feed URL, and some description about this particular FeedBurner feed. And then you can see the subject or the RSS, the blog broadcast subject. And this is just a couple of variables here which I have taken from default variables given by Aweber and I have pretty much shortened it so that it only displays the latest blog post title without the date or any other redundant information.
And then if you scroll down you can see that I have a pretty-looking template here. Well, this template is actually from one of the Aweber templates that you can use right from this section here under templates. The only thing that I’ve done is that I’ve of course, put in my own logo and I’ve modified all the links that you see here. And then you see I’ve added an introduction paragraph. Some links to some of my other products. Alright? And this section here is where all the content appears.
So let’s scroll down, and you see that I also have a text – a pure text version of the blog broadcast. Alright? And I’ve chosen to send this item out when it reaches 5 blog posts, and I’ve chosen to send it out manually instead of automatically so that I can always customize it further to make sure that I can get the maximum response or open rate for my email broadcast. And then I’ve also chosen to track links in my blog broadcast, and also Twitter update, and also to syndicate all the blog broadcasts that I send into my web archives and my RSS links.
So if you scroll to the bottom, and you’ll see that all these items have been broadcast, and this is a new blog post that I have just added to my blog, I think yesterday. So, this item is already queued to be inside the next blog broadcast that I send. Remember, I have chosen to send 5 new blog posts at once. So, as long as it has not reached 5 blog posts, I’ll just see a status here that says, ‘Not Broadcast Yet’.
Okay, so let me show you some of the syndication links. I’m going to show you all three. And the first one is the web archive. So if you’ve chosen to syndicate all your blog broadcasts, then every blog broadcast that you send will appear here neatly in this blog archive. So you can also use this blog archive link and put it into your Ezine newsletter to make sure that any new subscribers can always refer to the previous Ezine newsletters that you sent out using the Aweber blog broadcast service. And, although it’s just pure text right here, but if you click on the individual titles…alright, and you can see, this is exactly how a subscriber would get my Aweber blog broadcast. And you can see that the template appears here pretty nicely, and all the blog content, only the first paragraph would appear here, and then followed by a link that says, ‘Read More,’ and once they click on this link that says ‘Read More,’ they’ll be taken to your blog; that particular blog post so that they can read the full article.
And then, of course, you also have your RSS link. Alright? So very similar to the web archive, the RSS link however, can be subscribed to using live bookmarks which is a Firefox RSS reader, even Google reader, MyYahoo! blog lines, or any other RSS reading or RSS reader out there. You can pretty much use those to read this RSS feed as well. However, when you click on the particular links, you’ll be first taken to the Aweber web archive, similar to the one I showed you before. And then only when someone clicks on ‘Read More’ will they be taken to your actual blog post.
Now let’s take a look at some of the methods that I use to get all the subscribers subscribed to my Aweber form and also put them into my blog broadcast. Now this is the main blog that I have put my Aweber opt-in forms, and since I have some of my products, I’ll also put Aweber opt-in form where you can get free two chapters of a product, and once you’ve put in your full name, primary email, and click on “Get two free chapters,” then they’ll also be subscribed to my overall blog broadcast list that I’ve created in Aweber, or if they just want to get the latest blog post, they can always click on ‘Subscribe Now’. And you can put in your name and email address here. You can see I’ve about 16,000 RSS feed subscribers. And this counter here is actually a counter by FeedBurner, not the one by Aweber, but it is important to realize that since FeedBurner and Aweber have sort of integrated, then this number here is the total sum of all my subscribers from Aweber, plus the email subscribers via FeedBurner and also the RSS subscribers via FeedBurner.
Now I’m gonna show you another example, from John Chow dot Com, who is a very popular blogger on the topic of How to Make Money Online, and let’s take a look at how John Chow has implemented the Aweber opt-in forms onto his blog.
Okay, so the first thing that you would probably see here is a pop-up here, sort of a DHTML pop-up, or a lightbox pop-up, that you would see the first time you actually visit JohnChow.com, and on this form, he is offering a free eBook about how he went from zero to 40,000 per month via blogging. So you can just put in your name, email address, and click on ‘I Want to Download the eBook,’ and you can see here that he actually has about 19,000 subscribers via Aweber alone. Alright? So you can generate a form like this inside Aweber. Just look at some of the pop-up options, and this is called the lightbox pop-up.
So, I’m gonna close this. I’m gonna scroll to the right, and here you can see again, there’s an In-line Opt-in Form, and again, you can generate a form like this in your Aweber account. But of course, this form is highly modified to, of course, improve the layout and the look of the form, but it’s basically the same Aweber form that you can generate yourself. And, it’s the same offer right here, the free eBook – to download a free eBook, you’ll put in your name, email address, and click on ‘I Want To Start Making Money Online’. And then you can see here that the FeedBurner RSS icon here actually says “47,000 readers” “By FeedBurner”. So, again, FeedBurner would display your total subscriptions via pure RSS readers or RSS feeds via the FeedBurner email subscriptions, and also via the Aweber subscriptions.
So I hope these two case studies have shed some light on how you can start getting more subscribers to your Aweber Opt-in Forms and then automatically send them a blog broadcast containing all the latest blog posts from your blog, and of course, you can also use the same list to send out other email promotions that are not necessarily related to your blog content. Now the key thing is that, instead of just putting an opt-in form, you should offer something that your blog readers can download for free. This is perhaps one of the most effective methods to build a huge list from your blog traffic and also using Aweber.