Comments on: A 5-Minute Website Tweak That Will Quadruple Your Subscribers

By: Carl C

Carl C — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:22:46 +0000

Your site rocks! I am loving it! I Will definitely be coming back again. I’m taking your feeds also, Thanks.

By: Sean DSouza

Sean DSouza — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:03:13 +0000

@andy: That may well work for most. I’m not saying it won’t work to get people into the funnel first and then qualifying them. But what’s worked for us is that we get them to qualify by not letting them take the easy route.

As for a situation like you described: We’ve had lots of folks from Ken Evoy (SBI), Ken McCarthy(System Seminar), Mike Mindel (Wordtracker), Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg (FutureNowInc) all sign up. And we’ve been able to speak to their customers, their contacts and readers. And despite the lengthy form they’ve gone through the process.

I think a slight barrier is a good thing. We don’t have to agree. It’s just what we choose to do and what works for us.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 06:02:02 +0000

Your logic breaks down on one step

I may or may not be a potential customer, but the people you need to reach are the customers of my contacts, readers & followers.

Isn’t it therefore better to get people into the funnel first, and then qualify them?

By: Sean D'Souza

Sean D'Souza — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:38:25 +0000

@gabor: I disagree with Marketing Sherpa’s concept. The information we get through our form is extensive. It’s not the usual ‘name/email address.’ It’s detailed and acts as a barrier. So instead of needing tens of thousands of visitors and subscribers, we only tend to get ‘interested’ customers. Is our conversion rate lower because of the form?

You bet it is.

It’s designed to be a barrier. And this barrier seems to be a needless exercise till you realise that 3% of our list generates over 90% of our income. So yeah, this article was about increasing numbers, but I also want to put hurdles to make sure that those numbers become ‘faces’ by qualifying themselves.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:16:01 +0000

With Tweetmeme you just need the newest plugin, and then to go into the options and specify for them to use your own Twitter usename.
The newest plugin also places via Techmeme at the end, but easy to delete it.

By: Gabor Wolf

Gabor Wolf — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:15:26 +0000

Sean, great tip as always! I read in Marketing Sherpa’s Landing page book that one of the mistakes is putting a link or a button to the landing page saying “click here to convert”. Their suggestion: always put the form in there, not just the button. I think it makes sense!

By: Sean D'Souza

Sean D'Souza — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:44:09 +0000

I’d appreciate if you could tell me what I should do re::tweetmeme, so I can do it as well.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:27:08 +0000

Just added tips

You should update the Tweetmeme plugin so that it includes your own Twitter ID

Use an SEO plugin that removes all the personal branding from your Title Tag – it is used by Tweetmeme, and can cause messages to be too long, or be less “re-tweetable”

I don’t currently have any subscription options on my blog, just experimenting before a major switch.