In this session, we discuss the different strategies for creating an opt-in page that will deliver downloadable content.
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Video Transcript
You know, I think I may have shown you before a website called Hubspot.
Oh yeah.
Okay so I follow them and I’m just… really, quite honestly, trying to steal their ideas. They give you a lot of them and their whole goal is to give you ideas so that you’ll hire them. It’s maybe not a terrible idea but if you look at the front page of my website, it kinda looks very similar to this. Just go to the homepage, see, it looks quite similar.
Yep.
So I did steal some of their ideas.
Well, it’s nice and clean.
Nice and clean. One of things I liked on the Hubspot website is we’ve looked at what you call their catalog page which is I think it’s… okay if you go to Market Resources, the top there, alright you refer to this as a catalog page. Well, that’s because it’s got all this content on the left nav. I’m going to call it navigation bar or something.
Yeah, that’s what it is.
So you know, almost every page you go to, they have an offer that you know, you have an opportunity to sign up for something, download something and I really like that. You know, too many real estate websites, all they have, the only thing they offer is the opportunity to search for real estate. So I’m creating all this content that is not on the site that’s like reports on how you know, how to market your home, reports on you know, how to buy your home properly, this and that, all these various things that people could download. I’m just kind of looking for the best way to create a call to action and a landing page and I have some of the tutorials. I just haven’t done it yet because I just… you know, I’ve been working on site layout and organization and I just haven’t gotten to it yet and I feel like I’m getting close. And I just wondered what you think would be a good first step or two to you know, make one of those work and just kind of experiment a little bit.
I’m not sure I really understand the question.
Okay well, you see the… for example, the 30-day trial?
Yeah.
The button there, that’s a call to action that I think is… it links off to this little sign-up page of sorts so then once you sign up, you get to download. So how do I do that?
Oh well you know, are you using an auto responder?
I’ve got… I’ve looked at all of them and I think I like this one called Get Response. I have not really used it yet but I you know, got a trial with them and AWeber is good too. They’re like double the price though so maybe they’re twice as good? I don’t know.
Well, AWeber, I think, is the easiest of them to manage and to use. But I mean, MailChimp is probably the cheapest, at least, at the beginning because you can get 500 you know, people on your list without spending any money. But whether you… whichever one of them you use, I would use the auto responder as the sign up so they sign up, they confirm their email address, and then in the confirmation email, you send them a link to the report.
Okay.
And so it happens inside the auto responder email. If you want to make people members of your site which I don’t really think you would want to in your situation, but…
No. Maybe they’d want to get a for example, somehow… what would be the best way to… maybe if they wanted to make sure not to miss the weekly market updates, it can be either emailed to them or I don’t know. What’s the best way to do that? To RSS feed or…
Well, if they want to make sure they get the weekly market updates, if you’ve got an RSS feed button, they can do it themselves and it’s passive, right? There’s nothing you have to do about it. It’s just going to automatically happen. They’ll get… when you post something, they’ll get it. And the thing is that they have to open up their RSS reader to look at it. The next thing you can do is you can also offer email updates via Feed Burner. So it’s the same thing as the RSS except that Feed Burner sends them an email every time something happens. Or you can do this which is, I think, quite a bit more personal which is you can let them sign up for the free updates and through your auto responder.