Affiliate Musketeer

One of my three affiliate websites is receiving just over 6,000 unique visitors each month. After recent conversations on the Affiliates4U forum, a fellow affiliate advised me that when his site reaches 5,000 unique visitors per month, he starts to build an email list.

Knowing that to succeed in this game requires hard work and dedication, I took his advice and spent about 5 hours this week adding in an email opt-in/capture form to the website in question. To do this I needed a few things:

1. An email list service
2. A nice, catchy ‘subscribe to email’ image
3. Some text that encourages people to subscribe

Signing Up to An Email List Service

I’ve used Aweber before (you can sign up for $1) but after taking the advice from a colleague about how to set up an email list, I thought I’d ask him to tell me what program he uses as his campaigns sounded pretty successful. He recomended a very cool looking email program called Mad Mimi. Signing up was quick and easy and it’s a very intuitive website that makes setting up email newsletters and creating sign up forms very, very easily. Once I had an account, I was able to use the interface within the site to create a form that I was able to customise to suit my site with very little stress.

A Nice, Catchy Image To Support The Campaign

I already had an existing site but when it had originally been designed, I didn’t really think to cater for an email subscription box. This means that I had to create brand new images for this. Now my initial reaction was to go for a colour that fit the theme of the site in question which just happened to be sort of a dark red:

But, after speaking to my fellow affiliate, Mansoor, he suggested that his own campaign performance was improved when the call to action was actually blue. I’ve researched colours a little in the past and blue is actually considered a ‘trustworthy’ colour so I thought I’d give it a go:

I changed the text a little too, just to make sure. Now the problem I’m experiencing is that the red fits into my site really nicely but the blue stands out like a sore thumb. I tried the red for two days and got 1 sign up, I’ve had the blue online for 2 days and so far have no sign ups. My data is too little to make any judgements yet, but I’ll keep you posted on the outcome.

Some Text That Encourages People to Subscribe

I confess I’m still working on this and intend to run a few variations of this over the next few months. The immediate plan here is to use similar kinds of call to actions (CTAs) as used in AdWords Text Ads, with a clear call to action (CTA) such as: ‘Subscribe’, ‘Get’, ‘Receive’ etc. As you can see from the images above, I’ve tried two variations so far with little change.

The trick here, I assume, is to combine the response CTA with a reason. I keep mentioning this but I’ve frequently been told in the past that ‘benefits sell better than features’, so my philosophy here is to combine a CTA with a benefit of subscribing to the list, such as ‘Subscribe Now To Receive Discounts’ or something along those lines.

This is not too far from the truth actually, because when I have my list of several hundred subscribers, I’ll frequently be sending out emails with discount codes and voucher coupons to the merchants I’m promoting.

This is my plan, anyway…I’d be happy to hear everyone’s thoughts on what works in email marketing for affiliate sites and whether or not colours that integrate well with a site are better than psychologically reassuring but sometimes out of place colours…

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