1. Overview

In my quest to convert more readers of my blog to engaged subscribers, I am running a lot of experiments.

This one was one of the high impact ones – basically doubling my new daily subscribers.

1.1. The Call To Action

The idea is simple – new readers only will see a small inline call to action at the start of my articles – for example:

This will go away after the reader views 3 pages of my blog.

1.2. The Optin

The link is part of a Two Step Optin – when it’s clicked, it will show my optin in a popup / overlay:

So the signup can happen right then and there – with no additional page to lower the conversion rate.

And that’s it – clean and simple, and with very nice results.

2. How I did it

To show the link to new visitors only, I used the What Would Seth Godin Do wordpress plugin – which simply uses a cookie to separate new visitors from existing readers – and only show the message to new readers.

The plugin is pretty simple – it allows you to add a custom message before or after the article, and not much more.

For the Two Step Optin, I used a Lead Link – from Leadpages. Using Leadpages – which is a paid product – was easier for me as it enables you to do this out of the box, but it’s definitely not a requirement.

The optin itself is pretty simple, and can be created by hand without to much difficulty. Showing it when the link is clicked can also be done with one of the many wordpress plugins available for wordpress (or, if you are a coder, with javascript).

3. The 2X Results

On to the results – before starting this experiment, I was getting about 13 new email subscribers / day.

First, let’s see how many times the Call To Action link was clicked:

Out of the total number of new visitors in the test period – 9633 – ~58.66% were new (and actually saw the optin).

And, out of these 5650 new visitors – 126 clicked on the CTA – that is a ~2.4% conversion rate.

Now – out of these 126 impressions of the popup Optin form – 109 actually opted in – which is an 87% conversion rate on the Optin itself – not bad.

Overall, the conversion rate is 1.93% – which is higher than my main sidebar conversion rate.

Finally – over the course of 8 days – 109 new subscribers means an average of just over 13 new subscribers / day – thus, doubling the rate with which I’m building my list.

Here are the analytics on the new optin:

4. Conclusion

The conclusion is straightforward – this is an easy strategy to implement and the results are huge.

If you’d like to keep abreast with my upcoming experiments and get high impact strategies like this one – opt into my email list (on your right).