A little experiment I’ve been doing with aWeber inspired me to share this with you. If you’ve never heard of aWeber, it’s a service that allows you to generate forms to capture email addresses on your sites. You can store these email addresses in as many different lists as you want. Once someone joins one of your lists, you can automatically send them an autoresponder email series and then follow up with random messages whenever you want.

If you don’t have it yet, I highly recommend it. My business couldn’t function with out it.

On one of my sites that gets a good amount of traffic ( about 600 visitors a day ) I collect email addresses for a newsletter. It currently has about 4,200 subscribers, but I’ve been only adding about 25 new subscribers per week. That’s because the only way I’ve been collecting email addresses is via a traditional pop-up window that only displays on my homepage.

Well, since the latest version of Explorer and FireFox automatically block pop-ups, my list signup form hasn’t been showing to too many people.

I decided to get off my lazy ass and try something new. Here’s what I did yesterday.

First, through aWeber I can create pop-up windows that aren’t blocked by the current browsers. These are the ones that “slide” into the window from the top, bottom, left, or right. I create what I want these to say in my aWeber admin area by clicking the “Leads” tab at the top, and then selecting “Web Form Generator.”

In my message I introduced myself to my site visitors, told them that “over 4,200 people currently are subscribed”, and offered them some free e-books and an 8 day email course to join. I set this window to only display once to each visitor every 30 days so they don’t get overly annoyed with the pop-up. The key to creating one that converts is making it relevant to the visitor (duh!); I’m completely against those annoying pop-ups for casinos, gift cards, or shooting the alien to win a prize.

Once I input the above information, aWeber provides me with a single line of code for the pop-up that pulls a javascript file from their server. I then paste this code on whatever page I want the pop-up to show on. Right now I’m only testing it on my homepage, which is also the only way I was collecting email addresses before anyhow.

I did all of this yesterday, February 25th.

My traffic is generally lower on the weekends, but the results so far look promising. In less than 24 hours I’ve added 8 new subscribers to my mailing list. I imagine I’ll be able to average at least 10 per day, or 70 a week. Certainly a far cry from the previous 25 a week I was getting.

After I test this out for a week, I’ll report back with the exact amount of new subscribers I had signup. I then plan on placing this pop-up code on all of the pages of this site. Most of my visitors don’t enter my site via the homepage and will never see it. And since each visitor will only see the pop-up window once per 30 days, they’ll only see it when they first enter the site, but not on the other pages of the site if they visit them within 30 days.

Stay tuned for the update.

Check out aWeber’s site here.