Yes bulding a responsive email list is the most important factor in running a wildly successful internet business, not forgetting to build great relationships with your subscribers, of course.

I myself don’t like pop ups as well, but as you said we all need to test before coming to any conclusions.

Nice Terry and keep them coming

Thanks for the awesome free audio. You and Daniel give some great, actionable steps to take. It nice to be rewarded for being on your list

1. It may annoy the visitor who is just about ready to leave your site. Jerry, Chris has made a good point when he said that this has increased his rate to over 400%.

Even if the visitor gets annoyed at your site, so what. He is leaving anyway.

2. Like I mentioned above, you can increase your opt in rate which is always good.

Getting more and more subscribers to your blog is a great way to make more money.

Terry, how has your Summer sales have been?

It seems that the past 2 months have been really slow online in terms of making sales with affiliate programs.

Tal

Chris: GREAT comment I’d recommend everyone read from you – giving very good test results we can all learn from.

Cheryl: I don’t know of any written instructions although that is a great idea for a post.

Phil: Thank you for the confirmation that the email is important. You’d be surprised how many bloggers use RSS only without much focus on email.

Jerry: There’s actually quite a few people who find them irritating. Personally one popover doesn’t bug me, but multiple ones really do. But it all comes down to test resutls for anyone’s specific business.

And yes, even though I’m more web tech savvy than 95% of webmasters, I still prefer email to RSS.

It’s interesting perhaps that email marketing could be one of the oldest and best known Internet marketing methods, and there is really not much if any debate about it’s usefulness.

And yet, I get the impression that most webmasters never quite get around to making real use of it.

Even most prominent webmaster oriented forums never mail out any kind of reminder, update, news etc. They seem perfectly content that their registered users wander off never to return, which is strange in such a competitive market. I’ve made the same mistake myself, on more than one occasion.

So, Terry’s post is an obvious, but clearly still needed tip.

Thanks for the reminders. I got so many irons in the fire that I forget the bread and butter part of this biz.

Question: Do you know of some instruction on how to format the optin box with the neat red/green Submit button!! I do all my techie stuff right now and I suppose I could dig it out but man, I wish I knew how to do it – yesterday. Did you cover it in your Internet Lifestyle retirement system and I didn’t see it?

Thanks ahead of time!

Instantly, my subscribe rate increased by over 400% without any increase in traffic and has stayed at well over 400% ever since.

The way I see it is this:

1) If the popup is on exit, they’re leaving anyway. What have I got to lose?

2) Since it appears only once, existing subscribers may be temporarily mildly annoyed but forget about it.

3) If I’m providing truly valuable content on my website, people will WANT to subscribe… they might not have noticed the subscribe box and will actually be grateful for this opportunity to sign up.

4) If my newsletter / offer is good enough, people will WANT to subscribe just to get the initial benefits. And in this case, if my newsletter successfully builds a relationship with them and provides valuable content, they’ll again be grateful that they signed up.

I did make sure to use a different tracking code for the popover, so I can see exactly how many people subscribe from each part of my site.

Based on the numbers, I’ve lost THOUSANDS of subscribers as a result of not doing this sooner.

I now use exit-popups on most of my sites… often for a new squeeze page I ask people a single question – to tell me why they’re leaving. Then after about 50-100 of those responses, I improve the website and then take the on-exit popup off.

This has been invaluable feedback – I found out that one of my sites, due to the large # of international visitors, only focused on the “$97″ that was highlighted on my squeeze page, failing to notice that the entire phrase highlighted was “$97 of FREE…”

So instead I highlighted “FREE” and saw subscribe rates increase (and that’s with no on-exit popup asking for the optin… since the squeeze page was already asking for optin I didn’t want to duplicate)

Long story short: If a person isn’t using on-exit popups, they’re probably leaving money on the table in one way or another.