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Another quick day for the 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge to finish out a very busy, and productive week.

Yesterday, I promoted my new squeeze page from Day 5 with links on Facebook and Twitter. And I also added another message to my follow up series. This puts me at 9 days of time to optimize my list further before I need to add another message.

So today, I’m going to:

• Create a new webform for my blog sidebar
• Put the form on my sidebar
• Check if I missed anything during the first week

This shouldn’t take too long…

Create A New Webform For The Blog Sidebar

The blog sidebar is exactly as it sounds – it’s the narrow column on the left or right side of your blog. It appears on every page automatically – including standard blog pages, blog posts, and the homepage. So putting an opt-in form at the top of the sidebar is a great place to get attention to your list.

However, because of the size of the sidebar, you have to do a couple of things to your webform.

So I log back into Aweber and create a copy of the webform I started on Day 2.  I’m adding a new headline, a more concise call to action, and a shorter privacy statement. Sidebar space is at a premium, so you want to be economical with your words here.

Since the sidebar is narrow, I’m going to delete the label of the email address field completely. I do this by clicking the pencil on the design form page for the email field, and deleting the label I had before: Best Email Address.

I take the same phrase and put it in the default value box. This way, it shows up INSIDE the box.

In Aweber, there’s a little bit of an annoying thing when you do this. The colon (:) still appears to the left of the box. It largely goes unnoticed, but it is annoying to me. I’ll take care of this later by using the raw HTML for my form. But I’m making this quick today to get the form on the site (Take Action, Revise Later style). Also, each time you go to edit this form in the future, it will add the label again.

Put The Webform On The Sidebar

Once finished with my webform, I then click the Get HTML link from the Webform page and copy the javascript code like I’ve done before.

I need to login to my blog dashboard to get to my sidebar.

If you’re using WordPress, you’d either go to the theme editor and find the sidebar.php file, or you can use the widgets to add a text box.

Since I’m using Blogi360/QuanSite (think WordPress with a Ferrari engine), I have a feature called the Site Includes Editor. That’s where I need to go.

I choose the Sidebar Box option, and I paste the javascript code at the top, above all the other things I’ve had there in the past. I want my opt-in box to be the most prominent part of the sidebar.

Clicking save, I can now see my opt-in form on all my blog pages. You may have already seen it when you started reading today’s steps :)

I needed to make a couple tweaks to the form to make it look the way I wanted to. This basically involved where the words went to a new line. I manually added SHIFT+ENTER breaks to get the flow I want.

In the future, I’ll make the form stand out more by creating a table border around the form. I may also change the background of that table to a different color, like I did for my squeeze page opt-in box. But like I said, it’s Day 7, and I want to be quick.

Review Of First 7 Days

After a busy and intense week, I’m ready to reflect on how much has been done in such a short time (and just 10-30 minutes a day). I’m pretty happy with the changes I’ve made, and the game plan going forward.

However, I do remember there’s one thing I forgot to do yesterday. In Message 3, I meant to add the {!signature} tag at the end of my message, like I did with Message 1. This way, I can add a current message inside my evergreen autoresponder series at any time. I haven’t made this signature yet – but will do so later in Week 2. Basically, I intend to use the signature to post my Twitter link, and advertise any time sensitive things – like events coming up, or my newest product released, etc.

To add the tag, I just go back to the message, and put the cursor where I want the signature tag to appear. I can either type it in directly, or since this is something to be really careful about, click the personalize link above the message box, and click the {!signature} field. If you type it in manually and make a mistake, all your readers will get messages with {signature!} or something like that.

I’m sure you’ve received a message from a “guru” that started, Hey {Firstnamefix!} and wondered why. That’s why.

The Week Ahead

Now that we’re done the first week, I want to give you a sneak peek of where I’m going next with the 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge.

Tomorrow, I’m going to create a survey to see what my readers really want, and I’ll put it in message 4. Then, I’ll be creating a split test for my opt-in form on my squeeze page. On Day 11, I’ll create a better opt-in offer. I’m not sure what that’s going to be yet, but I may pick one of the reports I have or MP3 audios to give away as a welcome gift. On Day 12, I’ll revise the squeeze page to include the new offer.

If we’re on schedule then Day 13 and 14 will involve creating and implementing a One Time Offer (OTO), which will give new subscribers the opportunity to buy a set of lessons from me at a discount. This will be a great step to get done because eventually, I want to hook my central list to an affiliate program so my list can really grow faster.

So in other words, if you thought you learned and did a lot in Week 1, there’s a lot more where that came from! Please let me know what you’re most excited about after this first week with a comment below.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. And remember, I bet you know others that would get a lot out of this free 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge. Did you know you can refer them as my affiliate? Get your link inside DiscoverAutoresponders.com.

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