With such vast resources available online it is not difficult or costly to build your own website for free and there are no excuses for even the most technophobe of bloggers not to be able to learn how to build a website that displays their musings to the entire world in a suitable and readable manner.
Once the content is up a great way to build relationships with your visitors and encourage loyalty is create an email list. To create an email list that people want to sign up to isn’t rocket science but too often people looking to build a free website do not follow some simple rules on how to make people want to join up.
Provide Benefits
It may sound obvious but actually providing genuine benefits for people to sign up is half the battle won. For those looking to create an online store the benefit to signing up to an email list could be special offers, notice of sales and new products, where as a band seeking to create a music website for free could have an email list with the benefit of announcing new music or gigs, strengthening and fostering loyalty amongst their fans. People will sign up if there is good enough reason to it is good practice to have a good think about who your target visitors are and what they would want. Maybe experiment with making different offers for sign up and see what works. It could be new content, competitions or special offers, but once you know what the benefits to signing up work best you can use this knowledge to get more subscribers by offering the most attractive benefits.
Don’t Scare Them
Email lists can greatly assist in the identification of your target audience and the temptation to request lots of information in the email list sign up to get as many details as possible must be overcome. People are naturally reluctant to give out too many details online and are rightfully worried about the prospect of spam, viruses, fraud and other similar activities as committed by the less scrupulous out there. Keep the sign up process simple and ask as few questions as possible. Your information needs will differ depending upon what your your website is all about but you have to ask yourself if you really need their phone numbers or income levels or other such information that you either do not need or will only scare potential subscribers away for being too personal.
Information such as age, sex and location should be enough information for most online businesses or for those looking to build a free website in the blogging sphere, to get a fair idea of the type of visitor interested in what they offer. So keep the questions to a minimum
It is imperative that you make the people aware of what they are signing up for. Make it clear that it is not spam and you do not sell or pass on their details to anyone. It’s a good idea to include a privacy statement at the sign up stage so people are reassured as to exactly what they are signing up to and if third party’s are involved then that is declared up front.
Give them the opportunity
The final way to build your own website making signing up to an email list an easy process is to ensure that you give them plenty of opportunities to sign up. Make the subscription button nice and prominent and try and include it in areas that you have their attention, i.e. at the end of articles, on the home page or in a checkout. Don’t overdo it or force people to sign up instead provide clearly displayed email sign up buttons. Learning how to make a website in Flash will create more attractive opportunities but even the most basic of web pages can display an email sign up opportunity in good fashion.
Following some simple rules when you look to create your own free website will greatly assist you in getting people to sign up to a mailing list that will form an integral part of the self promotion of your website.
