If you’re a blogger, one of your major concerns is probably increasing traffic to your blog – not just one-time visitors, but regular readers. Email subscription lists are ideal for developing a loyal reader base, and pop ups have been proven to be an effective means of harvesting email addresses. The problem is that many readers hate them. You can resolve this dilemma by using pop ups properly – and knowing when you should not use pop ups at all.
1. Make Pop Ups Useful
Include useful features with your pop ups. For instance, along with harvesting email addresses, consider offering a free report for subscribers. Or include questions within the pop up to allow readers to determine how often they wish to receive newsletters or whether they want to receive the full body of the newsletter or just a link. Including this type of information in your pop up allows you to acknowledge your readers’ preferences, which can only help in building an audience for your blog or newsletter. The fact that you collect this information also sends a signal to readers that their preferences matter.
2. Avoid Pop Up Overkill
If your website has several pages, placing a pop up on more than one page can make sense. However, placing pop ups on every single page of your website only serves to annoy your readers and potentially drive them away. Don’t program pop ups so that readers can’t make them go away without filling out the requested information. The pop up should either fade away after a few seconds, or there should be a prominent “X”, “cancel” or “close” button attached to the pop up. If your readers don’t want to fill in subscription information, pop ups that obscure the text of the copy they came to your website to read won’t change their minds. Instead, they will probably click away from your website – likely never to return.
3. Don’t Use Misleading Pop Ups
Pop ups to collect email addresses and newsletter delivery preferences are fine. Pop ups that lead readers to other pages where they are faced with promotional copy for merchandise or services you’re selling – not so much. Rather than generating increased revenue, your efforts may backfire. Word of such unethical conduct gets around, and potential readers may use browser preference features to block your website altogether.
It’s also not advisable to spam readers’ mailboxes with ads after they’ve provided their email addresses for newsletter or blog subscriptions. It’s one thing to provide notice of upcoming blog entries. But you may find readers dropping their subscriptions in a hurry if you’re clogging their email inboxes every single day with a different item you’re pushing.
4. Avoid Pop Ups on New Websites
Until you’ve established an audience, keep pop ups to a minimum. While it’s true that pop ups are effective in harvesting email addresses, until your blog is established, you don’t want to do anything that might alienate potential readers. Many readers will assume a pop up is an ad and close it without even reading the contents.
A better strategy may be to include a subscription link at the end of each blog entry, or include a subscription link as a menu item on your blog’s home page. The advantage of this technique is that readers have already made it to the end of at least one blog entry, which is a positive indication that they like what they’ve just read, and are more likely to give a subscription to your blog a try.
This article is written by David Kendall. He contributed this guest post on behalf of WhoIsHostingThis.com for more information on their hosting reviews. David is a freelance technology writer and his articles appear on various marketing blogs.
You have to be very careful while using pop ups because most readers get annoyed with pop ups. I am sure even people who use pop ups, if they visit someone else’s site and are flooded with pop ups they will feel really irritated. I would recomposed that the bloggers should try using some other way of promotions. Try doing some research and select a application which will be suitable for your site.
Popups is always irritating to me whether its popup base ads facebook like box, ads or email subscription box. It irritates readers.
Even i hate pop ups in sites, so i using pop-up in limited fashion to show only once to new visitors.
Cool. I don’t like popups and I believe not many people like them. Don’t use popups on your blogs or you will drive many visitors away!
However, if you must put a popup on your blog, do so as un-obstructive as possible. Use the tips above!
Popups annoy readers, I too get annoyed when sudden popups raises.
As a Web Surfer, I hate PopUps at all, pop unders are fine, These tips are great to not annoy readers
Popups should be avoided. And if you are using it, then use it wisely without compromising your reader’s interest.
Well yes, using misleading pop-ups will wash-off the efforts of generating more revenue and agreed the pop-up should either fade out or should have an option to close, so that visitor will have an option on what action to perform. Thanks David for this useful and informative post 🙂
i think pop ups can be used productively but too many pop ups can upset your reader and pop ups should only show up on homepage and not on every single page and they should not very bright or disturbing to the eyes 🙂
I have a point to add here which is the importannce of checking the pop up from time to time.
I had been using pop up for one of my site and there was once where I didn’t realize that my cache is having problem, the pop up is all over the pages.
I am fortunate that someone notify me via contact form and after that, I do a regular check on this.
Wanted to know which plugin you use for Guest posting? I know this is off topic but wanted to allow guest posts on my blog too. So wanted to know the best plugin to use for user registrations.
You can try reCAPTCHA plugin for avoiding fake registrations mate.
Honestly, I don’t like popups. Some blogs load popups on every page view. At least that should be avoided. If possible, the popup should load probably 30 seconds after complete page load.
Everyone hates popups,Popups are really a 20 century marketing technique.
I really think that use of popups on our blog disturbs our readers. We should use them only when its required or when its very important. I really liked your tips. Thanks for the post.:-)