5.2 List building on Upscribe

So we’ve come to the last episode in this course on blogging for business. Think of this as a bonus episode because who doesn’t like surprise gifts, right?

In the beginning of this course, we spoke about blogging as a marketing function primarily aimed at driving business. And well, one of the ways brands convert readers into customers is through lead generation. 

How does a blog generate leads? Well, it's a no-brainer. First, you get people to subscribe via email so that they can receive your blog fresh in their inbox. 

Then, once you have a list of people who have subscribed to your blog, you can slowly start turning some of these subscribers into leads through email marketing. We have a full course on email marketing if you want to really understand how to do this well. 

 But for now, let's break this down in a simple manner. 

1. A person comes to your blog. Let’s give this person a name. Kumar. Okay too common. How about Kamala.
   
   
2. So Kamala reads a blog and Kamala likes what she is reading.   
     
3. You then have this email form that tells Kamala, she can get these blogs delivered to her inbox for free. Nothing is free kids.
   
   
4. Kamala subscribes to your blog and starts getting your blog posts via email.
   
   
5. After Kamala has become an avid e-mail opener and blog reader, you decide to start sending more sales-focused emails to her. Maybe even throw in a discount.
   
   
6. Kamala grabs the offer and buys whatever the heck you’re selling.
   
   
7. You just moved Kamala from being a reader to a subscriber, to a customer.
   
   
8. You’re happy. Kamala is happy. The business’ bank account is happy.
   
   
9. Quick maths.

Seriously guys, our e-mail marketing course literally covers this in excruciating detail. Go buy it. 

So now, if you are on Medium and you want to build a subscriber list, how do you do it?

Medium itself does not have an email form you can use in your blogs. But it does have integrations that will help you do this.

We’re using a tool called UpScribe for this episode. 

Upscribe is basically a form builder for Medium. Yes, it is paid but that's not your headache. Get the business to pay for it.

Once you sign up, you will see this screen:

Go to the forms on the top right and hit New Form.

You'll see this screen

You can change the title, color, text etc to make the form real nice and pretty.

Once you’re done, just hit update and then Embed. You should get a URL like this

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Now just copy this link, and simply paste it in your medium story, wherever you want the form to show up. Watch this, I go back to my medium blog and simply paste it in the body.

And there you go!

I have a sign-up form in my blog now.

Next big question, what do you do once you’ve collected these email ids? Well, there are several tools out there to help you send, track and customize emails.

Upscribe itself is an email tool, so if you walk through the step by step tutorial, you should be able to send out emails in no time.

There are a whole bunch of other tools you can use for your emails marketing like these (Show logo list of email marketing tools).

If you are using another tool to send emails, you can also just use Upscribe to collect the emails and send it to that tool.

If you click on your profile on the top right, then on integration, it will show you all the different tools you can connect to Upscribe.

Alright, that was lots of new information and we do realise we’re just skimming over some of this stuff. 

That's because the whole world of email marketing is quite vast and will take more than an episode to go over but we’re confident you’ll get the hang of it once you get started. 

Practice makes perfect, right?

And with that, we have come to the end of the blogging for business course. We packed a lot into this, so your brain must be practically buzzing. But we’re confident that you’re ready to tackle the world of content and begin your career as a top business blogger.