Okay, so a very important part of web publishing, is email marketing. This is because when you have visitors to a website, you need to hang on to them in some way. That's because you need to grow an audience, you need to widen a customer base. And usually this is for business reasons, ie it's a business website and you want to sell more of whatever you're selling. So the best way to do that is through email marketing. And the first step in email marketing is getting those visitors to your website to give you their email address, because once they do that, then you have a stronger tie to them.

You can send them emails, with offers or information and build a relationship with that visitor, to then turn them into to a customer strengthen the relationship. So in order to start with email marketing, we need to add a form on a website to collect email addresses. And I'm going to show you how to do that now. And the way you connect your website with an email marketing platform such as AWeber, MailChimp, or Active Campaign is usually through a plugin, all of the free plugins here@wordpress.org if you go to wordpress.org, slash plugins, and then we're going to search for AWeber, because that's the name of the email marketing campaign. And as ever, we're looking at the active install numbers, the positive reviews, and the recent updates. You see that AWeber made their own plugin, and it hasn't been very well received at all by the community, which is a great shame.

So I'm going to go for this This one which has more reasonable reviews, it's been updated more recently, even though it hasn't actually been used many times I need just over 1000. So we will copy that name there. A Weber forms by opt in cat, go to the dashboard, go to plugins, Add New. And now we're going to search plugins with that plug in title. And the first thing that comes up on the left here is the one we want. So we'll click install now.

And you can do this with any sort of plugin providing any sort of functionality. So we're going to go Activate Plugin now. And there it is, it's activated. And as you will usually find with plugins, it's added another item to the left hand sidebar menu in the WordPress back end, which is usually the case. But anyway, we're going to go into opt in cat and we're going to add new and we want a sidebar. widgets will enter a name, call it sidebar sign up, we'll go for that layout.

And then the opt in form is changed. course, we got to connect this with AWeber. So we're going to get my AWeber app realization code link there. And that will hopefully open AWeber. And I'll log in, and then I'll get the code there. paste that in.

After we pasted in the authorization code that connected WordPress to AWeber. And here at AWeber, this client has three lists, and we've got to choose the correct list to send the email addresses to so there it's given us an option to go to a thank you page when somebody has submitted the form and we will choose one that I made earlier. So we're going to save that opt in form but Nothing's going to happen yet. Because as you see, it says you can publish this opt in box by going to Appearance widgets. So let's go to Appearance widgets. And here in the right sidebar, remember I added those on the Customize page, which is part of the customize a theme.

Now I see that this is now tallies with what we put there. So you could either go to customize and edit the widgets there. Or you can edit the widgets in appearance widgets. And as you'll see, we have a new widget on the left hand side that we can drag over now, and that's from the plugin. So we got to select form, and that's the only one we made the sidebar signup form, and save. So now let's go back to the site and go to one of the pages.

And there we have our form. We can go rob, and my email. Join And it goes to that thank you page. Now, if this is a double opt in form, which I think it is, the user would now receive an email. But it won't be joined to the list. And that's because most lists when you start out our double opt in, so somebody has to click an authorization link on a subsequent email that they receive, which confirms their email address, and confirms their desire to join the list.

Now just have a look at my emails and see if I've got that. Yes. So that is the confirmation email that you get from me with AWeber. So it would be an idea to say on this page, you're not subscribed yet, you're going to get an email, please click a link in that email. So when I click this link now, now I have joined the list. And we can confirm that by going into AWeber.

And you'll already see there's one solution Driving today. And we'll go to the list and subscribers manage subscribers. And you see at the end there, there I've subscribed today. So this opt in box that we set up with just about five seconds, and it's on every page. This is a very powerful plugin or widgets or marketing technique that you must use on every website. Basically, because it turns visitors into customers, you get their email address, you have a much better chance of converting that visitor than you have.

If they just arrive at a website and read a page for one minute and leave. You should get them to arrive at the websites, consume your content and leave their email address because if you do that, and you get a large email list of few things, thousand subscribers, then you can guarantee sales. It's extremely powerful side of web marketing. And I think you'll agree that a video about email collection is a good thing to include in a course about WordPress because WordPress is all about publishing on the web, and many, many commercially viable businesses use WordPress precisely for this reason for this reason of its ability to use these sorts of marketing techniques very easily with free software. My name is Rob coven. I'll see you in the next video.