Blogging

Double optins is the term used for activating/using an email verification system when someone registers their email address on your blog for your newsletter or any digital product that you might be giving in for free. There are various pros and cons of using Double Optins vs Single Optin and there are varied opinions of people around the globe.

What is Double Optin To Be Exact?

Suppose you offer a free eBook to your readers that you feel would be valuable to them. You ask for the readers email address first and in exchange you offer them the free download. This way, you're able to get in touch with the subscriber for the years to come and continue to provide more value to the subscriber.

Here, once the subscriber enters their email address, in the case of double optin, the subscriber gets redirected to a new page where they are asked to confirm their email address using a link that is sent to them on the email through which they subscribed. (This page is called confirmation page)

Next up, the subscriber would click the confirmation link in their email that we sent and this would redirect them to a 'thank you' page which we can utilize in all sort of ways that I'll discuss in the future posts.

Double optins help you to make sure that the subscribers that download your eBook and become part of your email list are real fans and people who wish to be part of what you do.

Very often what happens is that people would generate random email address online (many tools out there) and would use them to subscribe and download you eBook in case you don't have double optins system set up.

This brings trash email address to your email list, for which you pay on monthly basis. This is what you won't want in worst case.

Note that at BloggingeHow, I personally experience both, the double optins and the single optin (where there is no confirmation gateway in between) and found out the single optin to work for me better. I'd love to talk about it in my up coming posts InshaAllah.

Now lets see how we can activate and manage double optins in Aweber account.

How To Activate Double Optins In Aweber?

Navigate to your Aweber's Dashboard >> List Options >> Confirmed Optins.

First of here in 'Confirmed Optins' options, you have to set your confirmation message that would be sent to the subscriber.

You can customize this message as I showed in the last post in Aweber series. You can set up a customized subject line that would make it clear to the subscriber that this would be the confirmation email.

Example: First Name, Please Confirm Your Email OR BlogggingeHow, Email Confirmation etc.

There are multiple options that we can choose from as shown in the image above. Once you select the subject line, move on and edit out the email body and make it more personalized. You don't need to change the entire body, though I would recommend to add some branding by mentioning the name of your blog or company.

For example you can enter in the body:

Thank you Name, for subscribing and showing interest to download my eBook. I hope the eBook helps you out in many ways. There is only 1 step left for you to follow so that I can send the download link of the eBook right in your inbox.

Kindly confirm the email address by clicking the link below.

Thank you :)

Regards
Your Name.

This body is more personalize and looks like it's sent by a human and not an automated bot. You can work out your own email body as you wish. Think out side the box :)

Next up, simply enable the button (as shown in the image above) to activate double optin. Now each time, when a subscribe subscribes through the email web forms on your blog (you can create your own aweber email webforms, I'll talk about that in upcoming post in the series).

Hope this procedure was easy to follow. Double Optins would definitely save you a lot of money by ignoring spam emails.

Try Out Experimentation Too

Never stay back from trying new ideas and experimentation. I would suggest you to enable double optin for a month or two and see how many people confirm their email address. What often happens is that when people see that there is another step to go, they often won't confirm their emails and this results in loosing a potential subscriber/fan.

Thus in some niche, it's advisable to use double optins while in some, it's better to have single optin, which is what I do with BloggingeHow.

I'll InshaAllah discus this in detail in my upcoming posts.

Make sure you go through them and then decide between what strategy is good for your niche.

Till next time,
Take care.

Allah Hafiz. :)

Email Marketing

Aweber Tutorial #2: Enable/Setup Double Optins - Fight Spam

Featureso Monday, 11 May 2015

Aweber Tutorial #1: How To Create a New Email List

Aweber is one of the best email marketing and list building tools online and I have talked about that in various posts before. Aweber is what I personally utilize here on BloggingeHow since over an year now. If you're not yet exposed to Aweber, you might be wondering what benefit could Aweber bring you with. Well once you get an account with Aweber, you can:

Before we start, make sure you read: 6 Reasons to Get Started With Aweber - You'd Be Foolish Otherwise

Powerful Features Of Aweber

Create Auto responders: Which are a series of emails that you can set which would be delivered to your email subscribers once they register/signup for your email list. This comes in handy to create a relationship with your newly subscribed email subscriber who would get quality information/deals right in his inbox with a set time sequence without you having to send the emails individually to each subscribers, which is near to impossible if you've a huge audience.

Create Email Newsletters: You can create email newsletters (you can choose from tons of predefined templates which you can choose as per your blog's niche) which you can set to be set weekly, daily etc. Or you can also send one time email broadcasts too for any specific occasions.

Auto Download System: With Aweber, you can create an auto download system where your blog visitors can subscribe to your email list and in return get a freebie to download such as an eBook, online course etc. You can learn how to set an auto download system with Aweber.

There are tons of other features such as creating on Email Subscription forms, A/B Testing for better email results, Managing subscribers in detail etc.

I layed down these features to give you an idea as to how powerful Aweber can be for your blog to capture email subscribers. Make sure you read this full list of Aweber features too.

How To Create a New Email List In Aweber?

Email list is the list of email subscribers you will capture over the period of time on your blog. These are the honest followers and fans that would like to hear more of what you have to offer with time to time.

With Aweber, you can create multiple email lists along side of one an other. You might want to categories your email subscribers into separate lists so that you could later send them precise content as per their liking.

For example, on many popular technology blogs, you'd have noticed that you get an option to subscribe to their email newsletter. There you can choose any specific category to subscribe to and leave others.

This subscribes you to their specific email list where they can then send articles of that very particular sub category. You might only like to receive emails from me regarding 'make money online' keywords, and might not be interested in 'blogging tips'.

So you could make a system where you can create multiple email lists to define a specific category of your blog and interest of the audience.

With that being said, lets jump right into the steps you need to follow in order to create your very own email list in Aweber.

Step #1 Login To Aweber Account

Simply put your login credentials and get to Aweber's Dashboard.

Once you're logged in, you'll be redirected to their Dashboard where the real fun begins.

You'd notice that I have currently 4,867 active email subscribers in my 'bloggingehow' list. In my future posts InshaAllah, I'll share some great strategies to clean up your email lists to save your self money. Every subscriber that you've in your email lists costs you money, as you pay to Aweber on the basis of email subscribers that you hold altogether in your lists.

Up til now, I've collected over 17-20k email subscribers, BUT currently I only have 4,867 subscribers that are filtered out to be the most active ones. It's better to have an active email lists that opens up your emails rather than thousands of email subscribers that are dead and are no longer interested in what you send.

More about on cleaning your email list in the upcoming emails InsshaAllah.

Step #3 Click 'Create a New List' In Dashboard

While you're in Aweber's Dashboard, simply scroll down where you'd notice a button that says 'create a new list'.

Simply click that.

Step #4 Enter Basic Information About Your List

In the first step, they'd like you to enter some basic information about your self and your blog/company. This is usually pre filled up as you already entered this basic information while you were creating your account with Aweber.

In the next step, you'd have to enter your email list's name and basic description that would be displayed to the subscribers while they'll be subscribing to your email list.

You can enter something like 'Receive regular quality tips on How To Make a Living Online' etc. This would largely depend on what niche you're in. And most importantly, what sort of relationship you'd like to maintain with your subscribers.

I would make this description more personal rather than a description from a popular technology blog.

Once done, simply move on to next step by clicking 'next step'.

Step #5 Write a New Email Confirmation Message

In the next step, you now have to configure your email confirmation message. This is the email that is sent to the new subscribe to confirm his/her email to avoid spam emails. People often enter wrong emails to download your free stuff.

To abstain from this, you'd want to create a double optin, which means that they would have to confirm their emails first by clicking to a 'confirmation link' in the email that you'd be sent to them automatically once they'd register for your email list.

You can edit the email subject as per your liking, and edit out the email body. I like to get personalized with my email and send the following confirmation email for you to have an idea.

Hey Greetings {!firstname}!

I am glad that you signed up for BloggingeHow via email. There are bunch of quality posts that we'll be sending over to you in the future.

You now have to confirm your subscription by clicking the link below.

Thanks a bunch for cooperation. :)
Cheers and stay blessed!
-----------------------------------------------------------
CONFIRM BY VISITING THE LINK BELOW:

http://www.aweber.com/z/c/?xxxxxxxx

Click the link above to give us permission to send you
information. It's fast and easy! If you cannot click the
full URL above, please copy and paste it into your web
browser.

-----------------------------------------------------------
If you do not want to confirm, simply ignore this message.
Thank you,
BloggingeHow

Once done, simply hit 'Approve message and create list'. You're all done. You have create your new email list. In the future posts in this series, there are bunch of more interesting stuff regarding Aweber and how you can manage your email list following in the best way you can.

Now, I have some important posts left for you to read and increase your knowledge about this wonderful comprehensive email marketing tool.

Till, next time, take care

Allah Hafiz. :)

Email Marketing

Aweber Tutorial #1: How To Create a New Email List

Featureso Saturday, 9 May 2015

Aweber, that is one of the best email marketing online tool, which I personally use at BloggingeHow to manage my email list has made a smart move lately. I wanted to write about this the moment they posted the news live.

Previously, if you had to signup for Aweber, you had to pay 1$ initial fee, which made sure that you were serious about the service. Even though 1$ was peanuts, it was still a big hindrance as people still didn't' consider that as 'free', which is somehow weird knowing the fact how powerful Aweber can be in bring your online business to a whole new level.

Aweber: Best Email Marketing Tool Offer Free Trial Now! Try It Now!

I previously wrote: 6 Reasons to Get Started With Aweber - You'd Be Foolish Otherwise which would give you an overview of how crucial I believe Aweber (or any other email marketing tool) is for an online business.

Even though, you still have to enter Credit/Debit card details while signing up, you won't be charge anything until of from second month. You can checkout their pricing plans. Generally, as your email list grows, you would be charged likewise.

How to Sign Up To Aweber For Free?

Step #1 Login to Aweber.com
Step #2 Navigate to the tab 'Free Trial' in green. (as of current design).

Step #3 Fill out your information form with your name and payment information. Once done, you're all set to use Aweber to it's full extent without any cut down in the features.

I accept that I opted for Aweber just to test it out and it worked so seamlessly and the opportunities it offered were so high that I couldn't resist signing off.

Even though I realized that the pricing were little high as compared to it's competitors, though it was enough for me as most of the industry top entrepreneurs were utilizing Aweber to it's fullest.

I had already made my mind.

This is a quick post to let you guys know to start of now without wasting any of your time. If you're confused about what Aweber is and how it could help you out, I would recommend you to first read out my previous posts that talk about how you could increase your blog's traffic and defeat Google with it's algorithm updates by utilizing Aweber to collect email subscribers.

All of My Email Marketing Posts In One Place

This is the first post in the series of Aweber Tutorials where I'll be sharing what you can achieve with Aweber and how I utilize Aweber to capture my email leads and how that helps me drive constant traffic to my blog with out relying on Google to pour in traffic.

Hope this helps. See ya on the next Aweber post.

You can now read few other related posts that I published in regards to Aweber:

Email Marketing

Get Started With Aweber: Best Email Marketing Tool Offer Free Trial Now!

Featureso Monday, 4 May 2015

Well, people said it right. Time flies by so quickly. On 30th April, kay2 TV aired an amazing show regarding 'Blogging in Pakistan' and I had a pleasure to be part of it as a speaker/panelist. I still remember staying up all night 4 years back where I kept murmuring with my self as if I was giving a interview on national television. My dream to reach as many people as I can to share my story had finally full filled Alhumdulilah and I pray to Almighty to give me strength to motivate and reach out to as many brothers and sisters as I can and promote scope of blogging in Pakistan and Internationally too.

Blogging is still quite an unknown phenomena in Pakistan and many third world countries where it needs to be promoted the most due to lack of jobs. Our youth needs to find out how powerful and rewarding blogging is and how it could not only be a great source of income, But a medium to reach out and help tons of human beings too.

blogging in pakistan kay 2 tv show soch factory

My primary motivation to blog had been to help my fellow country men and people around the globe in any way possible. I realized it quite early that money comes running after you, once you devote your self to the well being of the people around you.

This is what I tried to portray in the TV Show and this is what I preach here at BloggingeHow.

I dedicate this post to my entire experience of my first TV appearance and how it went altogether. Later, I have shared full video recording of the show for the people who missed out the show on TV.

My Experience - 'Soch Factory' Set @ Kay2 TV

We reached at the sets of 'Soch Factory' show by 12:30pm (this is much before the show got live as it was a recorded show). After parking our car and entering the main gates, a humble guy guided us towards the sets where we met Bilal brother, who's a senior manager at Kay2 TV and he's the one who was in coordination with us and other fellow panalists.

There on, we met and had a good time with our other fellow panelists and folks in audience. Below is a back stage footage of me getting some shots of the sets of 'Soch Factory'.

Enjoy!

It was such a pleasure to portray #blogging in Pakistan at Kay2 TV TV Soch Factory show. The show will get live around...
Posted by BLoggingeHow on Sunday, March 29, 2015

Full Show Recording

Hope you like to show. There were couple of questions that could have been answered even better and in detail, though due to the lack of time, it was difficult to incorporate every idea in a single answer. If you're new to blogging and have questions yet to be answered, you can always leave them in the comment section below or send me an email at hassam@bloggingehow.com and I would love to get back to you on them.

Conclusion - Final Thoughts

Finally I would like to thank Team behind Kay2 TV for conducting such a valuable show that I believe would help out many young minds out there. Such shows need to be conducted on frequent basis on other main stream channels so that we could together fill out the gap that we currently have in Industry in regards to lack of jobs and opportunities.

The more of our youth would have entrepreneurial minds and the more youngsters that would start blogging in specific, the more foreign exchange we could draw in towards our country.

As I mentioned before, if you have any questions in your mind, don't forget to leave them in the comments section below.

Till next time, take care

Allah Hafiz.

You may also like to read: How to start a blog?

Blogging Tips , Blogosphere News , Making Money Online

Blogging In Pakistan: Featuring Kay2 TV Show 'Soch Factory' - Full Video Recording & Experience Share

Featureso Sunday, 3 May 2015

Ideas are all around us! They said it right :)

If you pay attention to your daily life surroundings, there is always so much going on. Couple of days back i was going through a public service 'wagon' and some great blogging tips clicked me at the very instant. No matter what sort of surroundings that you live in, the way you interpret them is what really matters.

At the end of the day, its YOU who makes the day the worst or the best one of your life. Every thing is within your mind. The upper story. Take things positively, and you would notice how the world around you starts to shape up differently.

We all know the conditions of the public services in sub-continent. Once you get into the wagons, there is no way you could think of something positive. You are forced to get impatient.

How The Public Service Bus Conductor Brought Me Inspiration?

You don't always need some great heroes to get motivation or inspiration for the things that you wish to achieve in your life. Its just how you look let them effect your life.

Couple of days back, i posted two great inspirational posts that you may wish to get your hands on:

Let me give you a brief flash back of the public service environment in sub-continent. There are certain routes defined. The vehicles used for the transport are Toyota Hiace. Every single high roof is allotted a route ID. (Say 21 number etc)

Likewise, every vehicle has a wagon conductor that deals with passengers that gets on the Hiace from the bus stops. Plus obviously the driver. The driver's job is kind of an elite one (as in their circle) and the conductor is somehow called 'Nika or Chotay' etc meaning 'young one or small'.

Blogging Tip #1 Work Your Butt Off / Dedication / Optimistic

So what i learned from them in a 20 minute ride? Well, these people know the real meaning of 'working the butts' off. The conductor doesn't even have the privilege of a seat, where he could settle on. The seats are supposed to be for the passengers (as each seat has its own rent/toll).

With the backbone bent all the time, the conductors would work more than 12 hours daily. And to earn a living, they are forced to do these shitty jobs. What more could they get in such a turmoil situation after all? With a total education of no more than 4-5 classes (grades).

Each time they get to a stop, their faces are so optimistic to get more passengers, that would determine their daily wage (in some cases). So in the same way, we as bloggers should work our butts of in making new content for our fellow readers. When we think about these people and the hardship that they face for earning their living, then it gets much easier for us to type few hundreds words daily while sitting on our comfortable couches in air conditions.

Blogging Tip #2 Reading The Minds, Getting Used To The Surroundings

The way these bus/wagon conductors read peoples mind is amazing. They could exactly tell before hand the guy would want to get a ride. We, bloggers could be just like them. We are the ones who need to know their readership well. If we wont, who else would?

Reading our readers mind is one those problogger attributes that we must start working on right from the starting. Once we get to know what our readers want us to write, we would automatically be blessed with more comments per post and the social sharing would likewise boost up too.

Secondly, what i found in these conductors was their ability to get used to the surrounding that they live in. This is their fortune and they are pretty much satisfied with it. So on the other side, every body of us may come from a different family background with different level of support from our families in terms of our blogging career.

Not every parent would let their kids 'waste' (as some may think) their time in front of PC. SO its one of the big challenges that we would face, and thats where are adaptability skills jumps in. We know, this is what we have and these are the conditions that we MUST pursue our blogging world.

DON'T get demotivated by the surroundings (in case they are not very pushing).

Blogging Tip #3 Being Patient

Bus/wagon conductors are surely a true roll model for showing up immense patience. Irrespective of the weather, (some times it gets 50 degrees out there), these people would not indulge in unhealthy situations keeping in mind the level of public dealing they go through more than 12 hours a day!

I could clearly read their face expressions showing frustration and anger. But if they wont be patient, they could not last long in the field of conductorship.

So likewise, is it more difficult for us to show patience in terms of waiting for the success to come by? Cant we wait and keep working hard for 6-8 initial months of blogging? Why do we have to jump directly to money making ventures (AdSense in most cases) right from the day 1?

Blogging has taught me great things among which patience stands out clearly.

Blogging Tip #4 Multi Tasking

Wow, they are great at it! These bus/wagon conductors are responsible to recall the up comings stop to the driver so that he could stop the vehicle accordingly. Plus he has to gather the toll in the mean time before the person drop out.

He would exactly know the people who entered the bus/wagon on each stop and would ask them individually to pay the fee/toll. Its just amazing to their multi tasking skills.

As a blogger, we could be a great multitasking machine too. On a single day, we think of writing new content (that's a 24 hours job to keep thinking of the new content that you have to built. Traveling in wagon couldnt stop me from thinking about my next post.)

Like wise, we keep an eye on our competitors, plus mingling with our social media followers. Answering the blog comments etc. We all carry on these task side by side. If not, then its time to learn from the wagon conductors for sure.

Blogging Tip #5 Are Always In Rush

These conductors could be frustrating to watch too. They would search for new travelers on the very stop in a rush. The hunt for the next aim (traveler) never ends for them. So why are we so lazy to achieve our blogging goals?

Why dont we show 'rush' in bring our blog to the next level. Why do we lack motivation?

These are some of the great qualities that i noticed in my journey, on the wagon the other day and really wanted to high light them with the help of such post.

Hope you liked it.

Now What?

DON'T forget to share your views about these admirable skills and how many of these do YOU lack? Would love to hear from you.

You may like to read:

Blogging Tips , Building Traffic , Motivation

5 Blogging Tips I learned From A Public Service Bus Conductor

Featureso Saturday, 28 February 2015

If you've a YouTube channel you'd definitely be willing to increase your audience and subscribers fast. There are couple of strategies for that and the most basic and logical is to create quality, well edited videos that people would like to see.

I'll leave that to another post, though for today, we can implement a subscription widget on our blogs/websites that would encourage your blog readers to subscribe to you if you're running a YouTube channel.

Lets get right into the steps that would help you add a YouTube subscription widget to your blogger blogs.

add youtube subscription widget to blogger

Step #1 Visit Your Blogger Layout

Navigate to Dashboard >> Layout of your Blogger blog, add a new HTML/JavaScript Widget section and copy/paste the copy below.

<iframe frameborder="0" id="fr" scrolling="no" src="http://www.youtube.com/subscribe_widget?p=AddYourYouTubeUserNameHere" style="overflow: hidden;height: 105px;width: 300px;border: 0"></iframe>

html javascript widget blogger bloggingehow

Simply replace the text in orange with your YouTube username and it's all ready. Hit Save and you're all done.

You may like to read now: Uploading Videos Directly To Facebook Vs Sharing YouTube Videos? - Which Gets More Interaction?

Plugins , Social Media , YouTube

How To Add a YouTube Subscription Widget To Blogger - 1 Step!

Featureso Monday, 23 February 2015

YouTube is amazing and I just love the concept of "Broadcasting your self" and utilizing a platform to see your dreams become a reality. I've had a YouTube channel before I started with BloggingeHow where I used to put random videos (ranging from video intros, to Adobe after effects tutorials, to 3D modelling, Auto Tune songs and what not.) Ever since then, I have a close affection with YouTube but I never utilized YouTube for BloggingeHow to extant I should have done.

Perfect Dimensions To Create a YouTube Channel Cover? - Free PSD Template

I accept this and this is the very reason why I turned over a new leaf with YouTube to broadcast my fitness side with the help of YouTube and Facebook page, to inspire other fellows to stay healthy to change their life.

Well, this is going of topic here. With a great YouTube channel, there comes a well designed cover art, which is basically the main poster/cover image that defines the header of your YouTube channel.

A thoughtful YouTube channel cover can make or break the chances to increase followers. As I had to design my own cover for my fitness YouTube channel, I looked for the perfect dimensions in pixels which would satisfy the look on all the electronic devices, may that be mobile, TV, tablets or computer/labtop screens.

So I found out that the new YouTube layout has the following cover image dimensions that we can use to design our own. In fact, I have a link to a great PSD template (Photoshop) that you can use which has all the margins set.

YouTube Cover Art Dimensions

For TV: 2560 x 1440
For Desktop:2560 x 243
For Tablets: 1855 x 243
For Text and Logo Safe Area: 1546 x 243

There are in the above image that says "Text and Logo Safe area", is the best and most suitable section to put your tag lines and insert a logo. In fact, the entire horizontal orange section is the must add area that you should design on priority as this is what will be displayed on the mobile devices and laptops.

YouTube Cover Art Dimensions fitness page

Below is the download link that you can use and make a stunning looking YouTube cover art that rocks on all the devices that it can be possibly view on. Personally, I only designed it currently for Mobiles, Desktop/Laptop screens, though there is always a room to improve and jump up the game.

You might see more iterations of the above YouTube cover on my Fitness Facebook page and my YouTube channel.

Download Link for YouTube Cover Dimensions

I hope this would help you out in coming up with stunning and marketing oriented cover graphics. Yesterday, I posted a post that went though my typical day and how exactly I manage my time. If you're facing time managing issues, make sure you check it out.