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Using ConvertKit means you are sending a lot of automated emails. These emails are in sequences and will drip out over weeks and months. But sometimes you need to send up to date information to subscribers, even when they are getting fully automated emails. Or you might want to have a call to action (encouraging subscribers to take the next step) across multiple emails in multiple automations.

You can send broadcast emails to everyone on your list. But what if you want to make them more relevant to the people receiving them?

ConvertKit have just released a new feature that I know many, myself included, have been waiting a long time for - the ability to send a subscriber through a sequence more than once. This means they’ll get all the emails in the sequence again, from the beginning.

You’ve got a sequence (or are about to create one). You want to add new emails to the sequence. And you want to ensure that subscribers who have reached the end of the sequence don’t miss out on the new emails. This guide will walk you through exactly how to do that.

Sometimes you need to export all or a selection of your ConvertKit subscribers.

So you’ve set up your automation, and you have subscribers going into your sequence. But for some reason, they aren’t receiving the sequence emails. This can be incredibly frustrating - you’ve done all the work to get them in the sequence, so why isn’t it sending the emails?

I’m in the process of redesigning my consulting website. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about a redesign from the appearance point of view and start to play around with the visual design. Before I got to that point, I wanted a clearer picture of who the website is for, what it’s purpose is, how it will help people and how it could convert anonymous readers into email subscribers and clients. So I started with the website blueprint.

You can automatically add subscribers to a sequence in ConvertKit by using either a visual automation, or an automation rule. You’d usually use a form submission, or the adding of a tag, as a trigger for the automation. People who submit the form, or have the tag added, would be added to the sequence.

Pardot comes with its own forms that you can embed on your site. But if you’d rather use your own forms, then you can do this by utilising form handlers. In this article, I’m going to walk through an example of setting this up for a Drupal site using Drupal’s standard contact forms.

RightMessage is an extremely powerful personalisation tool. By segmenting your audience, you can give people the content that is more relevant to their needs and interests. And you can personalise website copy, call to actions and even more to suit their needs. It’s better for them and better for you - a win-win!

Your ConvertKit email list is going to have a mix of subscribers. Some are going to be engaged, some less so and some totally cold. Have you ever wanted to know who your really engaged subscribers are? You might want to know this for the following reasons:

Anyone who writes words will experience writer’s block at one point or another. You’ll sit there, staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor and you just don’t know what to write. The words won’t come out and sometimes you don’t even know what topic to tackle. The blank page is right in front of you. The cursor seems to be blinking evermore furiously telling you to type something, anything. Welcome to writer’s block.

Most sites on the web use simple call to actions with embedded forms that include a field for the reader to add their email address (if they have a call to action at all).

ConvertKit comes with some control over the presentation of forms, but it isn’t obvious how you can change the size of the form box. In this article, I’ll walk you through how you can change the form size and position on your web pages.

Have you ever needed to send subscribers back to a Workflow after they exit it? This is a common requirement when you use a Drip workflow to send emails rather than campaigns. With campaigns, subscribers automatically get a new email that is added to the end of the campaign (assuming you don’t have any automated rules to remove them from the campaign). But with workflows, subscribers will exit the workflow as soon as they have made it all the way through. So if you add another email to the workflow, any subscribers who have already finished the workflow and exited it will not be sent the newly added email.

There are two main types of email, commercial and transactional. Commercial email is marketing and promotional email, and that includes sharing content from your website (e.g in a newsletter). Transactional email is strictly to be used as part of a user’s transaction, such as sending a receipt or a download link.

If you are anything like me, you love to write in markdown. And like me, no doubt you’ve realised that ConvertKit doesn’t support markdown! Fortunately, there is a simple work around that you can use to get your words from your writing app into ConvertKit.

When you share a ConvertKit landing page on a social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, the platform will attempt to get a photo from the landing page and display it as a thumbnail. If you are using a landing page that has a photo, in most cases it will use that. But if you are using a landing page that doesn’t have a photo, or you want to use a different one, what do you do? Read on, and I’ll share with you how you can supply social media platforms with an image to use for your landing page.

Have you ever wanted to tag people who sign up to a landing page, only to realise that it isn’t possible with the new ConvertKit landing page builder?

Modern email marketing tools like ConvertKit and Drip provide two main ways to send emails, sequences and broadcasts. It’s not always obvious when you should use a sequence, and when you should use a broadcast. In this article, I’m going to outline how I’m using these two options and hopefully shed some light on it for you.

Landing pages are one of the two main ways you can collect new ConvertKit subscribers (the other being forms). In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create your own ConvertKit landing page.

This is the first time that I’ve written an annual review. I have mixed feelings about their usefulness to people other than the author, but I do actually enjoy reading other people’s. So hopefully you’ll enjoy reading mine!

There are a lot of smaller things that we can try in our business, yet we often find it completely overwhelming to get moving with them. We plan, re-plan and then plan again. We talk to people to make sure our plans are good. Self-doubt creeps in and before you know it, no progress has been made. And then life gets in the way, and the ideas that can drive our business forwards die.

The bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit only one page on your website in a single session. It is one of the most important metrics that you should be tracking and improving on for your website.

Sometimes you need to delete subscribers from ConvertKit. These could be subscribers that are no longer active, they are unconfirmed, or they no longer want to receive your emails.

In Pardot, lists are one of the two main methods for segmenting prospects (the other one being tags). Lists are used for sending emails to segments (groups of subscribers/prospects). There are two types of lists in Pardot: dynamic and static. So, what is the difference between a static and a dynamic list?

Do you offer a way for people to become an email subscriber on your website? If you do, are you incentivising it by offering additional value?

Most people who visit your product sales pages will not buy. That is a simple, if uncomfortable, truth. Unless your conversion rate is over 50%, the majority are going to walk away rather than buy your product.

Sequences and automations are two of the corner stones of ConvertKit. Using both effectively is critical to the success of your email marketing efforts. But what is the difference between them?

Have you ever needed to send an email to a new subscriber as soon as they sign up and add them to a sequence?

One of the things that attracted me to ConvertKit is that it’s built for professional bloggers and creators, and as such it has built-in features that I knew would make my life easier. And I’m all for making my life easier!

Shai and Brennan over at RightMessage have just released a new tool called RightCTA, of which I’m fortunate enough to be one of the beta testers. RightCTA is a tool to supercharge the call to actions on your site and make them a lot more relevant to your reader’s needs. You are likely to get happier readers and more conversions (and revenue) as a result.

ConvertKit comes with a handy templating language called Liquid. Liquid allows you to add just enough logic to your emails (broadcast or sequence emails) to be really potent. But it isn’t always easy to understand, especially if you are not technical.

There are affiliate links in this article. This means that if you click on the ConvertKit trial link and become a customer, I’ll get a small commission to help keep the lights on around here.

If you are like me and write in markdown, you probably have a hard time going back to a rich text editor. All those buttons, all that time wasted! But unfortunately Drip doesn’t support markdown and has a rich text editor.

When you send a confirmation email to people before they join your email list, not everyone is going to click on the link. But if the proportion of people who don’t confirm (don’t click on the confirmation link) is too high, you are missing out on potential subscribers.

Two weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of attending the Life Time Value Conference (LTVConf) in Brighton, UK. LTVConf is a conference for people who are tired of trading time for money and want to move to a products business (or have already done so).

I recently received the following question from a reader:

Most email newsletters that you’ll receive have the same call to action for all subscribers (or even no call to action at all), regardless of their status and position in the funnel. But that will result in sub-optimal results. A subscriber cannot act on a call to action if they have already done so previously. For example, they will not sign up for an email course that they have already signed up for. Or buy a book that they have already bought.

Using a marketing automation tool like Drip means you are sending a lot of automated emails. These emails are in campaigns and workflows and will drip out over weeks and months. But sometimes you need to send up to date information to subscribers, even when they are getting fully automated emails. Or you might want to have a call to action (encouraging subscribers to take the next step) across multiple emails in multiple automations.

Last week I jumped on a short flight to Stockholm in Sweden, to attend Double Your Freelancing Conference EU (DYFConf). This was the first time Brennan Dunn, founder of Double Your Freelancing, has held the conference in Europe. Going to Stockholm, hanging out in a Japanese resort complete with spa pools, with like-minded people and learning from a fantastic round up of speakers - attending was most definitely a no brainer!

Building an audience through content marketing and email marketing is a great way to generate more leads and new customers online. Over time, you can educate your audience, showcase your skills, attract people who can eventually become your customers and use the act of helping to build your business.

Blogging is an incredibly powerful business tool that can really help you grow your business over the long term. But often, when preparing to write for our blog, we can get caught up with who we should write for. We try and picture our ideal customers and wonder what they will enjoy reading in our blog posts.

Have you ever gone to a web designer and told them you want a new website?

This is the question a lot of creative entrepreneurs have. Everyone seems to be doing it but you’ve got a business to run. Do you have enough time to add another recurring task to your todo list? And what will a blog do for your business anyway?

People don’t like being sold to. Good advertisers know this and create adverts that blend into the environment. Subtle enough to appear as if they are not trying to sell to you.

A lot of people focus on SEO (including keyword research, link building, competitor research), Adwords, Facebook advertising and a social media strategy to drive traffic to their website.

Leveraging social media is one of the key methods to drive traffic and awareness of your website and business. And there are plenty of social networks to choose from - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest to name a few. And of course, you don’t want to focus on just one, so you end up spending time updating all of them.

Writing content consistently is one of the best ways that you can increase your online profile and grow your business. Creating content that really helps your audience, will naturally be shared and bring in more people. Over time, it will also attract people from search engines like Google.

A friend emailed me recently and asked:

There are a lot of methods to build traffic to your business website, such as SEO, content marketing and advertising. All of these take time and money before you will start to see real results. One way to build awareness of your business website is to leverage your existing network of connections (friends, family, colleagues etc).

Last week, I attended Microconf in Barcelona - the best conference I have ever been to. Microconf bills itself as “the conference for self-funded startups”. This means that it is designed for people who have built, or are building, small bootstrapped technical product businesses (SaaS, consulting, info products and productised consulting businesses).

Some business owners and entrepreneurs get into blogging because they think blogging in itself will make them a lot of money. The business is all about the blog. So you set out to create the most popular blog possible. You blog about what you know. You teach people. You share your knowledge. These are all good things!

If you have one niche offering for a defined market then you are likely to only need one website. But what happens if you have a second niche offering that is for a different market? Do you run both under the same umbrella with a single website, or create a separate brand and website for the second niche offering?

You may be under the illusion that all you need is a website and it will magically start to get you more customers/clients for your business. An effective website is a good start, but it in itself is not enough. Most businesses will achieve greater success utilising an online sales and marketing funnel.

Update 10 Oct 2015 - the product is live!! The product I created as part of this challenge, Developer to Author, is now complete and launched. It is currently available for 50% off while it is in beta.

A common misconception about websites is that if you have one, people will automatically find it. In truth, you need to put a lot of work into promoting your website on an ongoing basis. One of the most common and well known routes is search engine optimisation. This is ensuring that your website ranks well in search engines like Google for relevant key terms. Get this right and the traffic can be huge. But it is a long term game, and it can take months before you see a return. But Google is not the only source of quality traffic, and you don't need to wait for months before you start to see the traffic begin to trickle in.

The Challenge

Do you ever feel like you spend half of your life organising calls with clients and potential clients? You send a simple email letting them know when you are available. You might even offer two times, just to increase the chances that they’ll take one and you can get on with running your business. But then the potential client can’t do either, and suggests a different time. But you can’t do the proposed time though. And now you are in a round of ‘meeting tennis’, where each side lobs over a time to the other and waits for the return.

You are sitting at your computer staring at your screen. The cursor is blinking. Your fingers are ready to type. But your mind is blank.

If you are a consultant, freelancer/contractor, or full time employee, the old saying “time is money” is something you are always reminded of. You work an hour, you get paid an hour. You work a day, you get paid a day. The flip side of that equation is that when you don’t work a day, you don’t get paid. Sucks to be you (and me).

If you want to write a book, you’ll want the right tools to make your life easier. The right tools will truly save you time and help you to keep your sanity. Below you will find a list of the tools I used when writing Master Drupal Module Development.