Turning Your Medium Articles into Opt-In Funnels
Never relink your Medium articles again, here’s my step by step guide…
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Are you tired of constantly putting your personal affiliate links in your Medium articles?
Hoping and praying that someone will click your link and direct them to your email opt-in page?
Are you wanting to increase conversions to your email list from your Medium articles?
You’re in luck, my friend!
I have spent many hours figuring out how to further automate the Medium writing and growth process, and if you haven’t already followed me or joined my Online Entrepreneur’s Club, I encourage you to do so — I share all my exclusive tips and tricks!
Back to the article, there are 2 types of individuals reading this:
- The entrepreneur who’s looking to grow their email list and following
- The entrepreneur who may be new to funnels/email lists but wants to use Medium to their advantage
Which one are you?
Respond to the article and let me know!
Whatever your intention may be, I’ve firsthand seen the power behind Medium.
It’s a combination of a social media platform but also an evergreen content house — bonus: you don’t have to show up 24/7 in order to stay relevant (cough, cough, Facebook, Instagram)!
The beautiful thing with it being a social media platform is that you can drive traffic and create an audience for your Medium articles. People can find and follow your work.
The beautiful thing about it being an evergreen content house is that your work can be SEO friendly (meaning people can find it on google), you only need to write about a topic once, and you can use your articles as resources for people who may need some further assistance!
“Okay Tina, enough about the benefits, I get it. Can we get into the opt-in funnels now?”
Friend, I’m so glad you asked!
An opt-in funnel is exactly what it sounds like. People opt-in (self voluntary) and then get redirected to a back end funnel that you’ve created with an email provider, like Mailerlite — if you sign up with my affiliate link you get $20 off, but it’s completely free either way!
Learn about further mechanics on how to create a Forever Funnel here:
Okay, so how can we create an opt-in funnel with Medium?
Here’s the thing until this article came out I mostly had to manually drop in my affiliate links or resources into my articles — hoping and praying someone will click on it.
And it worked for sometime, I could have continued to let it do its thing, but I prefer to further optimize a process rather than settle for “it works so don’t improve it”.
So I got to do some research digging.
With Medium you can’t necessarily just “embed code”, you use an outside provider such as Embedly in order to embed pretty much anything.
This may sound confusing. Believe me, I was too.
So, when you click that + icon to add a new line to your article you can see that there are ways to input an image, link, etc. — for example, let’s just say you want to embed a Medium article, you drop the link and then your article populates.
But with embedding a sign-up form you can’t necessarily just do that, especially if your email provider is not a registered provider with Embedly.
There are email providers that do work with Embedly, but after testing and researching the platforms, you will more than likely have to pay for an email subscription service.
I like to run a very lean business, and if I can avoid another fixed cost, I do so.
So, I thought back to what was my primary purpose behind doing all of this work?
In summary, it was to have people self opt-in and join my Online Entrepreneurs Club by the end of reading each one of my articles. So, I figured maybe a chatbot can help with that. I typed it in Embedly to see what providers worked with them. Here’s what I found:
I did research on both providers and liked Collect.chat
It was free, very easy and intuitive to use, so I went for it.
If you don’t know what a chatbot is, essentially it’s a way for you to chat with a bot or person 24/7 and redirect traffic to a particular outcome.
For my purposes, I wanted to build my email subscribers and redirect my Medium traffic to my Online Entrepreneur’s Club.
So when you create a Collect Chat account you can go to your workspace and create a bot:
You’re going to select “New Bot” and input the following settings:
You want to click “embed” because you’re going to get an embed link you can input into your Medium articles.
You’re going to select “get subscribers” because for this specific use case you’re building your email subscribers.
You can select “create” and go from there.
There are 3 phases to building a chatbot:
- Design
- Build
- Share
You can design your chatbot avatar however you want:
You can go to script to create a script for your chatbot when people land on your page:
The script portion is pretty intuitive and you can customize the conversation for your chatbot anyway that you like.
I will not get into the specifics on what to say, because you’ll know that more than I will!
Once you’ve created your script and tested it out by selecting that “eye” on the top right corner, you’re ready to share your chatbot!
You’re going to grab your embed link and this will be the link you input into your Medium articles when you select the + button when adding a new line to your article.
From there, you hit enter so that your link can populate into a chatbot and you’re all set to go!
You’ve installed your chatbot!
Now, you may think, why do this in the first place?
Well, if you change any links in the future you don’t have to manually re-link each article and every time you update your chatbot, it updates on all articles in the process!
Also, it creates fewer clicks to your final designation. I’m going to be honest, people are lazy and won’t want to click on multiple links to get to your opt-in page, so cut the steps and have your destination easily accessible and easy to use.
Finally, I believe that chatbots have a higher conversion rate than any opt-in email sign-up forms — also, with Collect Chat you can see any partial conversations that have started and follow up with people as necessary!
Bonus: if you want the Zapier Automation to connect Collect Chat to MailerLite — meaning that every time a new response comes in you automatically add a new subscriber to your email list, grab it here
What was your #1 takeaway?
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