Intro to ConvertKit: Build Your Audience through an Email List

1. Introduction: You can grow your audience and your creative business through email marketing. Tell me if this sounds familiar to you. You put your heart and soul into creating, whether it's music, it's writing, illustrating, designing, film making, or any other creative pursuit. And you want nothing more than to share your work with others to build an audience. You know that if others could only find your work, it would bring them meaning and joy. You feel a deep down yearning for this connection to feel validated in your place in the world. But when you try to share your work with others, all you get is frustration. Silence, non-responsive, and don't even get me started on social media. Unless you're willing to pay to promote your posts, you end up wasting time and energy with such a seemingly small return. Not to mention the fact that being on social media as a professional creator can be totally soul destroying. But the truth is, Art brings people together and every creator deserves the chance to share. There are with others. Many creators, just like you have turned to an email list to solve this problem. And the Convertkit platform has emerged as one of the top services for creators today. Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Ali Abdel, and so many others. All are using the Convertkit platform. And you can too. Hi, I'm Mark Samples, a writer, musician, and professional musicologist. I created this course intro to ConvertKit, to give you a step-by-step process to set up your email list on Convertkit. Convertkit is an email marketing platform built with creators in mind. In this course, I'll teach you how to set up your email marketing system. You'll learn how to create a free ConvertKit account, how to create a landing page to collect email addresses, and How to design schedule and send out your first email. I'll also teach you how to set up email sequences and automations to welcome your new subscribers. And how to use Convertkit Creator Network to build your list faster. What will you need to take this course? Well, if you want to actually start an email list on Convertkit, you will need a free ConvertKit account. You can get a free trial where you can try out all the pro features while you're taking this course. Of course, if you just want to check out the platform, you can watch this whole course without a ConvertKit account and then make the decision as to whether or not you want to start one after you've finished the course. So let's get started. Join me in this course and finally, get your email newsletter system set up. You are going to be so excited when you see that first email from Convertkit that says you have a new subscriber. Imagine when you get 10,100.1000 subscribers on your email list. Imagined how many more people you can bring your ART to. Imagine how many more people you can bring joy to through Your Art. I'll see you inside the course. 2. Project Description: Thank you so much for joining me in this class, where you will build your email marketing system on Convertkit and grow your audience so that you can share your work with more people who value it. I want to share with you a little bit about your class project. For this class, I will ask you to build a landing page in Convertkit and share that with me and with other students in the class. This will be a live page on the internet where other people can go and put their e-mails into that field on the landing page, they will be able to add themselves to your email list. I chose this project for a couple of reasons. First, because it's not too easy, but it's also not too difficult. That is, it's read in that Goldilocks zone of accomplishment for this class. The second reason is that if you have a landing page, you have a functioning email list. If you have a way to Collect addresses, that means your email list is up and running. Also, I can't tell you how great it feels when you get that email from Convertkit announcing that you have a new subscriber. I want to take just a quick moment to show you exactly how to submit your project to this Skillshare course. Let me show you how to do that. Just below the video where you're watching this now, you will see a green Create Project button. Of course I'm showing this to you on a different course. This is a course that I have taught called creative flow on schedule. But if you scroll down, you'll see a green Create Project button. Click Create Project. Then what I want you to do is give the project a title. I'm going to call this mark Samples Landing Page. For the next couple of steps, let me show you an example of the landing page that you will be creating. So this is an example landing page like the one that we're gonna be creating in this course. What I want you to do for the description is grab this little description, this text description that you have created as part of this process, or you will later on in the course and post that in the project description. Then take a screenshot using the screen grab capability of your computer on a Mac, it's Command Shift four. It may be different on your machine. Then copy that image and put it into project area. Click Upload Image, navigate to that image on your computer and click Open. Reveal your image to make sure it looks OK and click Submit. Now here's the exciting part. Grab the link that links to your landing page. You can do that by clicking publish, and then copy that link and add the link in the project. Once you've added that link. Now every other student in this class can go and see your landing page. In fact, if you are one of the first ten students to submit a project with a live link to a landing page and your email newsletter. I will personally sign up for your email newsletter. I can't wait to be one of your first subscribers. So that's a preview of how you will submit your project for this class. The submission of the project actually comes about halfway through the course. So it'll be a nice milestone to mark your progress. Don't worry, I will give you all of those specifics on how to submit your project. Again, when we come to that lesson about landing pages, Let's keep going and get started learning about Convertkit 3. Previewing the Finish Line: Now, before we get down into the weeds of the step-by-step construction of your Convertkit email system. I want to give you a little preview of where we're going and what the end goal looks like in this course. So I'm gonna give you a tour of all of the resources that we will be creating during this class. Let's take a look. First. We're gonna get your account all set up and you'll see a dashboard kind of like this one. Next, I will show you how to add subscribers and you'll be able to see this graph grow over time. And it is so exciting to see new subscribers come in. Then we're going to talk all about how you send material to your audience on Convertkit. I'll show you how to send Broadcasts. This is how you send out your newsletter, emails. And so we'll talk all about how to create those. How to make them look beautiful, yet simple, and also how to see reports on who is opened your emails and who has clicked on your emails. We'll also show you how to set up a sequence of emails that will be able to send automated emails to your new subscribers, right when they sign up for your email list. We'll do this through a combination of email sequences and Visual Automation. Visual automation allow you to set up a sequence of conditions or actions or events that put your subscribers on a path to getting your content in a very specific way that you can manage. So in this case, when we have a new subscriber and they sign up on our landing page, they will automatically get my newsletter welcome sequence, which is a series of emails. And then they'll get this tag that says, yes, they have received the sequence, and then that is the end of the Automation. So this is a very cool feature where new subscribers can be added to your list and you don't have to be sitting around waiting for them to sign up and then take actions on your own to reply to them in time. In fact, Convertkit will do this automatically for you. So when they sign up for your list, that Subscriber, that new subscriber will get an automated welcome email. And then the next day they can get a second email following up telling them more about your email newsletter. So this is a preview of some of the things that we're going to build in this course. And the end state is that when you are done with this course, you will have the foundation of a communications platform with your audience. You will have the groundwork laid to grow your audience and bring your ART to more people using email marketing 4. What Is ConvertKit?: In this lesson, I want to tell you a little bit about what convert kit is and compare it to some other platforms. And maybe give you some reasons why you might choose convert kit and some reasons why I have chosen it for my own business. So what is convert kit? Convert kit is an email marketing platform built specifically for creators. The main feature of the convert kit platform is of course, the ability to send out e-mails to your audience. But when you start digging deeper into the platform, you'll find that there's so much more you can do with the convert kit platform, including earning money through a tip jar or through a paid newsletter, or even through selling paid products. And the great thing about convert kit is that it scales with you and with your business. As you probably know, there are lots of other email provider platforms out there. Some are built more for traditional businesses, kind of like HubSpot. Some feel a bit more marketing or salesy, like beehive. Many creators use other services like flow desk or Mailchimp. In fact, I used Mailchimp for about seven years before I decided to switch to convert kit, there were a couple of reasons why I decided to switch to convert kit from mailchimp. The first was that male chimps seem to be developing in directions that weren't as applicable to me. More for a traditional businesses or larger businesses rather than small creators shops. At the same time, it seemed like all of my favorite creators were suddenly using convert kit. It seemed like every day a new creator that I followed, I realized they were using convert kit and some of them had scaled their businesses to huge proportions. Ali Abdel uses convert kit for his Sunday Snippets list. Ryan Holiday uses convert kit for Daily Stoic and daily dad lists, which have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. James clear, the author of Atomic Habits, uses convert kit. Pat Flynn also uses convert kit. So many people are using convert kit successfully. And I realized that I could too. I wanted a platform that could scale with me as I grew and I do not regret making the switch. So if you are ready to go and start your convert kit journey, Let's get started In the next lesson by setting up your free account. 5. Set-Up: Create a ConvertKit Account: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your Convertkit account. So navigate to convertkit.com or click on the link that I have provided for you in the course Resources area. And that will take you to this Convertkit homepage. And it's very simple. If you have an account already, you can log in here. If you do not yet have an account, you can sign up free. And it will first check to make sure that you are indeed human. And this brings you to the sign up page. So I will put my name here, mark Samples. In the next field. I will include whatever email that I want to use for this account. And I will put in a password. After I've put in a password, I will agree to the Terms of Service and I will click Get Started. Now Convertkit will have just a couple of questions for me. And it will ask me where am I joining us from? Do I already use an email marketing tool in my business? If I were migrating from another tool, I would select, Yes, I'm moving from another tool. But in this example, I am just starting out. So I will click, I am just starting out and click Continue. At this point I'm just getting started. So I will select one-to-one thousand here for the size of my audience, and I will click to continue. Now, I get to tell Convertkit a bit about myself. What is your business newsletter or brand name called? And this is the name that will appear on the Creator Profile on checkout pages and other pages visible to my subscribers. So this is where I will put in my business name. For this example, I will just use my own name, Mark Samples, and click Continue. Great. Now I'm going to choose a custom domain. And it will suggest that domain for me that's basically created from that business name. If I wanted to change that domain name, I could change it here, but I'm going to just leave that as is and click Continue. Great. Now it's going to ask me what kind of creator I am. And this will allow it to give me better suggestions. Later on, I'm going to select educator and artist and musician. Great. So I'm going to continue. Now they're going to ask me to pick a goal. And there are a couple of goals here. Grow my list, send e-mails, earn an income, or I just want to look around. I'm going to select, grow my list. It actually will only let me select one at a time. So we're going to select grow my list. I really want to do all of these things, but we'll take them one at a time and just select, grow my list here and click Continue. Now, it's going to ask me to add a little bit of information to make sure that it can verify that I'm a real person. So if I had a website, I would put that here. That's my website. And then I could add my social media pages and other information here. And as it says here, these answers are optional, so you don't have to have a website URL and you don't have to have social media pages that you add here. But it can help the Convertkit team get you verified for sending faster. So let's continue. And it's doing some behind the scenes work here. Creating my account. And I have now been welcomed to Convertkit. So we're going to close this. You can watch that introduction if you want. It'll be up here in the right hand page. That's how easy it is to create your Convertkit account 6. Set-Up: The Anatomy of ConvertKit: Now that we have our account set up, let's take a quick look around at what this homepage is showing us. So we see this area here where we will get our basic dashboard information. There's not really anything there yet, but more and more information will be showing up here once we start using convert kit. Now, it's suggesting that we start by creating a landing page. We'll get to that in a later lesson. It's also telling us that reports will show up here as you start to use your account. This is where you'll be able to see how many subscribers you have and how many you've added as that grows over time. You'll also be able to see other information here, such as how many people have opened your emails, et cetera. Now, up here on the top menu bar, we have this Home button. Anytime you click this Home button, it will take you back to this main dashboard page. Then we have some menu dropdowns here organized as grow, send, automate, earn, and learn. You can also see over here that we have now 14 days remaining in our trial. You can upgrade immediately, but we're just going to stay on that trial account here for a little bit. And this little bell icon here is for announcements from convert kit. Now, let's take a closer look at these menu item sections. Because the course from here on out, we'll really be organized around these concepts of grow, sand and automate, especially we won't really talk so much about the urn section, just mentioned it briefly. And then the learn section, I will point you to some resources there. But this gross section, under that section we find subscribers landing pages and forms, creator profile and create our network. We'll go through each of those sections in future lessons. In the center section, we will have broadcast, will talk all about broadcasts and about sequences. We will create an e-mail template and we will create an e-mail snippet as well. On Automate, we will go through the visual automations. We won't go so much through the rules, integrations or the RSS feeds, but you can look through those when the time comes. Now under the urn section. Through convert kit, you can create products, so you can sell individual digital products. You can also create a paid newsletter where subscribers can pay you a monthly fee to get access to your paid newsletter. So those are a couple of options under products. You can also create a tip jar, which gives your audience a way to send you a monetary tip for your content. This would be a onetime tip. And you have a payouts section here which shows you all of your information regarding payouts on your account. In this Learn section, you have access to resources such as documentation, community forums, and create a university which are tutorials provided by convert kit. So I would encourage you to look through all of these as you go along and learn the platform. So that's the overview of pretty much all of the different areas of convert kit that you're going to need to access. And in the next lesson, we're really going to dig into the Settings area, and I'll show you how to configure some of these settings from the start. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Set-Up: Configure Your Settings: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to configure the main settings for your account to get started. So if you click on your account area up here in the top-right, it will have your name here and a dropdown. So let's go ahead and click on that. We can see what plan we're on now, which is we are still on the free trial and we have Settings, help and log out here. What we want to click on here is Settings. So when we click on Settings, we will be taken to our Settings page where we have a couple of options here, login details, notifications. We have our settings are general account settings, are Email Settings, domains, commerce, Billing, team, and Advanced. We don't really need to get into all of these at the moment, but there are a couple of things that we want to take care of right away. So let's look at some of those now, the first thing you want to do is to change your profile picture. So I'm going to click Upload here, and then I'm going to search for my head shot, which is here. I'm going to find that on my computer and my Files dialog, and then I'm going to open that there. And it will give me a preview of that. This all looks great if you need it to, you can add filters, you can change the colors. You can mark this up. We could crop this if we wanted, but I think it looks just fine. So I'm going to click Done here. The next thing that you will want to do is setup multifactor authentication. I really would recommend setting up two-factor authentication because it will increase the security of your account. And as you can see, it first asks us to confirm our email address before we can set it up. So let's go ahead and click on that link. It will take us over to the Email section of our Settings. And you can see that my email address status is still pending. So all I need to do there is go over to my email account in my email server and click Verify email. Okay, I just did that and you can see now that my status is confirmed. So now my email has been confirmed and I'm all set to go back into login details and set up multi-factor authentication. Now, you have two options here for multi-factor authentication, you can use an authenticator app like Google Authenticator if you have that, or you can use your phone number to receive security codes through text messages. I prefer to do this one at this point. And so I'm going to type in my country code, United States. And then I would include my phone number here. I'm not going to do that yet, but you would want to put in your phone number there to set that up. If you want to use the authenticator app, you can go to your authenticator app, scan this QR code, and get that set up by following the prompts. So again, I would recommend setting up a multi-factor authentication so that your account is more secure. The next thing let's look at is notifications. And notifications are interesting. You can set this up to your preference, but what I like to do is include the summary notification weekly, that gives me a weekly report of my email list. But I also like to add subscribes. That means that anyone who subscribes to my list, I will get an email that tells me, hey, you've just gotten a new subscriber. I think this is pretty cool, especially at the beginning of growing your list. So you see those subscriptions coming in? What, one at a time. I am not going to set up any purchases now. So I'm gonna leave that turned off. Great. Now that we've done notifications, Let's move to some of our other settings. Let's click on General here. If I needed to change my business name, this is where I would do that. And if I want to include brand colors, I can include those saved colors here. I'm not gonna do that right now. But if I wanted to set up my newsletter with a little bit more intentional design, it would probably save me some time to go in here, use the color picker, add my brand colors, and have those ready to go when I am creating my Email Templates. Now let's go to the next section here, which is the email section. And you can see some information here. You can see that it's telling me that my email address is a free address. Meaning it's just a Gmail that I created this account with just a Gmail account. And that this may negatively impact your deliverability. What this means is that if you have an email that's attached to your website, that is a stronger email to use here So on my professional Convertkit account, not my tutorial account that I'm showing you here. I use my website email address, which has a an at mark dash samples.com email address, which is a professional email and we'll improve deliverability. We're not going to worry too much about that now, except to say if you have a professional email address, you're going to want to use that one for your ConvertKit account. Now let's set up some time zone and sending times defaults. And so these will allow you to set when you'd like your Sequence emails to be sent. That means that when you set up some automated email sequences, you can actually set up the defaults if you don't want to send on the weekend, for instance, or if you only want to send on the weekends, you can do that here. I want to leave all of these selected because I want to be able to send on all days of the week and a default time I'm gonna put in the morning. I'm going to say 05:00 A.M. Eastern time in the US and Canada. I'm actually on the West Coast of the United States, but I like to use the Eastern Time Zone as a reference point because it's earlier. It's a nice default time for the United States and for mailing times. Next, I'm going to include a mailing address. In this case, I would include my business address. If possible, you can use your home address, although just note that this address will be shared with recipients. So if you have a PO box, a post office box, or you have an official office address, you probably want to use that here. So fill in your mailing address information. Then you can, if you choose, turn on and unsubscribed survey, what that means is that anyone who signs up for your email list has to be able to unsubscribe easily. And this would just allow you to collect some information as to why a Subscriber had left your email address. So you can use that unsubscribe survey if you'd like. We're going to leave that turned off for now. Another important thing to know, if you're setting up an email list is GDPR, settings and privacy. Now a disclaimer here, I am not a lawyer and so I'm not giving you legal advice here, but you do need to be aware that there are rules and sometimes strict rules about what you can do with a user's data that you're collecting and how you can reach out to these subscribers. The international standard really are the water called the GDPR Settings. And so you can add GDPR to your, to your account. And there are three options here. Don't show to anyone, show to all subscribers after they opt in or show only to subscribers currently in the EU, UK, and Switzerland. And these are the areas where GDPR are in effect. I would recommend starting with show only to subscribers currently in the EU, UK, and Switzerland. So let's change, let's save those changes now. Great. Now that we have that saved, let's go to the domains page. We're not gonna do this now. But if you had a domain, accustomed domain, your own website, such as www.mark-samples.com. In my case, you can actually have your Convertkit pages show up on a sub-domain of your website. That just adds a nice bit of professionalism. Where when someone is interacting with, let's say a Convertkit landing page, they're actually seeing that on your own site. You do not need to add a custom domain for this to work and to work very well because you are provided here with a C K dot page domain that you can use and you can collect emails. You can run your whole operation just with your Convertkit domain. Now, really that's all that we need to worry about at this early point. Once you get used to your ConvertKit account and want to develop it a little bit. You can look into commerce, Billing team and advanced. But at this point, I think we have things set up and we are ready to go to start building some emails and start setting up our newsletter 8. Grow: How to Collect Email Addresses on Convertkit: Now that we have our account all set up, let's get to the fun part, which is where we can actually start adding subscribers. Now, there are a couple of ways to add subscribers to your convert kit account. You can do this manually. You can do this with landing pages, and you can do this with forms. Now, they are pushing you here to start with landing pages. We'll get there in just a little bit. But first, let's go up here to the Grow section of our convert kit account and explore some of these ways to add subscribers. Remember, you can always get to this dashboard page by clicking on the convert kit logo here in the top left. Okay, let's select grow and subscribers. This takes us to our subscriber homepage. And I want to show you the fastest way to add subscribers. Let's say you want to add your own email to your convert kit list. And I would encourage you if you have more than one email at a second email address to this list so that you can send test e-mails to yourself and you can also receive the emails when they come through. The easiest way to do this is to add subscribers by clicking the add subscribers button. This will allow you to manually add e-mails to your account. Now it's going to ask you here to create a tag to categorize the subscribers that you are adding. Let's just rename this tag as first subscriber. And I'm going to create this tag which will allow me to go forward. I'm going to add a single subscriber here at this point. But you could also import from a table or a CSV file here. You could also import from another provider. This would be an option if you have an email list in another platform such as MailChimp or flow desk, you can import those contacts from another provider. But right now we just want to add a single subscriber. This is actually my own account, and this is a first-name only here. And I'm going to add my e-mail address from my professional website, mark at Mark samples.com here. And all this is totally fine. We can add more tags. We could, we can select the different forms that we can attach these to. But really right now we just want to have a single tag. So I'm going to save that. And now you have just added your very first subscriber to your convert kit list. Now, of course, it's just one of my own e-mail addresses, but this is exciting because this shows you a couple of new things on your account. You now see this chart here. It will give you a rolling a count of how many subscribers you have and over time. And you can see here the confirmed subscribers, mark at Mark samples.com. That's the one that I just added. When you add a subscriber manually as I just did, you don't need to wait for the confirmation process. When someone signs up for your email through a form or a landing page, which we'll discuss in a little bit, that subscriber needs to add their e-mail address. They will receive a confirmation email and then they will click to confirm their subscription. It's a two-part process. So that's the first way to add a subscriber. The second way to add a subscriber is by adding a form. Now, you are started here with a couple of forums. So we'll click on dark theme form to see what that looks like. This is a provided form for you. And really I could just use this, put this as a link in maybe a social media post or on my website. We can actually receive e-mail addresses right away using this form. All I would need to do is click Publish here. And I can share this using this link I could use, I could insert some JavaScript HTML code or some other ways. So that's pretty cool. They have it all ready for us. And there's also a light theme version of this where I could just add this. I can of course customize it as I would like. So that's the second way. The third way. And this is the way that we're going to dig into in the next lesson is Bye landing page. So another way that we can accept e-mail addresses is through a landing page. So I'm going to click Create New, and I'm going to create a landing page. So now that we've learned the three ways to collect email addresses, in the next lesson, we're going to go through step-by-step on how to build a landing page for your email list 9. Grow: Create Your First Landing Page: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to Create Your First Landing page to accept email addresses for your email list. So again, to get here we go to grow landing pages and forms. And then once we are on this page, we want to select Create New. And we're going to create a landing page. Once on this page, we can choose a template for the design of our landing page. There are a number of templates that are provided here for you. We have some simple ones. We have some that are themed according to the type of landing page. You can do a little searching here over on the left of filtering by category. Let's say I want to do newsletter templates and we have some examples here. I like this one, the Cyprus Template. So I'm going to choose that and we're going to create that template now. So this is our landing page editor window. And you can see this is what it will look like over here. On the left and on the right we have some formatting options. We have a title here. The first thing I want to do, and this is a good idea is to rename this landing page. And so I'm going to say newsletter landing page here. And so now we have this renamed so that we can find it again. And let's look at these general styles. Over here on the right, we have our options and we can just directly edit into this landing page. I'm going to call this mark Samples newsletter. And then I'm going to put in some text here. And the texts that I'm going to use here comes directly from my actual newsletter, which is called The Creative Process. And so I just put it in a Description here. What you want to put in this description is something that will make a Subscriber do a couple of things. One, it helps them evaluate whether or not your newsletter is really right for them. And you really do want to exclude people who really wouldn't be interested in your newsletter. So that's the first thing is you want to help potential subscribers understand if this is directed toward them. And then if it is directed toward them, you want to encourage them or give them a reason to sign up. So in this case, I'm saying many creatives, writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers face huge struggles in their creative and business lives. Every week, I send out an email with one example or timeless piece of advice to help creators make their best work and thrive. I've done a couple of things here just to break this down, as you're writing your own Description here, consider starting with the problem that your newsletter addresses. The problem here is many creatives face huge struggles in their creative and business lives. If that's you, if you're reading this and your creative facing struggles and your creative and business life, that gets your attention. Your maybe then more likely to consider subscribing to this newsletter if you see yourself in that problem and that's an urgent problem that you have. Next, I give some indication of really what the newsletter will provide as an answer to that problem. So here I'm saying every week I send out an email with one example or timeless piece of advice to help creators make their best work and thrive. Note here that you get a pretty clear sense of what to expect in this newsletter. You can expect it to be once per week. So as opposed to once per month or once per quarter, or once per year or once per day. You can expect, you'll get one every week. And then in those emails, you can expect one example or timeless piece of advice for creators. And so if you're thinking, okay, that seems like something that I would like once a week to get a piece of advice or an example, okay, maybe I will subscribe here. So you can change this text however you would like. Let's say get the e-mails here. And then this box is where the subscriber rural actually put in their email address. Anytime you have a box like this, if you look on the right-hand side, you see formatting options. So let's say I want this example text to say best email address, so I can change that label there. I can make this required. This one of course, is the, only, the only field on this on this whole landing page. So of course it has to be required. I can change the font size here, make it a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller. Of course, I can change colors, but I like this color just fine. Then I have a couple other options here. I can make it bold. I'm going to keep that normal though. This is the padding, how much space you want around the text, and then some other color options here. Now, notice, anytime I click into any section of this, I get customized options here. For these four. For each of these sections. You even have some advice. Here are some resources that you can look into if you would like. Now, on this button here, I want to say maybe something slightly different. So let's type in here. Sign Up now. So instead of sign up today, we can say sign up now. And so that's looking good. This is the text portion of my landing page. Of course, I'm going to want to change this photo. So let's replace this. And I'm actually going to replace this image with an image I created for my, my actual newsletter called The Creative Process. So let's do that now. When I click Replace, it will give me an option to drag and drop an image or choose files to upload. I'm going to choose files to upload. And then I'm going to search for my creative process image. And this is the one that I want here. So I'm gonna select that, just confirm that's the right one. Click Open and it's replaced there. Now, how did I make this image? I went over to Canva at canva.com. And I created this in that sort of vertical style because I knew that it would be, it would look nice in this landing page. So you're going to want to create some sort of image here. If you use this format, this template for your landing page, and you can do that easily in Canva, there are a number of great courses on Skillshare that can teach you how to use Canva, including one by Maggie Stara's that I would highly recommend. And I will put that link in the resources portion of this class. Great. Now that I have this pretty much done here, I'm going to save this. And then I am just to make sure that all my changes are, are still here. Then what I wanna do is I want to preview this. So I'm going to click preview, and this is how it would look in a web browser. So that's all looking fine for me here. So let's exit that. And I'm noticing here, I probably should call this the creative process. And that's just going to sync up with the example that I've put here. Of course, whatever newsletter a you decide to create, you're going to change these elements for your own. Okay, Now let's save these changes. Click Publish. So when we are ready to share our landing page, we can do this in a couple ways. Your landing page is already live. That means once you've saved your changes here, your landing page is ready to go. All you need to do is share it so that others can access it. An easy way to do this is to copy this link here. This is the link or the web address for your landing page. Copy this and then you can share this with anyone you would like. You can put it in an Instagram post. You can text it to your friends. You can put it on your website. You can really put it anywhere that links are accepted. And so just to give an example here, let's put this in to a web browser. Here. You can see this is the live page of my landing page. Just for Fun. Let's go ahead and put in my Email address here. This is the same one that I used before, but I'm going to go ahead and do this again and click sign up. Now, you can see it gives you this little confirmation message and now that email has been added to my list. What happens from here on the backend is the user will get a confirmation email. They'll click on that confirmation to confirm their subscription and then they will be good to go. Now that you've created your first landing page, you should know you can always come back and create new ones. So you can create new landing pages for different functions. So let's say you do a live event somewhere and you want to send people to a specific offer from that live event. You can create a landing page just for that event. And then you can track how many people signed up from that live event. Let's say you have a particular offer on your website. You can create a landing page for that as well. Really, it gives you a lot of power in understanding where your subscriptions are coming from. And that's how you set up a landing page in Convertkit. It's very easy. I would encourage you to not try to make it too perfect. Just get one up and running. And that way you can get started. It's most important to get started. Much more important than getting it perfect. Once you have created your landing page, here's what I would like for you to do in the course projects area. Click on your landing page. Create a screenshot of that landing page. So here I'm going to go to publish and I'm going to copy this web address, go to that web address. And I'm going to actually create a screenshot of this on my computer. And then I'm going to go and upload this screenshot with a link in the Skillshare project area. I want to take a brief moment to show you exactly how to submit your project for the course. So I'm going to go to a different course here just for the purpose of example, this is my other course called creative flow on schedule. But we will just give this as an example of how you might add a project to the current course on Convertkit. So what you do is you go to the Projects and Resources section of the course and click the green Create Project button. Then what I would like for you to do is give the project a title. So we'll call this mark Samples landing page. You can just give it a name that's very simple and clear. And in the project Description, give me just a little bit about what the, what the email list is about. So you could just write in something basic there, or you could just copy by Command C or Control C on a Windows PC copier project Description. That way, you'll give myself and other students just a little bit of an example of what your email list is like and about. Then we want to do two final things. First, we want to upload an image and my image is here, the screenshot is here in my folder. Then we're going to click Open and makes sure we get a preview of this. Okay, that looks great. We're going to submit that. Then I'm going to do one final thing. And this is very important. I want to add a link. So I'm gonna go over to my landing page. I'm going to click publish, and I'm going to copy this link. It might already be on your clipboard from our previous steps. But just to be sure, you want to make sure you get that link, then paste it in by Command V or Control C on a PC and click Add. Okay, now that I have added that, what I would do is I would just check everything else and then eventually I would publish this. Of course, I'm not going to publish this to the wrong Skillshare course, but that would give you the ability to have that image there, a title, a quick description, and that link there. So that's how you would go about adding a project to this course. Go ahead and do that now, and then let's continue on with the course. If you upload a screenshot and a link to your landing page, you will have completed your project for this course and put your, put your page up there. And I might just subscribe to your email list. For sure I will subscribe to the first ten students who post their landing pages. But if it looks interesting, I might just subscribe to yours as well. Excellent. So that's how you create a landing page. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you some other ways to grow your email list 10. Grow: What is the Creator Network?: So now that we've set up our landing page, we want to look at another great way to grow our email list. And that is with the Creator Network. So what is the Creator Network? The Creator Network is a network of other creators on Convertkit that you can connect with and that you can team up with in order to grow each other's email lists and therefore each other's reach as creators. So I've pulled up this help document on Convertkit website about the Creator Network. And so we're going to just learn a bit about it this way. Let's zoom in a bit. So what is the Creator Network? Recommend to your subscribers? Creators worth checking out and get recommended in turn to build your email audiences together. So the premise here is that there are already a number of other great, great creators on Convertkit and the Convertkit Network. You can recommend them with the hope that they will recommend you in turn. Now, the best way to make connections on a Creator Network is through reciprocity. If you are a good community member, others will want to recommend you as well. So you need to recommend at least one other Creator before others can recommend you as well. So let's take a look at this in the next lesson of how you set up the Creator Network on Convertkit 11. Grow: Set Up Your Creator Profile: Let's look now at how you Set Up Your Creator Network Profile. If you're not already there, click on grow Creator Profile. And let's go to the Creator Profile. You'll notice a couple of things have been preloaded for you, including your name and the image that you've put in in your profile. You can also add a byline here. So I'm going to put writer, musician, and professional musicologist. Well, I could put in a bio here. I'm not going to do that at the moment. This is where a user would put in their email address to subscribe to your profile. And this is basically your homepage. If people go to the Creator Profile and click on your name on your profile, this is what they will see as you add posts to your ConvertKit account. That is, as you send out emails, you can opt for those emails to be included here as well on Your Creator Profile website. And those posts will show up here. It's basically an online or web version of your newsletter, kind of like Substack or other writing, publishing websites. So you can really go just that far. You can do a couple of other things if you would really like on the Creator Profile. Either way, you can develop this as you go and as you use Convertkit more deeply, there are elements here for adding links. So maybe I want to add a link here to my website. I'm going to add this link there. You can include products and we can look at Recommendations. Now, Recommendations really are something that you want to set up because this is where the real power of the Creator Network begins. So we'll look at setting up Recommendations in the next lesson. 12. Grow 5: Set Up Recommendations in the Creator Network: Now that we've seen how easy it is to Set Up Your Creator Profile on the Creator Network. Let's add some recommendations so that we can help our subscribers find other creators that they would like, and in turn, encourage other creators to recommend us. So if you click on the go-to Creator Network button here, it will take us to that network and we can find people to recommend. Now, the way this works is that once you start here, you're going to need to click on join, the Creator Network. And that will get you in. And you want to confirm Your Creator Profile. And we've done that on the previous step. So I could add a biography here if I wanted to, but I'll just leave this as is. And I will click Next. Okay, actually it's going to ask me to put a bio in here. So let's let's go back and find that description that I put on the landing page and use that as my bio. So I'm going to open up this landing page in a different tab, grab the text from that Landing Page. This is a really nice way to describe why people might want to subscribe to my feed here or to my newsletter. So let's put that there in the bio. Now just a little tip here. Many people in their bios really describe themselves. They talk about themselves. A little pro tip here is to, in your bio, actually talk about the problem that you solve for your customers or your prospective customers. In other words, in your bio, refer to the problem that you address in your work. You really want people who come across your profile to see themselves in it and say, I want that. So now that I've put this biography in here that adequately addresses my prospective customers problems. I'm going to click Next. It will give me an opportunity to choose my Creator type. I've already done this in an earlier phase. I'm going to, I think deselect educator here and add writer. And I think that will be good. So we'll click Next. Choose your topics. I am going to just choose a couple here. I'm going to talk a little bit about music. I'm going to talk about culture and entertainment and Content Creation. And I think those are great for now. We can always change these later. So I'm going to click Next. Now, it gives me an opportunity here to choose where I want to show my recommendations. Again, these are going to be Recommendations of other creators on the Convertkit platform that I am vouching for, for my perspective subscribers. So I want to choose any landing page or form that is live can have Recommendations that show up along with it. I only have really one that I'm going to be using right now. So I will select that one and we'll click Next. Now it's gonna give me one more thing. And it says, in order to be listed in the Creator Network, you must be recommending at least one other Creator. So let's discover creators. And what I'm gonna do here is go down to this search bar and just type in Creative Process and scroll down. This will take you to my official newsletter, the professional newsletter that I Create, and it's called The Creative Process. So if you would just click on my profile, you can see that Profile here and click recommend. Once you do that, you have now solidified your first recommendation. And that means that you now can be recommended by others. So here's what I asked for you to do. If you recommend me, I will then see that on my account and then I can recommend you back. We can help each other out. So when you go here to my recommendations, I can see now that I am recommending The Creative Process Newsletter. These are analytics from my own account. This means there are zero people who have signed up for my landing page and have seen this recommendation and zero people, zero subscribers that I have currently sent to the Creative Process Newsletter. Of course, that's to be expected because I just signed up. I can also go over here and click recommended by and you'll notice I don't have any recommendations quite yet, but that's okay. Okay. Now that we have our first recommendation, let's add a couple more great creators here to our recommendations list. First, I'm going to look for, oh, let's see, James Clear. And we will recommend James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Let's do one more and let's do J Klaus. Klaus has a great newsletter about creation creativity called creators science. Let's go ahead and recommend Jay Klaus. Now, if we go back to our recommendations, we can see that we have several here. And let's go through just the settings here to make sure we have everything right. So I'm recommend, I am recommending on landing pages and forms. And we're going to go customization here. We can do a couple of things. Slot one will put the Creative Process Newsletter. This is basically just indicating which creators in which order you want to show. And let's have the top three here. We have five total Recommendations slots. This is basically you can fix who you want to show up where otherwise it will just be sort of randomized. So let's go to a preview here to look, to see what this will look like to a subscriber. So once a Subscriber puts their email into that landing page, a screen will pop up here, an overlay screen. And they will allow you to select which additional newsletters you would like to subscribe to. So the idea here is if you suggest or recommend other newsletters, eventually other creators will recommend your newsletter as well, as long as you put out good content. That is how it works. So that's how you Set Up Recommendations and how you get your recommendations hooked up to your landing pages or forms. So the Creator Network is another great way for you to go about growing your own list, but also a great way for you to help your subscribers find other great content as well. 13. Send: Broadcasts vs. Sequences: Now that we've talked about how to grow your email list, Let's move on to the world of sending e-mails. So let's now check out this whole area on the Convertkit platform called Send. The next couple of lessons will be all about sending emails and the different ways you can do that with some tips and tricks along the way and some ways to think about how you send these emails. The most important thing to understand conceptually here is the difference between Broadcasts and Sequences. Broadcasts are kind of like a single email that you broadcast out to either your entire list or a subset of your list. So let's say you want to send out an email about a particular holiday, and it's just a onetime email on that particular day. You went send a broadcast and schedule it for that particular day. Just think of this as sending individual one-off emails to your list or a subset of your list. A sequence is something slightly different, and you can think of it as a series of automated emails that you can send in a given situation. So for instance, if you want to send a couple of welcome emails to every new subscriber when they sign up for your email list. You can do that with a sequence. That means that emails will go out to these subscribers at different times depending on when the event occurs for that particular subscriber. So again, Broadcasts would be a single email to your entire list or a subset of that list all at the same time. A sequence would be a series of emails that you can trigger for a particular Subscriber after they have taken an action. So let me give you the two most common situations for using these two. When you're sending out a weekly newsletter. Each weekly newsletter will be designed in a broadcast. So you'll use that for your email newsletter. And if you have a new subscriber welcome sequence, you would do that through email sequences. So in a little bit we're going to create our First Broadcast. But before we do that, let's hop over to Email Templates and set up an Email Template. Before we get to Broadcasts. I'll show you about Email Templates in the next lesson. 14. Send: Create an Email Template: Now, before we send out our First Broadcast, let's go over to Email Templates and set up a template so that we can make it easier to send out Broadcasts in the future and make all of our Broadcasts similar in look, feel, and style. So an Email Template is a starting point for your emails to make them look the same over time and also to save you time when you are creating them. Let's click on New Email Template. When we go to new Email Template, we will have some options for different kinds of Email Templates to customize here. And you can look through all of these at your leisure. We're just going to choose one here. That's very simple. I prefer emails that look like emails, as opposed to looking like a PDF or a designed webpage. But you can do and choose what you would like depending on your needs. Let's select this intro template and customize it. So now we have this starting point Template and we're going to go about customizing it. The first thing I want to do is clean it up here. I'm going to get rid of that dot of orange there. I'm going to get rid of this header. And I'm going to have this text here. We're going to leave that for now. We can leave these social icons here as well. We're gonna get rid of some of this stuff. Really what I want to do is have a blank template that is just a good starting point for my Newsletter. One thing I do want to do here is add a header image to my Email Template. This is important because your subscribers get dozens and perhaps hundreds of emails a day. And we want to have a nice, easy way to visually mark off that this is an email from you. The way I'm going to do this is I'm going to add an image. So if I go over to this plus button, click the plus button, I'm going to scroll down to adding an image under this Media section. So I'm going to add an image. Now. I'm going to upload an image here. So I've found that image here and I'm going to open that. Now. I've created this image in Canva and it gives it just a nice sort of horizontal look here. I'm going to move this up so that it just occurs at the top. Now again, your image header is gonna be different here depending on the name of your newsletter. But I'm just going to keep this as an example for this purpose. Now let's do a little bit with our text. I want to have a slightly different font here. So I'm going to select the text area, select font, and go with a sans serif font such as Arial. You'll notice that it changed this entire section. And we're going to leave this as normal instead of bold and 20 pixels will be fine. Looking down here at the Advanced will see that we can change the link color. We can change the line height, which is how spaced out vertically the lines are. And we can adjust the letter spacing as well. So let's keep that here. I like to give myself just a little reminder, which is insert text here. And that's gonna give me just a little reminder there when I'm creating my first email. I'm going to get rid of this button. And really, I'm just going to start with something very simple, just like this. And this is going to be my template. Now, before I go, I want to change the name of this template and I'm just going to call this Newsletter Email Template. And that's going to give me the ability to access this template when I go into Broadcasts. So now if we go over to email templates, we can see that I have a new newsletter e-mail template that has been created there. So in the next lesson, I will show you how to access that Template in order to Send Your First Email broadcast 15. Send: Send Your First Broadcast Pt. 1: Now that we've set up an email template, it's really starting to get fun here. Let's now in this lesson, send our first broadcast. So if we click Send and we will click on broadcast. Now you'll see exactly why setting up that e-mail template is so helpful. Because when we click new broadcast, we can choose from our templates as to how we want to create our broadcast. And I'm going to select that newsletter e-mail template that I just created. I'm going to select that. And we are now brought to the editor window of our first broadcast. So as you can imagine, having that e-mail template is going to save me so much time as I make broadcasts every week. I don't have to pull in this creative process header. I don't have to pull in these social icons. I can really just get started by adjusting this text in the body of the editor. Now, let's take a look here at the editor and understand what we are seeing. Don't overlook this section here. The subject line is very important. This is the subject line that your subscribers will see in their email inbox. So as you might imagine, this is very important, the subject line, because it, it may make the difference between whether or not they open your email or they do not open your email. So for this first broadcast, I'm going to recreate one of the very first newsletters that I sent out on my creative process newsletter. And this, this newsletter was called the creators daily struggle. So in the subject line, I'm going to put the creators daily struggle here. And let's go find the text of that by going to my website, mark samples.com. And you can find this on my blog. And let's see, here is the text of the creators daily struggle when you're creating your own first newsletter text, I would recommend typing this out in another text editor. So you can use, you can use Google Docs, you can use Microsoft Word. You can use notion anywhere that you prefer to compose your text. I would not recommend composing your emails actually in this text editor, although you certainly can. The reason for that is it's good to have all of your written text separately in a repository where you can access it very easily. That way, it's not locked within convert kit. So let's say in the future you stop using convert kit and it's hard to find those newsletters that you created. Well, if you have them saved somewhere else, such as Google Docs or in Microsoft Word or notion. You can easily find that text for further use. So I'm just going to copy this text in. This is direct from that earlier newsletter that I created. And so this is just for an example, but you can see here that the text is laid out very clearly. You can see that it's using this style that I had set up, which is Arial font, normal. Let's say I want to emphasize some of this text. I can make this bold. I can also, well, let's, let's undo that actually and do it this way. If I want to make just this section bolder italics, I would use these editing options up here so I can make it bold, italic, underline this. I really only want to use maybe one of these, so I'll maybe make this a tau x. And now that I have my text here, I would want to read through it. I want to make sure everything looks great. I can see that I have a link in here. When I, when I do links and this is maybe worth talking about. If I put the cursor inside of the link and then click on this link button up here at the top. It will show me exactly the link that will send me too. So let's go ahead and copy that and just make sure that link is working. And you can see that it does send you to the correct link, which is this book by Steven Pressfield. So now I have the text. I have this nice header. Somehow this got changed. So I'm going to just fix that I'm going to look at this email and I think it is ready to go. Now, there are a couple of other things before we leave here that you might want to do in your e-mails. And let me give you some examples of that first paragraph styles. Now, if I wanted to make a header within the text here, let's say I want to take the title, the creators daily struggle. And I want to make this into a heading. I can click on this paragraph dropped down and make it a heading. I can make this heading two if that's too big or maybe heading three. Let's go back to heading one. Let's say I had some, some sort of list that I wanted to create here. I can go up here and choose bulleted list and then add item one, item, two, item three. I can also turn this into a numbered list if I would like. The other thing I can do is if I have a long quote, you can use this block quote style, which will set off your writing. I don't tend to like to do that, although there are some examples where that is a good choice. So let's go ahead and make all of this regular. Now, as you can see, it's kinda messed up my text here. The way that you can get back to where this was before is by using the undo command, which is Command Z on a Mac or Control Z on a PC. And if I just keep pressing Control Z or Command Z, it will get me back to where I was by undoing those actions. There are a couple of other things here. Let's say we want for this text to be centered. We can do that. We can use the font size here. We can also deal with colors here, we can highlight some sections by making it yellow and changing this transparency just a little bit. This option allows us to add a link. So if I wanted to make this whole thing a link, I could just select that and then add my link here and click Apply. There's one other feature here, this very powerful, which is this at symbol. And this allows you to personalize your emails depending on what information you collect from your subscribers. So let's say I want to dress a subscriber by firstName, and I have collected their firstName and it's included in the system. I could say something like, hey, and then leave a space. And if I put my cursor right here and click this personalization tab, I can select here the property of first name. So if I have a first name included for that subscriber, they will, their name will actually be included here. So let's say I have three subscribers and their names are mark, Terry and Kate. Each individual subscriber, if that name is actually included in the database and attached to that subscriber as the first name field. They will see an email that says, Hey terry or hey Kate in their inbox. And that's just a nice way to personalize your emails if you choose to. I have chosen to not collect first names for my newsletter, and therefore, I don't use that personalization feature, but you can use it and it's very effective if you have that information for your subscribers. So now that I have really edited my broadcast, I'm gonna get rid of some of this stuff that I've done. I'm going to make this left aligned. I'm going to remove that highlighting. And I think this is looking good. So once it's looking good, I can continue past this page and go to the next step in descending of a broadcast. On this page, I can indicate some further important information for this email broadcast. The first thing you'll see here is the from address field. And that just indicates that email address that this email will come from when it hits your subscribers inboxes. Next, you can select who you would like to send this broadcast to. Now, if you are sending out a newsletter to your entire list, this will already be set up for you to send to all subscribers. If you want to send to a subset of your list, you can add filters here. So first I would need to remove the all subscribers tab. And I would add a filter. And I could select within a segment. I could select within a country or region, I could select a distance from a postal code I could select based on when a subscriber has subscribed to my list. I could select according to firstname, email address, or a custom field, depending on what I have collected as information from my subscribers. But for now I want to include all subscribers. You can see that this number updates automatically to show me how many subscribers my current filter applies to. The next question that I need to answer is when I would like to send this e-mail. Now, if you're running an e-mail newsletter, I would recommend getting this all set up well in advance of when you actually want to send your newsletter. The way I do it is I schedule my emails for Monday morning. So let's say I want to send this out next Monday, which is August 14th, and I want to send it early in the morning. Eastern Standard time, let's say for 50 05:00 A.M. so now this broadcast is scheduled to be sent out at 04:55 A.M. next Monday. And at that time, even if I'm not awake at 04:55 A.M. it will still send out automatically. There are a couple of other advanced options here that you can engage with or you can just leave them blank. If you want something different to show in the email preview texts than the beginning of your email. You can include that here. Oftentimes it works to just leave the beginning of the email as the preview text. And then this internal note section is simply for your own records. If I want to take note that this was my first broadcast, I could list that here. The subscribers won't see this. But when I'm looking back through on my on my information on my dashboard, I will see this note which can help me distinguish between different broadcasts. Finally, let's click Preview here to see what our email will look like and we can see that it's looking great. Now a couple of further steps here. You can preview as a subscriber, a particular subscriber. So let's say, want to see if the first name field is actually working. You can preview that there. You can also send a test email to yourself to see what it looks like in your actual inbox. I would recommend doing both of these and just getting a feel for how this works. Great. Now I'm ready to continue to the final step. And I'm going to just look this over, make sure everything is looking good. Ascending from sending two and the content of the broadcast, which I can see here in a miniature preview. I'm going to click Select broadcast here. Excuse me, scheduled broadcast. So this is scheduling and my broadcast. And this is now saying Congrats the creators daily struggle is scheduled and will be sent to your one fan. So it gives me an option here to share this post to my public feed. And I want to do that. So what this means is that I can take this newsletter content that I sent out and make it do even more for me, work in different places. What that means is I can actually have this posted on my creator network profile. So I'm going to show you how that works in just a moment. I can post this to my public feed, which I'm going to have selected. And we're going to skip over this section, which is you can create a paid newsletter. That's something that we're not covering in this course, but it is something you can do in the future. 16. Send: Send Your First Broadcast Pt. 2: Now, just for example purposes because this is not scheduled till next Monday, let's walk this back and see what we've done. So I haven't posted this on my creator profile quite yet, because actually what I'm gonna do is I'm going to send a test email now. So I'm going to unscheduled this and for example purposes, just send this out right now. And so we can see what it looks like and move on to the next steps in the process. So again, this is my email, I'm going to continue and instead of scheduling it at a different time, I'm going to select Send. Now, you can see this option down here of posting to my public feed. I can do that here. And I really do want this to look just as is I can. I'll tell you right now this horizontally oriented image will not work very well on the profile. So I'm gonna go ahead and replace this image with a square version. So I don't have that uploaded yet, so I'm just going to choose some files to upload. So I have that file selected now and I'm going to add it. So now I have that square orientation, which I know is going to look better. So I'm going to click continue, and I am going to send the broadcast. Now, notice, this is going to be sent immediately because I undid that scheduling. So this is just for example, purposes. If you want to schedule the broadcast, you just leave it as is, and it will go out when the time that is scheduled has arrived. But let's go ahead and send this now and see what it looks like. Great. So now I have a confirmation screen. The creators daily struggle has been published and is now being sent to my one fan. I have a direct link to this broadcast here. But let's go ahead and look at my creator profile. Since I selected for this to be posted to my profile, you can now see that that post is right here ready to be found, to be discovered by anyone who accesses my creator profile and look at this beautiful design pulled directly over from my template. Very simple. It has my block down here that kind of explains what this is about. It has another sign-up field here. So really this is all built around the idea of growing your list. Now, of course, this email has also been sent to my e-mail inbox. And so let's go check that one out as well. So I have popped over here to my email where this email was sent and you can see this is how it appears in my email client. So again, it looks great. I can read this, I can click on these links and everything is working well. So now that I'm back in convert kit, let's close out this somewhat lengthy lesson. But you've learned something very important in this lesson. And that is how to send out your first broadcast and how to navigate some of these settings so that when you send out the broadcast, it's going to look great. And it's going to be sent also to your creator profile so that you can grow that list. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 17. Send: See How Your Email Performed: Congratulations. You have just sent out your first e-mail newsletter broadcast. And this is the exciting part, getting to create content for your subscribers where you can connect with them and where you know that they are receiving your emails. Now, after you send out a broadcast, one of the fun parts is to analyze how that e-mail has performed. So let's go ahead and click on broadcasts. Here. You can see now that this broadcast that I just sent out is actually listed here on the broadcasts page. And as you create and send more broadcasts, you will see all of them listed here in order. Every broadcast has a report that is associated with it. So you can see how that e-mail has performed. Now, you can get a summary of how it's performed right here on this page, you can see it had one recipient. It has a one-hundred percent open rate. And yes, this means that you can actually see when your subscribers have opened your emails and which subscribers have not opened your emails. And you can even see which subscribers have clicked. And so you also have the number of clicks here and the number of subscribers that have unsubscribed as a result of this particular email. That is the ones who have clicked on that unsubscribe button. So let's click on View Report to dig in a little deeper. Now, as you build your list, these numbers will not be quite so good as they're looking right now. In fact, a common open rate for email newsletters is anywhere from 10% to about 40%. And 40% is really a great open rate for an e-mail newsletter, especially as you grow and get more and more subscribers. Notice a couple of things here as we read how this email performed. The overview is here. We can review the e-mail content and so you can see exactly what was in that email. You can see all of the recipients who received that e-mail. When you click on opens, you can see which of those recipients actually opened the e-mail. So this would only show those subscribers who opened the email. When you select clicks, this will show you which links were clicked and how many times that link was clicked. I can see if anyone unsubscribed as a result of this email. And I can do a couple of other things here. I can re-send to any subscribers who did not open the email. I can duplicate this e-mail. I can share this email and I can review whether or not the email is shared on public feeds. So every time you send out an email, you are going to want to monitor the performance of that e-mail to make sure that your emails are really connecting with your audience. This review and adjustment period in response to the performance of each email broadcast or each newsletter is really an important one for making the content as quality and as helpful as possible to your subscribers. So that's how you read the report for a broadcast. And remember, as you send out more newsletters, you will see more e-mails here with the performance shown. So that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we will talk about creating an email snippet to make the creation of your broadcasts even more quick and more effective. 18. Send: Create an Email Snippet: So now that we've sent out our first broadcast and we've learned how to read email reports. Let's do a couple of extra things that will make sending out your newsletter easier and more effective. The first thing I want to show you is this feature called snippets. Snippets create reusable blocks of content that you can easily place in any e-mail. So let's go over here and click new snippet, and we're going to select blocks. Now, I want to add a name for this snippet. This snippet is going to be an easy signature snippet that I can put into any e-mail that I would like. And so I'm going to call this email signature. But really snippets could be any block of text. We could also create a snippet for the description of my newsletter. We can create a snippet for a brief bio. We can create email snippets with images or other content. And you can really use your imagination on this. But for this, let's just make it very easy and put my name here. So we're going to hover over this plus button and add an image. So if I scroll down select image, it will give me my recent uploads here. I'm going to select this circle headshot here, put that in. Now you can see it's much, much too big. If I just have this selected here and go over to width, I can make this much smaller. The other thing I want to do here is I want to put this all the way to the left so that it goes under my name. Let's add one more thing here, which is my website, www.mark-samples.com. And let's make this a live link. So I'm going to put in my my website link here. Click Apply. Now, anywhere in an e-mail that I would like to drop this signature in will be available. Let's see what this looks like here. If I create a new broadcast. So if I create a new broadcast here, over in broadcasts, I want to select that newsletter e-mail template. And now after I have my text, Let's say I want to add that signature block. I would hover over this plus button in the e-mail editor. I would scroll down and select snippet. And as you can see, this lists all of my snippets that are available. Of course only have one at this point. So I'm gonna select that and it has dropped right in. You can see now that that has been put into this email and it's been made very simple for me to do that. Now. I think that's good for now. Let's go ahead and cancel out of this. I don't want to save this, of course, but it's saved as a draft there for me. I want to change one other thing about this template. So now that I've shown you snippets, let me give you one extra bonus thing here. If we go to back to email templates, we can actually edit this template that we've already created. One thing that I think would be nice here is if I made this whole image clickable so that if an email subscriber receives this in their inbox and they want to go to my profile page in the creator network, they can just click on this big banner. That's something that subscribers tend to want to do, which is just click on that, on that e-mail. So let's make this URL field. So again, I have this image clicked, I'm on URL. Let's go now and find the creator network profile. Open this in a new page. So let's grab here this profile. Go back to my editor and paste that in and save. Now if we go to this email address and let's say you've received this in an email, you click on that profile, that header image, and it takes you directly to my convert kit creator profile. So that's just another tip. Now, every newsletter that I send will have that clickability on it when I use that template. So again, what we've covered in this lesson is two ways to make your emails created quicker and more consistent, but then also more effective. And that was by using snippets and also by adjusting our e-mail template 19. Send: Create Your First Email Sequence: Okay, thanks for sticking with me through all of these instructions in the Send area of Convertkit, I have one more very powerful feature to show you in the Convertkit platform, and that is sequences. Now a word of warning before we talk about this, this is a paid feature. So if you are only using the free version of Convertkit, you won't have access to Sequences. But if you are on the trial period or you choose to pay for Convertkit, you will have the option to use Sequences. This is very common with most email platforms. They make you pay for the sequence automation and other automations. It's a typical paid feature for an email platform. But assuming that you are either on a free trial or you are paying for this, let's take a quick look at how you might set up a sequence. So again, an Email Sequence is a series of emails that automatically sends out to your subscribers based on a given event. A very common way or reason to set up an Email Sequence is upon subscription to the email newsletter. So when a new subscriber subscribes to your Newsletter, you might want to send them some welcome emails and that can all be automated. So when a subscribers signs up on your landing page, you don't have to be sitting there waiting for their email to come in and then respond to them. Convertkit can actually send them that welcome email immediately when they have subscribed. Let's see an example of this by creating a new sequence. Now, there are some suggested templates and I want to use this same newsletter e-mail template for my Sequences. So you can see this looks like just a regular email editing interface. And it is, the difference here is that over here on the right sidebar, we have opportunities for multiple emails to be created. Let's do that now. We're going to have a welcome email. So we'll call that one welcome. And then let's create a second email by clicking Add email. And on this one, we will call it The Creative Process starter pack. Day one. And I'll show you what I'm gonna put in there and a little bit. But just for demonstration purposes, this Email Sequence now has to emails in it. And this one will be sent after one day. That's based on a particular event. Will I'll tell you about that in just a minute. What I want to do is actually make this 10 days, which means immediately. So I want this immediately when a subscriber signs up for my email list. Once they've, have confirmed their subscription. This will send right away. And that's a really nice thing to do. So that subscriber doesn't forget why they signed up for your newsletter or who you are. People surfing the Internet really come across multiple offers every day. And so you don't want your emails to get lost in the shuffle. So this is really going to be a welcome email. I have an email that's already written and I'm just going to paste that in here. I've copied this from another text editor and I'm just going to paste that in here. So this is my welcome e-mail that I've composed and we can just look at it here. Welcome. I'm Mark Samples. I give a little bit of thanks for signing up for the newsletter. And then it's nice to tell a little bit about what the newsletter is. Just a little pro tip here. You want this Description really to match the description that they saw when they signed up for your newsletter. That's just a nice way to make sure that the subscriber connects what they're getting in their inbox with the reason that they signed up in the first place. After that, I give a little bit about me, including a link to my website and then I tell them a little bit about what they can expect. And specifically, I'm going to tell them that they should expect to get more emails from me in the next couple of days. And that's right here to say, thanks for signing up. I'll send you four of my most popular past newsletters over the next five days or the next few days rather. That alerts the subscriber to expect to see emails in their inbox from you for the next couple of days, not just on the Monday mornings when I send out the newsletter to all of my subscribers. So I do say that here next Monday morning You'll also see me in your inbox with the next edition of the Newsletter. What that means is that this subscriber, let's say they subscribe on a Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon. They're going to get this email immediately. And then they're gonna get a second Email one day after subscribing, which will be on Wednesday. If that's the end of the sequence, they won't get another email from me until the following Monday when I send a broadcast out to my entire list. Let's say however, that they sign on a Sunday. On Sunday they'll get this email immediately upon signing up. And then on Monday they will get both my newsletter broadcast that's sent out every Monday. And this second email in the creative process starter pack. So subscribers maybe getting multiple emails every on a particular day rather. But that's okay. It just as long as you have described to them what they should expect, that will make sense. So let's do just a little bit here to set my second email. And what I've, what I've said here is that I'm going to send this Subscriber some of my most popular posts. So let's go and grab my, Let's go here actually to Broadcasts and grab the text from this creators daily struggle Broadcast and reuse that content as a welcome email for this new subscriber. So what we're doing here is we are actually, let's go back to this tab here. So what we're doing is we're reusing our content in different ways. So in this scenario, this subscriber has signed up for my email list after I already sent out this creative struggle Newsletter. What that means is they probably haven't read this before. So I'm going to use this content to welcome that new subscriber. So this is a really nice way to build up your welcome sequence is to take the first three or four newsletters that you send out and package those into an Email Sequence that you can then send to new subscribers. The second email I have selected to occur after one day. If there are any days, I don't want it to be sent. Let's say I don't want it to be sent on that same Monday that my newsletter will be sent out on. I could deselect that, but I'm gonna leave that for now. Now when you're ready and these emails are ready to go, you want to make sure that you publish them. You can do that down here, or you can also do that up here. So I'm gonna go ahead and publish this. You can see that that draft tag has now been removed. I'm gonna go to the second email. Let's say it's ready to go and I can click to publish that as well. Now that I have set up this Email Sequence, I can use the sequence in a couple interesting and powerful ways. I will show you about how to use this sequence in a future lesson. But that wraps up our discussion of this send section on the Convertkit platform. We discussed how to send out Broadcasts, How to set up Email Templates and creates snippets, as well as now How to set up a sequence. In the next section, we'll look at how to automate and specifically how to get this Email Sequence to our new subscribers. So I will see you in the next lesson. 20. Automate: Set Up a Visual Automation: Now that we have explored the sand section of the Convertkit platform, Let's take a look at the automate section. We won't go through all areas of this section, but we will discuss the Visual Automation section to show you how we can leverage that email sequence that we created in a previous lesson. Let's click now on Visual Automation. I will tell you this is also a paid feature on the Convertkit platform. So you want to set these up during your trial period. Or if you end up paying for a subscription, you can do that as well. Automations are visual representations of actions that happen that you can automate for your subscribers when they take an action? That sounds a bit confusing. Let me give you an example. A very common automation is for when a new subscriber enters your email, into your newsletter Landing Page, they get added to your system. You want a couple of things to happen to welcome that new subscriber. Let's set up an automation to do just that. So I'll click over here on new Automation. This is an area where you can get a bunch of different templates and these are all great. Let's just take a look maybe at one here. Let's do this release a new book template. You can preview the Template and it shows you this is the visual automation of actions that would happen if you use this particular Visual Automation. Feel free to look through all of these. There are some great ones, but it's sometimes easier to just start from scratch and build exactly what you need. So let's do that. Let's click start from scratch. Now we have a canvas here that will allow us to start building our visual automation. And I'm going to click start building. Now, we have a couple of options here for the event or action that happens to kick off this automation. Now, what we want is when somebody joins a form and when a subscriber is added to our newsletter landing page, remember that's the name of that landing page that we created earlier. You can see why giving it a clear and descriptive name is actually helping us out at this step. So when a subscriber joins the newsletter landing page, we can add an event here. So now that action will kick off something new. Any action we want to put between this event and the end of the automation we can put right here. So let's add a step. Here we have an option for three different selections here. We can select event, action or condition. The event category gives us some options for actions when a tag is added or removed, when a product is purchased on a certain date or something that happens with a custom field. An action will happen once a Subscriber reaches this point in the Automation. So you can add the subscriber to an Email Sequence. That's what we're going to do. You can also add a delay. You can add or remove a tag or some other actions here. A condition checks if a Subscriber matches a certain condition when they reached that point. And then we'll take it in, take that subscriber in one or other of a path, we'll come back to this one. But right now to make it very simple, Let's add an action. And when a subscriber enters their email on this Newsletter landing page, we want to add them to an Email Sequence. Since we've already created that email sequence that we called Sequence, we should rename that actually. We can add this just to make sure let's edit this Email Sequence. And as you can see, I clicked on that green email icon. And now we're directly editing that email sequence that we created earlier. And let's call this the welcome, the newsletter welcome Sequence. So now we're actually directly editing that sequence. So just to prove that, Let's go over to send select sequences. And you can see that that email has now been, or excuse me, that sequence has now been updated. So let's go back to automations. Basically what we've done here as we have set up when we want this Newsletter welcome sequence to be triggered. And in this case it's triggered by a particular event which is being added to the newsletter landing page. Now, it could be just this simple where if someone were to Other email to the landing page, they would be entered into the sequence. They would get the immediate welcome email. After a delay of one day, they would get the second email in that sequence and then it would end the Automation. They would be removed then from that automation. That's really the simplest way to do it. Let's add one final step here and add an event. Or excuse me, let's add an action here. And we're going to add a tag here. We want to just add a tag that this particular subscriber has received the intro content or the welcome sequence. So let's create a tag, has received welcome sequence. Since that tag doesn't exist, will create a new tag. And we will add this action. So now that subscriber, once they go through the welcome sequence, we can indicate that they have received it that way. We don't send it to them twice. Now one thing that's cool here is that we can add multiple entry points into this Automation. So now if they enter their email in our landing page, they go into this welcome sequence. But I think we should also add an entry point of what if they are added on the Creator Network? So if I include here a new step to the side of this entry point, and select joins a form and select Creator Network and add event. Now you can see that if a Subscriber enters my newsletter either from the landing page or from the Creator Network. They will both be added to this newsletter welcome sequence. And you can imagine, you can add multiple entry points to this same sequence. If you have, let's say, a particular event and want to create a welcome sequence. Let's say you give a talk somewhere and you want to give a special welcome to those visitors who have subscribed from that event. You could create a separate landing page and a separate welcome sequence on a different Automation. So there are, there are many, many other options here for these automations. We won't go into all the details of those. But what we do want to do before we leave is we want to change the name of this automation to make it our welcome sequence Automation. So now we want to be sure before we leave if this is all set, that we set this to live, and that means that we will now be accepting new subscribers into this Automation. Now, it gives us just another warning here that automations are free to use during the free trial. But after your free trial ends, you won't be able to use these automations anymore. So you can go ahead and add your payment details there if you know you want to pay for Convertkit or you can wait and see. Now, if we go back to our visual automation, we can see that that automation has been added. Before we leave this lesson, let's just look at a couple other templates and bring those in here. Let's say we want to start a podcast. I'm going to pull this one in. And so that's now been loaded there. Let's go in and add just one more. And let's say we want to release a new music album. So I'm going to say use this template and it will import that automation into my account. And there it is. It does take a few moments, so I have skipped ahead, but after a few moments, it will be added in. Let's just take a look at some of the things that we can do with these templates, starting with this release, a new album Template. There is a landing page entry point and an album release tag entry point here. So this means if they've been added to this landing page or they get the tag of album release. They will get put into this Email Sequence, which is called album release warm-up. Then on a particular date, all subscribers will be moved forward into the album release Email Sequence. That means that let's say this is the dates that you want to release your album at that moment, this will all move forward. And then if they have, this is a conditional. So they're checking to see if the subscriber has the listened to the album tag. If they do have a listen to the album tag, you send them for content for listeners sequence. So you can have separate content for those who have listened. And then if they have not listened to the album, you can give them a different sequence that will hopefully drive them towards listening to the album. So you can see how these elements work together on this one. Let's go look also at the welcome subscribers to your podcast Template and see what they have cooked up there. So we have a podcast landing page. And once they are entered into the podcast landing page, you check this conditional as to whether they have this tag has introduced to the podcast. If they have been introduced to that podcast, this sequence has it waiting one day and then gives a recap of why you're here, just reminding them of why they want to listen to that podcast. If they have not received the intro to the podcast Sequence, you get this different sequence called welcome to the community, community, after which they are given this introduced to the podcast tag. That way this Subscriber won't get that material again. Now, at the end of this sequence, all subscribers will get a welcomed tag and that will end the automation. But you can see here some of the creative ways that you can move your subscribers through your content in unique and very powerful ways. So this has been an introduction to the Visual Automation feature of Convertkit. We've created one from scratch and we have explored some of the templates that you can start with and then adjust an edit to your particular needs. I'll see you in the next lesson. 21. Learn: Helpful ConvertKit Resources: Wow, we have covered a lot in these last few sections. We covered all about how to Create Your First Landing Pages and grow your list adding subscribers. We talked about how to send out Broadcasts, How to set up email sequences. And we talked briefly about how to automate a path for your new subscribers as they are welcomed to your email newsletter. I wanted to talk just a little bit now about the resources that you have available to you as you dig further into the Convertkit platform. Now while we've covered a lot in this course, we have only scratched the surface of what you can really do with Convertkit. And when you're ready to learn more, you will want to take advantage of this Learn section of the platform. You can read through the documentation, really asking specific questions and getting step-by-step guides for how to navigate Convertkit. You can also go to the community to ask questions in a forum setting. But I want to point you to the Creator university resource as well. These are tutorials created by Convertkit that will walk you through how to set up your account. All of the different features that you can use. And some of this will be similar to what you've seen in this course. Some of it will be new. So you can look at specific courses for starting an online business. Courses for growing your income, and courses for starting your newsletter, as well as this crash course, basic features course of Convertkit. Now, as I said, there are many different features that you can access on Convertkit and you really want to avail yourself of this learn feature, this Learn section where you can take your skills to the next level. Okay, with that, I'm going to see you in the next lesson, which will wrap up this course. 22. Conclusion: Congratulations for completing this course on Convertkit. Thank you so much for making it all the way to the end with me, you now have all of the knowledge and skills you need to start growing Your Audience through an email list. You know how to create a landing page where people can come and connect with you. You know, how to send out email broadcasts as newsletters or other communications with your audience. You know how to set up email sequences and automate how they are presented to your audience to share your work with them in a curated way. You also understand how to use the Creator Network to join with other creators, recommend their work and have them recommend you back a couple of things before you go. Don't forget to add your project to the project area of this course. Remember, I may just sign up for your newsletter if you do, if you found this course Helpful, leave a review of it on Skillshare. This helps other students find the course as well and share this course with a friend who needs to see it. If you haven't already sign up on my email list, The Creative Process Newsletter, where each week I send out an email with one example or timeless piece of advice that helps creators make their best work and thrive. Click on the link in the Resources area to find that email or go to my website at www.mark-samples.com. You can also find a link to it on my profile in Skillshare where you can follow me to see all of the new courses that I release. And lastly, find me on the Creator Network and recommend me. That way. I can recommend you back as we close this course. Remember this ART brings people together through your email list. You can make and share gifts of Art with your audience and spread joy and connection through your creations. Thanks so much for watching and happy creating