Optin Skin Review (And How One Affiliate Made $1400 In 48 Hours)

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In April I launched my most successful ebook to date. Despite all the excitement of the launch, the sales generated and the new customers added to my list the single biggest take-home point for me was this:

That’s right. One single affiliate succeeded in generating 160 sales in a matter of days amounting to a nice profit of just under $1400 for him. For sending a single email to his list. And as I know this guy I can tell you he mails to his list five days a week. Assuming all the products he promotes get a similar result that’s the equivalent of over $300,000 per year for sending five emails a week. That’s the internet lifestyle right there staring you in the face: after all he can send these simple emails from anywhere in the world and queue them up in his autoresponder to go out whenever he likes.

In many ways the real “secret sauce” for generating long-term online wealth is to build up your own private list of subscribers that you can mail to time and again just like the guy above does. And trust me – plenty of other affiliates also sent bucket-loads of sales my way and I wanted to show the real-life proof of one person’s results. The only reason I’ve blocked out his name is simply that I haven’t (yet) received permission to “unveil” him to you. But the results stand.

In other words no matter what niche you’re in, and whether you operate as an affiliate or you sell your own products or services, you need your own email subscriber list. Google delists you? No problems. Your Adsense account gets banned? Not an issue. Your Facebook page gets deleted? No worries. Owning your mailing list means safety, security and profits on demand.

So over the last few weeks I have knuckled down, got serious and started to make growing my own subscriber list the main priority in my business. Fortunately I have a number of high-traffic authority sites in a number of niches so the question really became how to grab as many of those passing visitors and turn them into long-term email subscribers?

But before I get to that, here’s an interesting experience I want to tell you about…

How I Increased Traffic To My Sales Letter By 9%

Whilst I focus most of my efforts on free traffic methods, I do buy a small amount of pay per click traffic for a few of my product sales sites. And here’s a funny discovery I made not so long ago… By changing the spelling of the word ebook from “eBook” to “Ebook” in my ad the response rate increased by 9% instantly. 9% more traffic for the same cost and effort – simply by changing where a capital letter was in my advert.

The point I am trying to make is that one of the most powerful techniques you can apply online is testing and tracking your advertising – or put more succintly GET SPLIT TESTING.

And this is exacty why OptIn Skin, created by Glenn Allsopp over at Viperchill, grabbed my attention. The sales page claims that not only is it super-simple to add optin forms to your WordPress blog with their built-in (yet custimizable) templates but furthermore the plugin gives you the opportunity to create a range of differebt optin boxes to split test. In doing this you will be able to scientifically increase the percantage of your visitors who actually add their details to your subscriber list. But does it work?

How To Create An Optin Form With Optin Skin

One of the things that Optin Skin does very well is make it incredibly easy indeed to add an attractive, professional-looking optin form to your site. There are 6 simple steps that can all be completed within a few minutes…

1) Select a name for your optin form

2) Select an optin skin template

3) Modify skin as necessary

4) Add your autoresponder details

5) Select positioning of your optin form

6) Publish

Yes, it really is that simple. Infact, as a test, I decided to make a short video showing how simple the whole process is and in it you’ll see me create and publish an optin form in roughly five minutes from beginning to end…

How To Split Test With Optin Skin

If you thought that creating an attractive, ete-catching optin form with Optin Skin was easy, just wait till you see how simple the split testing process is. All you need to do is to create two or more optin forms to test against each other and when it comes to the fifth step of selecting the positioning of your optin forms all you do is choose to display them all in the same position.

By doing so Optin Skin will rotate your optin forms, showing different forms to different visitors and then keeping track of the results so you can see exactly which form is getting the highest response rate from your visitors.

Even better Optin Skin offers “smart tracking” in that it will only track response rates of people who actually saw your form. So, for example, if you add your forms to the end of your content and a visitor then clicks off your site before actually getting to the bottom of the page and seeing your optin form it won’t count towards your statistics. Doing things in this way gives you are fairest and most accurate tracking of any of the various optin form plugins for WordPress.

The Strengths Of Optin Skin

Optin Skin is a very well thought-out plugin where clearly a huge amount of effort has gone into making it as powerful – yet simple to use – as possible. Just a few of my favorite features include:

Speed Of Implementation

I love the way you can create and publish an optin form in a matter of minutes – literally.

Attractive Designs

The various optin form designs that come with the plugin are, on the whole, very attractive and professional-looking. There are a few “questionable” designs in my opinion – and not enough that contain both a name and an email box (many come only with an email option) – but in general these designs are a great way to very quickly get an attractive optin form on your site.

What’s more, if you want a greater range you can always create your own using their built-in generator.

Simple Optin Form Customization

Once you’ve selected an optin form that you like the look of then modifying it to match your site is incredibly easy. You need no technical knowledge – you just select the thing you want to change and then select another option from the box. No coding, no messing around. Also, the changes that you make are updated in real time so the “preview” always shows you changes as you make them. In this way you don’t have to try and “imagine” what your form will look like but can instead make adjustments on the fly and see them change before your very eyes.

Adding Autoresponder Code Is A Doddle

Most of the optin plugins I’ve tried over the years – even the most expensive ones – ask you to copy across all sorts of details from your autoresponder and paste them into the plugin. Once added, if you’re lucky the plugin manages the “read” the code and adds it to your form. If you’re unlucky it’ll struggle and you’ll have to spend some time manually filling in all the various fields needed to make the actual form itself work.

Optin Skin is different. You need only do two things to add your autoresponder code so that your subscribers are added to the right list. Firstly, select which autoresponder you’re using (it works with Aweber, Mailchimp and GetResponse among others) and then secondly enter the unique email address of your autoresponder. That’s it. It literally took me a matter of seconds to configure my form thanks to this “couldn’t be easier” interface.

Build Your List Without Annoying Your Visitors

Optin Skin is a WordPress plugin designed to do one thing – and to do it well. The whole point of Optin Skin is to enable you to quickly place attractive optin forms anywhere on your WordPress site to enable you to build your own mailing list.

It’s important to stress that Optin Skin doesn’t create popups or header bars like some of the other more expensive optin form WordPress plugins. It only creates forms that you actually place on your main site – such as in the navigation menu or at the bottom of each article you publish.

For some people this limited feature will be an issue – the fact is that popups still work well and so you’ll likely see a higher signup rate by using them than not. On the other hand, people find popups as annoying as ever and I, for one, have stopped visiting blogs I previously frequented simply because I’m sick of the inevitable popup window on every page.

So in many ways Optin Skin tows the line well. It allows you to put optin forms on your blog or WordPress-powered website to capture as many email addresses as possible – but without annoying your visitors with popups. This is likely to be the best long-term solution for building your mailing lsit and retaining your visitors.

The Weaknesses Of Optin Skin

Whilst I freely admit that I am very impressed with Optin Skin being a perfectionist I must admit there are a few areas for improvements in my own mind. Note that these aren’t major issues and certainly shouldn’t detract from the power of this plugin – they are more “niggles” that will take an already-impressive plugin to even greater heights.

Slow-Loading Admin Panel

When you’re actually creating your optin forms the Optin Skin plugin has the unfortunate habit of loading every single one of your available forms. This means that while actually creating your optin form takes a matter of minutes, actually waiting for the form generator to load in the first place can be a little frustrating to me. It’s a small point but one I wish would be improved.

Limited Range Of Skins

Whilst the plugin comes with a range of “pre-designed” forms you can use and/or modify to your hearts content I personally would like to see a wider range of standard forms being offered. There are more than enough options to start off with, but the fussier owner may want to take some time to use the built-in features to either create a new form from scratch or at least modify the existing forms a little to fit into the general style of their blog and what they’re trying to achieve.

Optin Skin Summary

I’d be lying if I said that Optin Skin was perfect, but I do think it makes a fantastic addition to anyone’s arsenal when it comes to building a list. If you’re not yet building your own mailing list – or you’re looking for solutions that will make the job easier – then I strongly encourage you take  a closer look at the very reasonably-priced Optin Skin. You can view the full sales page here.

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