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How to Start Using ConvertKit for Complete Beginners in 2023
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May 9, 2024
Learn the basics of ConvertKit, a powerful email marketing tool, with this beginner-friendly tutorial for 2023. This video provides a comprehensive guide on getting started with ConvertKit, designed for those new to email marketing or transitioning from another platform. Discover how to create your first email campaign, set up automated sequences, and segment your subscribers for targeted messaging. You'll also explore ConvertKit's unique features, such as customizable forms, landing pages, and integrations with popular marketing tools. Whether you're a blogger, entrepreneur, or small business owner, this tutorial will help you navigate ConvertKit's interface and use its features to grow your audience and engage with your subscribers effectively. Get ready to elevate your email marketing strategy with this practical introduction to ConvertKit.
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0:00
In this ConvertKit tutorial for complete beginners, I'm going to walk you through the basics of
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how to use ConvertKit. We're going to start out from the very beginning and create a new account
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I'll walk you through all the settings and configurations so we can start to send emails
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We'll add contacts to our ConvertKit account. I'll show you how to add tags so you can segment your audience and send different emails to
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different parts of your audience. Then we'll add a form to a website so we can start to grow our email list
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And then I'll show you how to send your first marketing email. If you currently don't have a ConvertKit account, I'll put our affiliate link down below in
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the description. Let's grab a computer and create our account. Here's what it looks like at ConvertKit.com
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You can click on sign up for free in the top right hand corner. It's making sure I'm not a robot
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Let's create a new account. Okay, first step migration. Welcome. Where are you joining us from
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Do you already use an email marketing tool in your business? No, I'm just starting out. Continue
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How big is your audience? Just getting started. Tell us about this
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What is your business newsletter or brand called? Sure. I'm going to choose it for my personal brand
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ConvertKit domain. So here is the free ConvertKit domain that they're going to give me
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So JJ-Thalen. Let's just get rid of the dash and see if that works. Continue. Okay
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We just leave that for the name for now. Now choose a custom domain
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That's already done. Business name is done. What kind of creator are you
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So what do we got here? I am a YouTuber. Continue. Okay
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What do you hope to achieve? Grow my list. Send emails. I don't know if I'm selecting more than one
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Basically all of this. Well, more than just look around. Earn income. Yeah
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Send emails. Why not? Okay. There's some get started tutorials. Let's just click off of that
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So we have our ConvertKit account set up in just a couple of seconds
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Now let's go through all the settings. There's a few things you want to do here if you want to send emails
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So we're going to click on our name at the top, then click on settings
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The very first thing, let's add a profile picture. So you can do that here
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Profile picture done. My name. So the one thing, it's not going to let you send emails from a Gmail account
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So what we're going to need to do is add another email. I can log in with this email
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Not a big deal, but I'm going to show you in a second. We're going to have to change this up
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The notifications would be the next thing. So what do you want to get notifications about
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So the account summary, when someone subscribes, when someone makes a purchase, if you use
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ConvertKit to have people pay. Okay. So we can see here is there is a warning here
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So a Gmail account is a free mail address. This may negatively impact your deliverability
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So we don't recommend doing email marketing with a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, anything like that
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You're going to want to use a business email. If you don't currently have a business email, we have a whole tutorial walking you through
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how to create a Google workspace account. That's what we end up using
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I'll link to the tutorial up above as well as down below in the description. So why don't we add that here and let's just use our hello account. Okay
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So add email like so. So you're going to see either way, you're going to need to confirm the email
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Both emails are confirmed now. Then you have the default time zone and send time
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So what time would you like to send emails? Where in the world are you
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So for example, it's set for if you have an automated email sequence, it's going to send
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at 3pm Eastern. Maybe we say we prefer late morning. So 11am Eastern
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Then the one thing that's going to be important here is you have a physical address for sending
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out email. So for best practices, most email marketing softwares are not going to let you send anything
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without a physical address. So they're putting in here, ConvertKit's address. So you can use this for ConvertKit as a last resort or add in your own physical address
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And then down below this, would you like to have an unsubscribed survey so you can find
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out more information on why people are unsubscribing. Then down below you have GDPR
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So you can have don't show to anyone, show to all subscribers after they opt in
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Or you could choose show in the EU, UK and Switzerland determined by IP address
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So this is where it's going to be the most important you can show to everybody
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I'm not an expert here, you choose what works best for you
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Regardless of if you're making changes here, don't forget to save all the changes the bottom
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of the screen. Okay, then moving on, so you have domains. So with this ConvertKit will give you a ConvertKit domain that you can use
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There's a couple of things here, this particular page, you want to be a specific landing page
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or you can essentially create something like a Linktree account. So you can use it as like the link in bio for Instagram, etc
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You can have that be this or one of your landing pages that will create in either this video
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or future videos. Then you have a custom domain. So if I have JJThalen.com, I could add that here or a sub domain which would be like info.jjthalen.com
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Either way, I could add that to a custom domain here. Really really easy
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There's a knowledge base article right here that walks you through the steps and then verified sending is for larger accounts
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So I wouldn't worry about that commerce. So if you want to sell with ConvertKit, you are able to do that
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That's something that we're doing currently, but know that options available billing
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So choosing the plan that you're on, if you're on a free version or a paid plan, you're going
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to make adjustments that here team so the free version is just you the creative version
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I think it's one other person, the creator pro, I think there's more people you can add
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Then there's a few other things. So one of the nice things with ConvertKit, after you create your account, you can sign
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up for their affiliate program, recommend ConvertKit because it's awesome. Earn commissions, you can do that here
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Then you have an API key. So if you need to connect ConvertKit to any other software you're using, you're going
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to come in here and get your API key and the API key secret
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One other thing is automatically add UTM to your email links. This is nice because if someone clicks on one of the links for email, goes to your website
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they'll know that it came from email marketing, not from something else. So let's turn this on and save the changes
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All right, so that is what we need for the settings. So the first thing I'll show you is how to add a single subscriber
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If somebody emails you or whatever it is, and you want to add them individually, you
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can do that here, click on grow, then subscribers. Let's add Laura, my business partner
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And then so we only have one tag right now. So we're going to need to add the YouTube tag and then save
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Okay, so we have one subscriber already added. If there are any other fields that you'd like to have stored on ConvertKit, it's really
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really easy to add. So for example, if you're saving first name and last name, all you need to do right here
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is click on add a new field, and then give the field a name. So last name, and the field value for her update subscriber
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And now we're saving last name as well as first name for all of our subscribers
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Now really quickly, I want to show you how you can add different tags to segment your audience
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So if we scroll down further along the side here, you're going to see segments, which are groups of segments or groups of tags
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And then you have the tags right here. So we're going to create some stuff later on for the personal finance channel
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So there are two lead magnets we're going to create. So we have automate finances would be one, we're going to also create one for
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our cash spreadsheet. Okay, alright, so two new tags added. Now get back to uploading subscribers, let's upload a couple at a time
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So if you have a customer list or something that you want to upload a ConvertKit, click
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on subscribers, then click on import a CSV. Also here, you need to choose the tag form sequence you want them to be part of, let's
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say this is part of the cashback spreadsheet. And then let's drag and drop the CSV file
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It is this file right here. There we go. Okay, so it's going to pull up the header and the fields right here
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So we can see really easily the field we want to be first name, then here we have last name
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And then lastly, the email and import subscribers. Now let's go through how you can create a form and add it to your website so you can
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continue to grow your email list. To do that, click on grow landing pages and forms and click on create a form
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So there's four different options here you have inline. So that's going to be in the middle of an article at the end wherever you want to place
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it on the page modal is something that pops up. So you can choose when it pops up right away if someone is going to close the tab after
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certain amount of time you can adjust that here slide in so similar but in the bottom
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right hand corner and then sticky bar along the top. Let's choose inline then they have all these different templates, you can choose the one
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that's going to look the best on your website. I'm going to go with just a simple one without an image today, the mills template
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One thing I like to do is give anything a name. So when you have a bunch of forms and landing pages, you know which one is where tutorial
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form for website. So we can do that. And then this is just really, really easy to edit
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So just click on anything you want to change. So this is going to be for automating finances, automate your money
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And then we're going to say free seven day, seven day email course
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And then the thing is here, we're only collecting the email address right now, if we want to
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collect anything else, you can hit the plus right here. And usually we have this is going to be first name and usually ask for first name then email
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we can change the order then for this field, what we want to do is select the custom field
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first name, and we're good to go with that. The other thing that I want to do here is maybe I want this text to be cap lock, subscribe
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And then the other thing, this isn't the color for greater than enough. So now we have the design how we want it
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The next thing we want to figure out is what's going to happen after somebody signs up. And then we'll add the form to our website
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To do that, click on settings. The first thing is to tell ConvertKit what happens after someone signs up, you can show
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a small confirmation message within the form that's on the page, you can redirect to an
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external page, you can add a thank you page, let's just leave this for now
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The next thing I want to do is the incentive email. So we normally do is when someone signs up, we're going to have them confirm their email
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And that's what this does. And you can also use it to deliver a freebie lead magnet, whatever it is someone might
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receive for signing up to your list. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do here is change the from email, then I would
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maybe not have important to start off, I would say confirm your subscription and start
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automating your finances. Something like that. Good to have you, Jeff. Again, let's change this color
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There we go. And good to go. So if this were a page we wanted to send somebody to, this may be the first day of the training
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let's say if it were a document, you can upload it here. Or it could just be to send someone to a thank you page and hey, thanks for signing up, you're
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going to get day one of the course. And then that's what you would set up through the automated sequences
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If we're good with this, then click on Save. The next thing we want to do is to save and publish
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Now let me show you what to do to add this to a website. So you have JavaScript, HTML, share WordPress, Unbounce
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Let's take the HTML, we're going to copy all this in the top right hand corner
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Now let's go to our blog and insert the form. So let's say we want to add it to our high yield savings account article down at the
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very bottom. So we're going to do here is click on plus, then we want an HTML card as it's called
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And then all we need to do is paste all this mumbo jumbo, you don't need to understand
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what it means, you just need to add to your website. And if we just click on Update, and then we can view the post, scroll to the bottom
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And here is the form that we created. Now that we have a couple of contacts within ConvertKit, and hopefully we're starting to
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grow our email list from forms on our website, the next thing to do would be to send a first
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email to do that you want to click on Send broadcast. So here on the broadcast tab, you'll be able to see all the previous emails you sent the
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open rate, click through rate, things like that. But we're going to do right now is to create a new one
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So here there are a bunch of templates to choose from what we normally end up doing
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is try to create an email as if you were sending a message to your friend. So if you're sending an email to a friend, it probably not designed like this, it's probably
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basically text, maybe an image, maybe add a button or something like that, but primarily text
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So this is what we're going to use for today. But choose something else if you would like
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So the first thing is to choose a subject line, start investing
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So the one thing with a subject line, you can do an A B test
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And so we could say how to start investing, something like that, the thing is going to
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send a small percent of your audience, option A, another small percent option B, the one
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that gets open more, it's going to send to the rest of your audience. So that is an option that you can test out as well
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The next thing is we're going to fill out all the content. One of the nice things you can do here is if you go to the plus here and go to personalization
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you can add the subscribers first name like I just did, then we would write out whatever
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message bullet points, images, things like that that you want to add
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Here's the new video. Hope you like it. So what we can do here is we can add a link to the YouTube video
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If someone were to click on this, you can add a tag
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So you could say, hey, if someone clicks on this, then I know that they want to automate
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their finances, let's say. So that tag will be added to any subscriber who clicks on this video
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The other thing is if we wanted to add, say, the thumbnail of the YouTube video, we can
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do that right here. So let's drag and drop the video thumbnail like so
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And that's probably a little bit big. So what we want to do is adjust the size
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So if we say something like 400, that works. Do we want it centered
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Maybe left align looks a little bit better. Also with images, you can make them links
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So here we can add the same URL if we wanted to. If that looks good to you, then what we want to do is just click on continue
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Then from here, it's going to let you preview it. So I can preview it here
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You again can change the from address, whichever ones you have registered with ConvertKit and confirmed
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And then we want to do is choose who you're going to send this to. So for example, if you have a couple of different kind of sub audiences within ConvertKit, maybe
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this is the message for everybody. Or if you want to send something just to students of your online course, you could choose students
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or whatever tag you happen to have. But in this case, we're gonna send something all subscribers down below, you can choose
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to send now. Or you could schedule it like so the preview text
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So for example, if you're in Gmail and other tools, it'll show you the first couple lines
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of the email or you can choose to add specific text that's going to show up
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So I'll have this subject then I'll have this preview text as opposed to whatever the first
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couple of words are of the email. It's just kind of personal preference depend on how you're starting off the email
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Maybe it's better to write up to 150 characters right here. And then you can have a public feed of the message you're sending out if you'd like
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If you check the preview, you have the right audience, everything's good to go
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Let's click on Continue. Again, it's gonna show it to you one more time
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And then click on Send broadcast. And there we go. Three fans received this email
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So that's the basics of how to use ConvertKit. Now if you want to create a landing page with ConvertKit, check out the video up above
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Or if you want to learn how to create an automated email sequence, check out the video down below
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Hope to see you in another video.
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