Create a Newsletter Website Step by Step! (Beehiiv Tutorial)

So, the Milk Road is an extremely popular email newsletter. And as an email newsletter, the product is the actual email. So, people subscribe to the email list, then they send out emails on a weekly basis, and they have sponsorships and promote products as an affiliate. Running an email newsletter is very profitable. And with a platform like Beehive, you can create your own email newsletter websites.

What's up, everybody? My name is David. I hope you're having a great day. And in my Beehive tutorial video, I'm going to walk you through step one to step done on everything that you need to know to get started with this platform. I'm going to show you how to create your very own email newsletter website that you can drive traffic to from various social media platforms to convert people into subscribers or paid subscribers. Then grow your email newsletter and turn this side hustle maybe into even a full-time business. I'm going to cover everything that you need to know to get started. I'm going to show you how to set up Beehive, how to design your website, how to set a custom domain name, all the different settings on the backend that you need to know and understand to create a very effective email newsletter.

So, if you're ready to get started, make sure to check the links in the description for timestamps and resources mentioned in this video. So, let's begin.

In this tutorial video, I'm going to show you how to create this type of website with Beehive. I'm going to show you how to edit and adjust your offer section with good copy and a nice big subscribe button. How to add in different sections to your website. Add in feature images for your blog posts. Edit and adjust the footer. Change the colors of your website. Add in a logo. Build out a menu item. Have a drop-down over here. How to edit and create this dedicated subscribe page and how to customize it. Also show you how to write blog posts with Beehive and how to email your list. They'll also show you various ways to capture emails like having this pop-up appear on your blog posts or having a gatekeeping box that protects the content where people have to subscribe to get access to the rest of the content. And finally, I'll cover different automations that you can set up on the backend because Beehive provides automations and segmentation for email marketing purposes, and it's quite powerful.

Anyways, let's get started. Welcome to my laptop. Let's begin.

So, step one with creating an email newsletter website with Beehive. Well, we have to get a custom domain name. And for that, I highly suggest NameCheep. They have the best prices, lowest renewal rates, and also Beehive has software on the backend called Entry that integrates really well with NameCheep just to set up all your name servers. So, you can connect your NameCheep account and your domain name here with your BHB account so you can have a nice custom domain name.

Anyways, let's get started. How to register a domain name. Very simple. Just type in the domain name that you want to register right here where it says register domain name to start. Then go ahead and click on search. Okay, so NameCheep will tell you whether or not your domain name is available. If it is, you can just click on the add to cart button. If it's not, you click up top here and try a different word combination. If this is your first website, I highly suggest getting a .com. Anyways, when you're ready to proceed, click on add to cart. Once you do that, you'll be presented with a bunch of upsells right here. You can just go ahead and ignore all this and click on the red checkout button. Boom. There we go. So now we're ready to go. So all we have to do is confirm our order. So you have your domain name registration right here. You can register your domain name for up to 10 years in advance. That's really helpful because you can lock in the low prices right now because domain name registration prices do increase over time. So you can lock in a nice low rate, low rate now if you want. You also get domain name privacy included within your purchase. And domain name privacy is very important because it keeps your personal information private because you do have to submit accurate information when you register a domain like your name, email, address, and so forth. Anyways, when you're ready to proceed, click on confirm order. Then you'll be prompted to create an account or to log into your NameCheep account. So once you create an account or log into your account, then just submit payment and it's as simple as that. So we have our domain name registration right down there. Free domain name privacy. Then you can pay with whatever payment process you want, either a credit card or PayPal.

Welcome to beehive.com. So this is the platform we're going to be using to build our newsletter website. So Beehive is the newsletter platform built for growth. Now the homepage over here is a sales page for like why you'd want to use Beehive and just emphasize the different features that you have access to. If you navigate up top here for the platform, you see that there's newsletters, there's a website builder on the back, and you have access to an ad network. Then you have a bunch of different other features like the editor for the content and customization. Beehive AI which helps you generate content. Then growth over here, Boost, which is like their promotional program where you can promote your newsletter and other people's newsletters and vice versa, referral program, subscribe forms, pop-ups, just marketing things that you need in order to grow your email newsletter. Then obviously data, you need access to data like analytics and A/B testing so you can figure out what is working. Then various ways to earn money that are built into the platform. The most interesting for me is the ad network because typically with an email newsletter website, you'll have your just your own email list and you have to manage your own promotions and advertising yourself. Well, the ad network allows you just to make money without you having to do anything. So, it's quite nice. And obviously, you have paid subscriptions, boosts, and direct sponsorships.

All right. So, anyways, let's click on pricing. Like, how much does this all cost? Let's click over here. And right now we have Launch, Scale, Max, and Enterprise. So you're going to be looking at pri at primarily Launch and Scale. So what's the difference between these two? Besides Scale being a monthly fee, it is actually worth it in my opinion because you get email automations, you get access to the referral program, you get Beehive AI, you get access to webhooks, and access to live support. Whereas the Launch is great because you can have up to 250,000 subscribers completely for free with no commitment. But again, the thing that the Launch plan is missing is email automations. That's a big thing right there because when people subscribe to your email list, you can set up a year-long automation where people just get emails every day, every other day, whatever you want. So, it's quite powerful. But again, I know a lot of you want to start for free. So, I'm actually going to be using the Scale tier in this tutorial. Okay, you can get started with the Scale tier with a 30-day trial. There is no credit card needed to follow along with this. So, you can click on Scale, set up your account, and you're not required to pay anything. You get 30 days to try out Scale and follow along. Again, if you don't care about automations or the referral program or Beehive AI or any of these other additional features over here, then you could follow along with Launch. Uh, also, you only get 1,000 subscribers on Scale, but again, Scale is really built to monetize your audience quite effectively.

Anyways, I'm going to click on get started with Scale. And once you click on that button, you'll be presented with this signup plan. So, let's get started with Scale. Onetime phone verification SMS is required. So, you will have to input your phone number, but you'll need to input your first name, last name, email, password, and then you're good to go. Okay. So, what's your experience with newsletters? Experienced, beginner, curious. Put in, whatever you want. Now, it's time to create your publication. So, you just have to input a newsletter name, a subdomain, what's your newsletter about, and how often do you plan to publish? None of this is really that important. You can always change everything later. You do want to come up with a branded email newsletter name. If you don't have one now, that's fine. Just input your name, newsletter, whatever you want to do. And the subdomain you can change to whatever you want. But again, that's not important because we are going to be setting up a custom domain name in this tutorial. So just input the newsletter name as needed. So I'm going to go with Expat Weekly. Okay. So let's go ahead and change the subdomain. Put in expat right there. And what's your newsletter about? And then you have to put in three tags at a minimum if you want. So I'm just going to have one for now. And then how often do you plan to publish? We'll say weekly, daily, whatever you want. Click on continue. And then how did you hear about Beehive? So put in whatever you want. And then what are your goals with Beehive? So you can skip this or click continue, whatever you want to do. And then you can start your 30-day free trial and you get all features except access to the ad network, paid subscription, and Boost. So, if you want to go ahead and just pay for that right now, you can get access to everything. Anyways, whenever you're ready to upgrade your account, you can go ahead and do exactly that by inputting your credit card information.

Welcome to your Beehive dashboard. So, once you go through that quick onboarding process, this is what Beehive looks like. So, it gives you a step-by-step process to follow along with if you want. Pretty self-explanatory. Start your publication, finish your publication settings, customize your newsletter, so on and so forth. Now, the first thing that we're going to be doing is setting up a custom domain. So, right now I have expat-newsletter-b363, a weird subdomain of beehive.com. We want a custom domain. So, let's get that set up and get that out of the way so we can get going with everything else. Now, how exactly do you get started with setting up a custom domain name? It's very simple with Beehive. So, you want to click over here for your settings and then you want to click on domains right here. Okay, so it goes info, emails, content, import, subscribers, export data, domains. Go ahead and click on that right there. And now you can connect an existing website domain. So, add a custom website domain through Entry DNS. What's Entry? Entry is just software that automatically sets everything up between your domain name registrar and Beehive. Okay, so that's all that it is. It's very convenient, quick, and easy. I really like Entry because then you don't have to copy and paste in a bunch of DNS records.

Anyways, go ahead and click on set up custom domains. Okay, so now it says web domain. In order to link a custom domain name, we have to verify that you actually own the domain name, obviously, and add the domain name below to start the process. We recommend that you use a subdomain. Now, this is where a lot of people get thrown off because they're like, "A subdomain? You mean I have to use newsletter.website.com?" Like, no. A subdomain would be like www.yourwebsite.com. www.website.com. The www is technically a subdomain. So, it's totally fine to use that. So, click over here to enable a new subdomain and put in the subdomain that you want to use. So, I have www.website.com. website.com. There we go. Now, it says redirect web domain over here. We recommend that you redirect your root domain to your website subdomain. So, this would be done automatically by setting up the DNS records on the backend. So, there's nothing else you have to do. I know it's a little bit confusing because it says no redirect there. You think like, do I click on this one, redirect your root domain to your Beehive? No. So it'd be like redirecting your root domain to your Beehive website would be if I wanted to redirect like website.com to the long subdomain on beehive.com, which we don't want to do. Redirect to something else, which we don't want to do. So just leave it as no redirect right there. Let's click on next.

Okay. So now it says enable a new domain or subdomain for email. You're like, what are we talking about now? Okay. So your website's going to be sending out emails. So, what Beehive is recommending you do is set up a custom subdomain for strictly sending out emails. And I do recommend doing that if you're going to be using Beehive. Uh, the reason you'd want to do this, it just helps separate your emails that are being sent out via your newsletter to other emails if like you're using Google Workspace and so forth, just because it helps se separate the domain name reputation and it protects the subdomain just in case your newsletter gets flagged as spam or anything like that. So again, this is your call. It's not a big deal. If you want to click on enable the same domain. So if you want to use like hello@yoursite.com, you can do that or you can set up a new subdomain. I'm going to set up a new subdomain. There we go. So we have the email domain expat.davidutorial.com. Now you can also set up a completely different domain if you want to use something just for strictly emails as well. So your email newsletter is like website.com, but emails are being sent from example.com. You can do that too if you want, whatever. Totally up to you. Anyways, I'm going to use this subdomain. So let's go ahead and click on next.

So now we have this red box, this like warning, connecting this domain will overwrite your website on another provider. All right. So what's what are we talking about here? So, say you're using a domain name for like Wix or Squarespace and you have your name server set up for all that stuff and your DNS records set up for all that. By following this will overwrite all of that. Now, if you just registered a domain name at NameCheep, you're using just basic DNS settings from NameCheep. So, there's nothing really to worry about here. Okay. So, this is just giving you a quick warning that this is going to overwrite anything if you have a domain name set up with another provider like a web host like Blue Host or Hostinger or Wix, Squarespace, that type of thing. All right. Over here we have web domain, email domain. Looks good. Let's click on finish setup.

Fantastic. So now we can set up with Entry right here or you can set up manually. I really don't recommend setting up manually. I'm pretty technical and I normally set up manually with newsletter type stuff. It's there's just a bunch of different email records on the DNS side of things. It's just a little bit annoying and confusing. I definitely recommend using setup with Entry. So, let's go ahead and click on proceed with verification. All right. And all you have to do is click on continue. It'll go through a quick process to analyze the domain name. And it's detecting that that domain name is registered at NameCheep, which is correct. All you have to do is log in with your NameCheep details, your account information that you use to log into NameCheep for onetime permission to connect the domain name. Okay. So, that should take about a minute and it will send you an email verification code. So just get that verification code and enter it in. We detected the existing records at the .com. CNAME, host name, value name. Please confirm that you'd like to update these records. Absolutely. Click on okay. Continue. Fantastic. So it just says our website.com is now properly configured. It does say changes can take up to 48 hours. Full propagation does take probably a day or two, but your custom domain will begin. your custom domain name will begin uh being active maybe like in 30 minutes to one hour. It really doesn't take that long. Anyways, when you're ready, just click on done. And there we go. So, verify domain names. We have the web right there. Entry verification in progress. And we have the email Entry verification in process.

All right. So, it's been about 30 minutes and the website is live over here as we can see. So it says web live and then the custom domain name is correctly set up. It's really that simple with Beehive. Now if we open this in a new tab, we can see our website is right here with a custom domain name. So I'm quite happy. Now if we click into the domain name, you'll see that it is the subdomain w.eit.com. Now if I go back to the naked domain, it should redirect appropriately. Yep, there we go. So it all redirects as expected. So looks good. Everything's working on the backend. Now, if you're just curious as to like, well, what exactly did we do? Like, all right, so let's jump over here to our domain. And this is with NameCheep. And when you do the automated process to set up your CNAME records and whatnot based on your DNS settings, this is all that happens. You have your advanced DNS settings right there. And then all the software did was automatically add in the CNAME records right here on your behalf as well as set up a TXT record for the uh specific mail settings you have there. So everything is good to go.

Setting up a DMARC record for your website. So we have to set up a DMARC record. It's not too complicated. I know you're like, are we done yet with this emails? Like we got to do a bunch of things on the backend because we're going to be sending out emails via an email newsletter. Now your domain doesn't have a DMARC record. This can impact deliverability. What's a DMARC record? It's just a record that you put in your DNS uh file for your domain name. It helps protect the domain name from phishing and spoofing attacks. It is actually quite important. So, we do want to do this. So, let's just get this out of the way. Navigate down here. Blah blah blah. Doesn't have a DMARC record. Okay. Click on learn more. Once you click on learn more, you'll get this little support article. But what I like about this support article is that it comes with a little handy wizard right here. So use our DMARC wizard to create your DMARC record. Fantastic. So let's go ahead and do exactly that. Input our domain name right there. Click on next. Okay. So define how strict you want your policy to be. Personally, I would just kind of leave it none. That's quite sufficient. Even Beehive is recommending none. So just keep it as none. And click on next and decide where to send these reports. So honestly, you do want to set up just a throwaway domain name and put it in right here. And let's go ahead and finish record. Fantastic. So your completed DMARC record is right here. So all we have to do is take this and input it into NameCheep. And the record type is it that it's a TXT record and the target is DMARC. So now that we have our DMARC record, all we have to do is input it into NameCheep. Now Beehive does have a quick little step-by-step written tutorial right here on what to do, but you got me. So, I'm just going to tell you what to do very quick and easily. So, you want to navigate to NameCheep, log in, go to your domain name, click on manage, and then you want to find where it says advanced DNS. And this works for any domain name registrar. You just got to go to wherever you can put in your DNS information. And right down here, we have a bunch of records. We need to add in a new record. So, go ahead and do that. Let's click on add new record and just follow it step by step. So, it's a TXT record right there. So, let's navigate down here and find where it says text. There we go. The host name is DMARC. Take that and put it right to there. And then the value is right here. So, we'll take this, copy that, and put it with the value. And we can leave this automatic. You can change the TTL as well, but with NameCheep, it's about 30 minutes. With automatic, don't even worry. It's a little bit technical. Automatic is totally fine as long as you're not going to be changing the DMARC record anytime soon, which I don't think you are. So, just leave it as is. Click on the little green check mark. And there you go. It's as simple as that.

Finishing up your publication settings. So, we got all the techy stuff on the backend pretty much done with regards to setting a custom domain name and setting up all the little details for our email. So, we're good to go. Now, I want you to navigate over here to settings, and we're going to go under the general info tab. Now, over here, we're going to add in a publication name and a publication online description. So, name is what you inputted as you were setting up your website. You can change it at any time, but I just want to let you know that this is the title of your site and this will be picked up as the title of your website. So, if I take a look at Superhuman AI over here, it's a very popular Beehive Newsletter. This is the SEO title that is being picked up from right here. So that's why it's important. So you want to give it a good name, a little bit keyword-rich, and something that's a little bit catchy. So anyways, I came up with this right there, Expat Insider Newsletter, number one expert guide for Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali. So we'll take that and I'll input that right to there. Or we'll say Expat Expat Weekly. There we go. Expat Weekly number one guide for blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. Online description. This is quite important because this is your functionally your call to action. This is in your offer section. This is directing people to subscribe to your email newsletter. So if you take a look over here with Superhuman AI's website right there, this section is powered by this section right there. So it is important. You don't want just a oneline description. You want something that's good copy and compelling. So anyways, I got this right here. Discover the latest expat news. Explore must-know, must-know tips for living in Thailand, Bali, and so forth. Let me input that right there. Boom. There we go. So that looks good. So join. Maybe not 1 million, but join. We'll just say join. I don't know, whatever. 7,000 plus readers thriving abroad with the Expat Insider weekly newsletter. There we go. Something like that or the Expat Weekly newsletter. Okay. So anyways, so just take care of that, the publication and your publication name.

Now right down here is you have your publication logo. So you had an onboarding process. We upload a logo right here. You can upload whatever image you want. So I already went ahead and used Canva to come up with two quick graphics. So I have the Expat Weekly right here. This is 800 by 800. The reason it's 800 by 800 is because literally Beehive is telling you to do that. So, let's click over here and I'm going to go ahead and upload that. And then the default thumbnail preview. Now, again, Beehive does a horrible job of explaining what this is. This will be the thumbnail that appears across your publication posts and previews in web browsers. Like, what? Like, what exactly does that mean? So, it's really functionally the catch-all image. Like if a piece of content like a blog post doesn't have an image, it's going to display this image. If someone shares the homepage of your website, it's going to display this image. That's why it's important. So for example, if I take Superhuman, just take any piece of content they wrote right here. Let's go ahead and take this. Let me bounce over here. Let's go over here to X. Let me go ahead and post that. Not gonna post it, but just show you a quick example. There we go. And see how it takes the image right there from the blog post. But if you back out of this and just share the URL. There we go. So this image right here is this image right here. That's why it's important. So you do want to come take the time to come up with something that kind of matches your publication logo for branding purposes. Okay. So anyways, let me click over there and click over here for Expat Weekly. Upload that. Great. So the thumbnail is saved.

Now we have publication tags. Choose up to three tags to describe your publication. Okay. So right now I have two tags that I added in, travel and immigration, because that makes sense for what this theoretical publication would be about. But again, you just click over here to continue adding in. You can add up to three. Default language English, that's fine. Default time zone, that's fine. Subscribe button. You can customize the subscribe button right here. Join now. Something like that is probably a little bit better. Okay. So we navigate down here. We have content access, private publication, require subscriber approval, just a bunch of like little technical details that you can set up over here if you want. So if you want to make your website private, you can do that right here. Require subscriber approval, you can do that here. By default, this is off because you just want people to subscribe typically. But if you want to make it a little bit more private, you can totally do that. Then you have your UTM analytics over here. Uh, and really that's it.

So now let's navigate over here to emails. And now once we're over here with emails, you can just set up details over here. So you have use post, author's name, at sender name. So it's really up to what how you structure your email. Is your email newsletter a branded email where people are getting they want to subscribe and get email updates from like Expat Daily or are they subscribing to you as a person because they like you and they want to hear from you? They're subscribing to you as a person, David, but David writes this newsletter. That's probably better to go as your author's name. But if it's more of just a branded email newsletter, then just keep it as is. Anyways, this is who subscribers will see the email is from in their inbox. Typically, the name of your newsletter or the author. There should not be an email address. Obviously, I don't know why people do this. Still some people do this to this day like contact@. No, it should be David or your the name of your newsletter. So there you go. And it's going to be from the email that we set up right here previously. So I have hi@expat.davidutorial.com. Then reply to address. So if someone replies to the email, where does that email go? So by default it's set up to the account we have set up with Beehive. But if you want to change it to something else, then you can just set that up over here. So replies will be all to all emails will be sent to this address. You can set it up to where you want. So if you want replies to be sent back over here, right here, you just input that right there. Boom. Keep it simple. So uh this change requires verification. Please check your inbox for verification email to confirm the change. So you do have if you are going to change it, then you have to confirm that you have access to this email.

Anyways, so there we go. And so now we have the footer, email footer details right down there. So I would leave it as is. Looks good over here. Then preset emails. You can also configure a welcome email right here. So you do want to set this up, enable a welcome email that's sent to new subscribers. Now again, depending on the plan with Beehive, if you have access to automations and you can set up a nice long, lengthy email automation for new subscribers where they get emails every week automatically, whatever you want to do. It could be one week, it could be one year, whatever. If you don't have access to that, but you still can set up a welcome email, which is very, very important. So, let's click over here to configure welcome email. And over here to begin writing, you click over here to write. Then you have access right there to type uh and begin writing. So, you click over here for the plus sign. You have bulleted list, numbered list, button, image, and so forth. And again, really, it's pretty self-explanatory. Nothing too crazy going on over here. Like, "Hey, thanks for signing up and so forth." So, you want to just create a again, welcome email. So, what's a quick example of that? So, right over here, this is like a quick welcome email that I personally set up for my own personal blog. And so, it's like, cool, you're in. Thanks for subscribing. Really the point of a thing, a welcome email is either a to either set up an upsell, like offer a product or service at a discount, or b, just tell people thanks for signing up and just tell them what happens next. So, check your email, I send a newsletter once a week, and I have access to this thing that you signed up for. How to access your account, just really quick and simple. You can do something similar if you want over here. Okay. So that's what a welcome email is. So, just welcome people, thank them for signing up, direct them to your best-in-class content on the site, set expectations like how much they're going to be sending out, like once a week. Check your spam folder. That kind of stuff is what you want to include over here. So, let me back out of this. Okay. So, anyways, that's the configure welcome email. So, you want to do that. You want to take time and set that up.

Now, you also can set up double opt-in email. So, requiring new subscribers to confirm their email address before adding them to your list. That's quite useful. One, it protects your domain name reputation uh for just email purposes. And two, it does tend to make the list a little bit better and more responsive because people actually have to confirm that they want to be on the list. So, it's quite useful. So, if you want to turn that on, you can turn that on right there and then view opt-in email over here. So, this is the email opt-in confirmation that people will get when they subscribe. So, "Thanks for interest in Expat Weekly. To start receiving newsletter, confirm your email address." Personally, out of the box, I think it's pretty good. Maybe change like "Thanks for interest" like, "Hey, thanks for signing up to Expat Weekly. We want to send you helpful content about XYZ123 thing." But before we can do that, you just need to click the big button to confirm that you actually want to be getting emails from us. Just write it in a personal and engaging way. Okay? It's all you need to do. Now, you do have access to an AI writing tool within Beehive, depending on your tier, and personally, it's okay. I mean, I think other tools are better, but if you want to access it, you click over here for the plus sign, and then you just click over here for AI writer and then describe what you want them to write about. So, write, click on the plus sign. Let's do that again. Write an email for confirmation for new subscribers. All right. Then generate text. See what it comes up with. Okay. So, "Thanks you for subscribing. We're thrilled to have you join our community. As a subscriber, you receive the latest updates and this and that." Any questions are see like it's okay. I think there's other tools that do a much better job. But if you want to use this tool, uh, you have access to it. Click on insert. There it is. You can play around with it. But again, eh, you know, it's not really telling the end user to confirm. Like that's what I wanted to do. Like tell the user to confirm, not just welcome aboard. Like what do you want them to do? They get an email, then they have to click a button. Got to tell people what to do. So click on the confirm subscription button and so forth. Uh, I would leave the subject line as is. Looks good right there. And the confirm subscription button right there looks good. So just again, write this yourself. Nice personal touch.

Setting up a thank you page for your website. Now let's navigate down just a little bit. So we are in the settings and we're in the email tab right there. So I just showed you how to set up a double opt-in email. So when people subscribe, they're sent an email saying, "Hey, confirm your subscription." When they click on confirm subscription, then they get this first email, the welcome email sent to their inbox. But in addition to that, because they're clicking a button in their email client that says confirm subscription, etc. You can direct people to somewhere. So that's what you can do with this opt-in redirect URL. So by default, people will just click on confirm subscription, then they'll be directed to the uh homepage of your websites. And if you're okay with that, then just leave this blank. But if you want to set up a custom page where maybe like a onetime offer or a dedicated thank you page and hey, thanks for subscribing. Here's this guide, that guide, here's a coupon code, whatever. You could set up something like that. So, the usefulness of this is to set up either a a one-time offer. So, offer a generous discount on a course or digital download, a product, service, whatever, or list out your best-in-class content, whatever. Just direct people to something. Now, you are going to need a page on your site. So, you have to actually create that page. So, let's navigate back out of here. And we have to go down here to where it says design. Click on that. Then you want to navigate over there to where it says the website builder. Open up that. Now, it's not that intuitive. You actually have to click up top here and go to custom pages. And now we have our custom pages over here. And we want to create an internal page. External pages are like if we want to link out to something. We want to create an internal page. So, click on that. And we want to add it to our website, but we want this to be a standalone page. We don't want that to be part of the menu item or anything like that. Now, the title over there should be "Thank you for subscribing." Makes sense. And then we can create like a dash thank you, like thank you. There you go. SEO title and SEO description. Honestly, for this specific page, it's not important at all because we're not trying to rank and index this page. So, I'd keep it simple. It's up to you if you want to enter in an SEO title. I personally wouldn't because it's not that important.

Now, you need to actually create the thank you page. So, there's a ton of examples that you could kind of model after if you want to build out a thank you page. I'm going to keep it simple. I'm just going to say "Thank you for thank you for subscribing." And because this is the title of this, we want to create that into an H1 title tag. Then, we want to go ahead and center this. There we go. And then we want just some text over here. So we click on that and we'll ask the AI writer. So write, let's do that again. Write, write a thank you page for new. Write a thank you page for new subscribers. Let's go ahead and generate text. And all right, that looks good. So we'll go ahead and click on insert. Maybe break it up a bit so it's not a wall of text. We'll have that "Welcome aboard" right there. Maybe I'll go ahead and bold that. This is the title. We want this to be bolded to actually. There we go. And then maybe a button would make sense. So click over here, click on button. And then maybe share the newsletter and go ahead and center that. There we go. So just keep it simple like this. Again, your thank you page. Build it out how you see fit. I'm just doing this as an example. Let's go ahead and click on create page. Click on create page. There we go. All right. So, let's go ahead and view the page that we just made. And now we have website.com/thank. Great. So, we can take this URL over here and then navigate back to where we were. Click on settings. Go back to our emails. Navigate down here. Opt-in redirect. Right there. Click on that and there we go. Okay. So now we have the opt-in redirect all set up. Now when we're over here, people on people are on our site and they go ahead and subscribe. Then click on that. Then uh they should get a prompt to become a subscriber. So let me do that again. Actually, I did subscribe to this a few times. So that's why it has that rate limit. There we go. Okay. "Please check your email blah blah blah." There we go. Okay. So, let's go ahead and check the email. And there we go. So, we have "Confirm your Expat Weekly subscription" right there. And looks good. Let's click on the confirm subscription. And then it's automatically directed directing me to this thank you page right here. So, all in all, working as expected.

Anyways, that's how you set up an opt-in redirect URL.

Writing blog posts and sending out emails with your Beehive newsletter website. So the core function of this platform is to email your list. So how exactly do you do that? The way it works is that you write a blog post and then when you're ready to publish the blog post, you can either choose to publish it on your website or send it out to your list or do both. Publish it both on your website and send it out to your list. All right. So how does this work exactly? Now, if we navigate under here to where it says posts, we have a bunch of draft posts. So, any all your drafts will be over here as well as anything you published. And you can just begin writing a new post by clicking on the start writing right there. You can manage your content tags right there. Content tags are like categories. And if you click this little dropdown, you can also use a template or blank draft. By default, if you click on start writing, it's just going to use a blank draft. If you click the plus sign that says start writing, it actually doesn't take you to start writing. It directs you to the templates. So, I don't know why it does that. Doesn't that doesn't make any sense to me, but your templates are over here. And I'm not crazy about the templates personally because they come with a bunch of preformatted content that you have to like delete and copy and paste everything in. So, if you want to keep it totally fine. I mean, I'd probably just edit and adjust. Like I'd click into this like the featured interview template over here and maybe you like the way this template is laid out. Looks nice. We click over here for the style to actually see how this email works. Then you can customize this to your liking. So you can change the black to a different color. Instead of this like cream-colored background, you can change something else. Little details like that.

Anyways, let me click over here for posts. Let's jump into a blog post just to show you how this works. All right. So I have over here travel in Saigon. So we'll just use this as a temp post. So the new post is called "A City of Chaos and Charm" over here. And we need a subtitle. And right over here we'll take this and make that take that and make that the subtitle right there. Boom. Pop that in right there. And then we'll just take this whole thing over here, copy and paste this in. And then here's our piece of content. Okay. So, we have a functional blog post over here. So, a few things that you can do. Number one, you can add in a thumbnail. So, click on thumbnail. You click on upload new image and then select the image. Now, the image should be 1200 by 630 across the site. And like I said in the very beginning, if you don't add in a thumbnail and you publish this to your site, it's going to use that catch-all image. So just be aware of that. So we'll add in an image right here. This looks good. So with the blog post right there. Now with the actual blog post, like what can you do? This is your H1 title tag right there. You can add a content tag if you want. And the most important blocks in my opinion to be aware of, click the plus sign that you'll find helpful would be number one, you can have the content break. And so that forms a nice little line. So you could do that with like each little section right here. Add in a content break and so forth. So let me do that again. Content break. And so you kind of can break it up so it's a little bit more easy to read and easy on the eye, so to speak. And let me navigate back up top there. Let's click on the plus sign. You can also have a subscriber break, which is quite useful. So I click over here. What the subscriber break does is that if this is going to be live on your site, maybe you don't want to show the whole thing, you want to prompt people to become an email subscriber. So you can do exactly that. So the subscriber break over here, only for website view. That means when people are on your site, they'll be able to read up to this paragraph right there. Then there's going to be a box telling people, hey, you need to become a free subscriber to get full access to the content. So you set that up as well. And so, you know, you can edit and adjust that as you like. Let's click over here for the plus sign. Then you just have standard stuff. Bullet list, numbered list, button, table, code block, image, block quote, columns, and so forth. And file attachments, your different headings. You can embed different social media links right there and have dynamic footnotes. And when you have premium, you can add in advertisements, referral program, and so forth. But primarily what you're going to be using is the basics up top here when you're writing a piece of content. So again, nothing too fancy. So that's how it functionally works.

If you click over here for style, you have your basic tab right there. So you can change the color. So outside background, maybe I want to have this be a nice like sky blue or not sky blue, but maybe make that a little bit less easier on the eyes. There we go. Have that right there. Post background is white, which I want maybe or maybe I don't want. Maybe I want it to be like a slightly gray so it's a little bit easier to read. Can change that. There we go. Text on background is this primary right there. Sets the background colors for email footer and all social links right there. You can change the footer link down there if you want with this. Uh, text on primary, same thing, secondary right there. So text on primary is like defines text for colors like email header title, subline, subtitle, byline. The secondary is controls colors for horizontal content breaks, email footer top border, all that. Right down here you can change the typography. So you can for everything for your headings and your paragraph text. So if you don't like Trebuchet over there, I can change that to maybe Lato right there. Change that up top there. So I think that looks better. Just little things like that. Spacing, you can adjust the spacing and the line height over here with the margin and the padding. And same with your borders right there.

If we click over here for the advanced, you have colors, margin, padding, radius, and border. So right here with the advanced right now with the background, I have the color right there. Canvas color. Post is the light gray. Post border. And so right now it's white, but if I want to have the post border be black, then I could give this whole thing a nice border if I want. So right now the border is not activated. So if I click over here for borders, we'll click on one and let that click in. There we go. So now we have a nice black background. So it's like a two-step process right here. The colors control the color of the border. Border over here, you actually have to activate it and turn it on. Not too complicated, guys. And then you

Have your margin over there. So that controls the padding of the email, and padding controls, uh, padding obviously. So you can have more detail control right there. Same with the corner radius, if you want to be like more rounded over there or less rounded. Just little details like that. Nothing crazy.

Your email header over here. So you can have your title, change the font family, subtitle, image. So, if you want there to be an image within the email because you added an image to the blog post, but it's not going to show up here. If you want the image to be displayed within the email, then you have to actually click over here to upload it. So, I can click on this one. I just had it right there. And then it will add this to the top of the email. So, just to let you know with that right there.

Then the byline over here. Nothing, nothing fancy. Show byline, don't show byline. Date. Show date, uh, however you want. Long, long, or no, short, none. Turn the date off if you want over there.

Then you have the body right there. And then different, uh, aspects you can change with the font family, font weight, font size for your text, H1, H2, H3, and so forth. Title, tags, and then the widgets over here. So if you have like images, buttons, you can change the color and look and feel of things within the email right there.

And then the email footer right there. Uh, you can change the color independently by navigating to advance and clicking on email footer. Because under basic up top here with the primary right there, uh, that changes like the email header, change the email footer, and it, social links, etc. Now, if you just want to change it independently, then you have to navigate here under the advanced tab for the email footer, and then you can change the background color there to something that fits your brand a little bit more. And you can click over here for custom as well to create a custom footer if you don't like the way this is set up. Personally, I would leave it. I think it looks good. Update your email preferences, the, the address, date, and so forth. So, everything over here that you kind of need just for, uh, you know, like hygiene with an email looks good overall. So, has everything that I would expect to be within an email that I'm going to be sending out.

So, anyways, that's functionally how this works. That's all you kind of need to know. So, we click over here to preview. You can preview what everything looks like. And so far, so good. I quite like that. Very nice and simple. I like emails that are very simple and uncomplicated.

So, it comes with a bunch of social media share buttons right there. One thing I know you're going to ask is like, well, there's my name, and I don't want a beehive next to my name. How do I make it so it's a picture of me? All right, so let's back out of this. And we have to go back over here to settings. And then under here, click on your account right there. Go to personal info. And then you update your avatar right there. So we click on that. Open up that. Update the avatar. Okay. So I got my profile picture. All right. So let's go back to the post where we're at. Let's open this up again. And let's go ahead and edit post. All right. So, let's go ahead and preview that. So, good. Okay. So, let's go ahead and preview that. And there we go. So, it's replaced from a beehive with a picture of ourselves. Great.

All right. So, next we can click on next. And now you have your audience over here. So you have publish to web and email, or email and web as it say as it states. So you have email right there. How many people are subscribed and then your web audience. So if you don't want to publish it to your list, you don't want to email this out, you just want to publish it to your website, then just have web audience selected. If you want to email your list but not your web audience, there you go. And if you want to do both, you just leave both selected.

Then over here you can include and exclude segments. So segments are a little bit more of an advanced feature which I'll get to later, but right now I just want to cover the basics of just how to email your list. So I'll just leave both of these open.

Let's click on next over here. And now sending details, subject line over here. And we have the subject line, preview text, email header, buttons, advanced settings. So everything over here looks good. I wouldn't ch, uh, change anything by default.

Then click over here for review, then the blog post settings. So you have your post URL. Typically you want to keep URL short and sweet. So if you're going after a specific keyword, typically I'd try and keep that just to the keyword that you're going after. Keep it as simple as that.

Then over here you have show thumbnail on top. If you want, you can have that selected or not. So that shows thumbnail at the very top of the piece of content. Advanced email capture. And so you can have a popup here if you want, or you can gate this. So if you want to set that up, or just have it be freely available, then who can comment? All subscribers, only paying subscribers, you can disable comments altogether.

Your SEO settings are quite important. So make sure you have a good meta description that describes the blog post and that go, that's going after a specific keyword. Same with the meta description. Again, you can use AI to like really whip up something that's pretty good. Your meta description should be targeting the keyword phrase and explaining what the piece of content is about. Then it just shows you what it's going to look like when it's ranked. And then you can edit and adjust how this looks when people share it on Facebook and LinkedIn. And same with how it looks when it's shared on X over here.

Then you post visibility. You can hide the post from your feed if you want. You can feature this post. You can feature up to six posts on your website's homepage. You have zero featured posts at this time. So, if you have like best-in-class content that you always want to be sitting on your homepage, that's what this is for. So, just as a quick example, like that's what I do with my own site right here. Popular guides. These are just like, you know, pinned right here. So, they're always displayed on the homepage. That's what this allows you to do right here with the featured post.

All right. And then finally, advanced settings down there. So, you can custom date. So, if you want to change a date, there you go. You can do that right there. Okay.

Okay, so let's click over here for review and then review and publish. Okay, so now we're on review and publish. So a few things right away with this screen. So you want to test your post first. We can do that over here. Just click on got that.

Now we have this thing right here. Your branded link configuration is incomplete. So let's go ahead and click on that. Configure branded link. Let's take care of that. So we have branded link action required. And then let's verify branded link right there. And over here, just make sure to click on complete setup with entry. Now, it should say entry branded link verification in progress. The reason this is popping up is because we have a double opt-in for our newsletter. So, that's why we have to do this. Just let's just get this out of the way. Verify branded link.

Now, you need to update your DNS records. You need to find the value in your DNS records. That's this e link, whatever it says for you, and change the value from send grid to your branded link beehive. Uh, so let's highlight this over here. I'm going to take this, copy that. Or you just click over here, whatever. Does the same thing. Now you need to jump into your DNS records and you need to find where it says whatever the value is here for you. Okay? So for me, it's elink54E.xbat. So elink54E.x. Send grid.net. Nope. We got to get rid of that. And then copy and paste this in instead. And click over here for the little check mark right there. And done. And that is it. And so the entry verification progress will just continue and it will resolve itself on its own. But that's all you need to do.

Okay. So we're on review and publish now. So we can publish to email and web. We have the post title and we have the subject line right there. But we're going to click over here to schedule this out. And then you can choose to publish this now or schedule this for later. So we click on publish this now. We'll click on publish now. And your post is live. Very good. And let's go ahead and take a look at the site right there. And then boom, there we go. So, we got our blog post right over here, ready to go. And this was also sent out as an email. Okay. And it hit the primary tab of my inbox, a city of chaos and charm. So, we click this to open it up. And there we go. So, now it's hit my inbox. And here's the blog post that was published on the site as well as sent out as an email. We can click over here to read online and directs people to the blog post on the site. So people have optionality in that way. But really that's how you that's simple to send out an email or publish as a blog post with Beehive.

How to send yourself a test email. Now, as we just saw with the email that I sent myself and I published to my list of one person, me, there are some issues. So, maybe like the padding is a little bit off right here. Maybe I don't like this color over here. Maybe I don't like the border. I want to edit and adjust this a little bit more before sending it out. So, that's what the test email function is for. To get access to it, when you're in the blog post, the email writer, whatever you want to call it, just click over here for this little dropdown. And then you have the test email function right there. So you can have the subscriber, typically your own email obviously, and then send yourself a test email. So let's just do a quick little example. Okay. So just call this test post over here. And let's go ahead and click on that. And let's click on table of contents right there. And then underneath table of contents I'll have title right there. And we'll highlight this. I'll make that, uh, H2. So that's automatically added to the title right there. Looks good. Now, let's click over here and then send test email. And then test email sent over here. And let's click over here for the inbox and just wait for it to arrive and hit the promotion tab. So there we go. Test post over here. And looks good overall. So that's basically how you test emails that you send out to yourself. Very easy.

And also one additional thing you just want to check when you send yourself a test email is just to make sure that it hits the inbox. So as you notice that this the promotion tab, the test post is right there. But if I'm over here in the primary tab, I have my blog post, email, whatever you want to call it, hit the inbox as expected. Uh, so you just want to play around with the copy, the words you're using, the images, etc. because there's different triggers when you send out emails, whether or not it hits the inbox, promotions tab, update tab, that type of thing. So, that's why you also want to play around with sending yourself a test email just to make sure that it hits your inbox.

Tagging your subscribers. So, we covered how to publish content on your site and how to send out emails and send out test emails and an overall high level view about how to design your emails. Now, if we navigate over here to audience, let's click on that. We have subscribers at the very top. If we click in on that, this is going to show a list of your subscribers. You can also import subscribers as well. And you have your access to your custom fields over here if you want to set that up. But what's most important over here is the ability to set up tags. So tags are things like, uh, maybe you have emails from emails coming in from a certain form that you create. You can tag those emails. Uh, maybe you have affiliates and you want to tag those emails, whatever. So for example, I have maybe paid subscribers right there. Default color will be purple. You can enter in your subscriber emails right there manually and then click on save. Then you have a list of your subscriber tags over here. So for example, let me click on that. We'll click on affiliates. We'll just create a tag called affiliates. Default color I'll make blue. And I'll enter in an email right here. We'll click on save and there we go. So now we have subscriber tags over here. So affiliates we have one subscriber under this and for paid subscribers we have zero subscribers. And tags are helpful because you can use tags within segmentation. And so that's helpful because you can segment your list. And so you can break your list up into like different groups, different buckets. Then you could tag specific segments within those, like tag specific emails within those segmentations. If that makes any sense. So subscriber tags are useful in that way.

Creating a segment for your account with Beehive. So email segmentation is a very powerful email marketing tool that allows you to break apart your email list into different groups based on your subscribers attributes and activity literally. So you're like whoop-dedoo. So what? Well, I'll show you what exactly you can do as a quick example. Now again, I'm over here under the audience tab right there and we click on segments. That's how you navigate to this page. So, let me click on create segment. Now, like always, Behive explains things in a very technical way that might be a little bit confusing. So, we have static, dynamic, and manual. Static means this group will not be updated automatically. Dynamic means the group will be updated automatically. So, let's create a segment now over here with the name of the segment. We'll say low response and description will be I'll just say like an open rate under 20%. Now the difference this is the difference between static and dynamic. So if an email subscriber their open rate falls below 20%. If it's a dynamic segment we're going to create a dynamic segment that means they're automatically added to this segmentation. Static by contrast doesn't update automatically. It just takes your email list as it is right now and breaks it apart. So, if that makes any sense, then manual should be kind of self-explanatory. You can upload your subscribers and they're not updated automatically and so forth. So, dynamic is helpful because it updates automatically on a regular basis when an email subscriber meets the attributes of the segmentation. All right. Anyway, so let's define the conditions of this segment. All right. So, the first thing that you need to click on is condition right there. And so, you have a bunch of different things. You have attribute engagement, any email, automation, email segment, post, welcome email, opt-in email, enrollment, referral. This is great, very, very detailed. So we're going to navigate to engagement right here and select engagement. And again, what type of engagement are we talking about? Were we talking about unique opens, open rates, unique clicks within our emails, verified unique clicks, click-through rates, unique sends, whatever. We're going to go with open rate. And the opener rate is less than we'll see 20%. The percent signs right there. So there you go. And then we'll click on save segments and now we have the low response. So we have one subscriber automatically because I didn't click and open the email. So anyways, uh, right here this is the one email that has been sent a welcome email but they didn't click and open it, which is my email. So anyways, that's it. So now you have this segmentation right here. And once you have this segmentation over here, you click over here for your audience. Click over here for segments. Then you have your segment name. Then you click on the segment that you want to take a look at. And it's as simple as that. So you click over here for like a quick report. You can full, you can quick export, full export, unsubscribe, delete, do whatever you want.

Now what's helpful about this is then you can set up an automation on the back end if you want. So we have automations over here. You can set up an auto, set up an automation to just fire off whenever an email subscriber enters this segmentation. They go through this series of emails, for example. That's why you want to set this up because you can set things up automatically with Beehive where it's like if they're very responsive, like open rate of 60% or more, they go through a special automation. Low response like this, they go through a special automation. And because you created a segment, when you're going through the process of like publishing a piece of content or sending out an email, you do have the option to include or exclude a segment. So like for example, like a low response, say I want to just email everyone who's low response and be like, hey, do you still want to get emails? You can send a custom email if you want. So that's why you want to set up segmentations because it just gives you a lot of flexibility on the back end and and with addition to like the automation feature that Beehive provides, you have a very powerful email marketing tool here where you can set up a lot of like technical detailed things that happen automatically without you having to do anything other than setting up the process.

Setting up automations with your Beehive account. So, automations are another very powerful email marketing tool you get access to when you upgrade your account with Beehive. Automations are just emails that go out automatically, honestly. And so, you can set up like a year-long autoresponder if you want. You can set up specific automations for your different segmentations. So, let's get to it. Now, I'm going to show you how to set up like a quick re-engagement automation. So, let's click on new automation right there. We'll just call this like low response right there. And this is for our segmentation that we already made of people getting like less than a 20% open rate. So we'll click on save automation right there. All right. So when does this automation start? It starts when a user enters in a dynamic segmentation that we just made. So click on add trigger right to there and then add trigger again. Scroll down and then we want the segmentation action. Now again, this is why I like Beehive. You have a bunch of different events. Signed up, email submitted, survey submitted. Very, very powerful stuff. So, segmentation action right there. And they enter a segment. Great. What segment? So, this will list out all the segments that you created. We have one at this time. Low response. Click on activate. Click on confirm. Click on save. There we go. Okay. So, we're sending out emails. one of our subscribers, their open rate falls below 20%. So, this triggers this automation. So, that's all we've done so far. So, what happens next? Well, we want to send out an email with a button to click on. So, click over here to the plus sign, send email, and then we want to click on the configure setup right there. You want to click on create email. Click on blank draft. All right. So, now we want to edit this. Click over here and we'll type in something like you still here. Whatever question mark. Okay. Now, we want to actually write the email. Now, you need to write something quick and snappy that gets people to be re-engaged with the email. Okay. So, I just wrote up something quick like, "Hey, are you still active here? If you still want to receive emails, go ahead and click the big button below." So, let's add in a button right there. Click on that. Click on button over here and custom. Now, what you may want to do is like set up a page within your B5 account and then you just link it here. You could do something like that. So, that's a custom page that exists on your site. That's only for this automation. Right now, I'm just going to put in the homepage. There we go. Click on that. Okay. And then obviously, uh, click here. Whatever. Okay. Anyways, we'll click on save. Looks good. Let's back out of this. All right. So, when this We'll click on activate right there. Click on that. Click on save. There we go. All right. So, what what's happened so far is the automation begins. When it's triggered, the first thing it does is sends this email. You still here? And then a button to click on. So, how do we know if they clicked on the button or not? You just need a true false, uh, piece of content right there. Or not piece of content, but let me navigate down there. There we go. A true false, true false branch. There we go. So add that in. All right. So what are the conditions for this? Click on configure setup. We want to add in conditions. Then click on the condition for this. So the email, click on that. Want to navigate down here. And it says right down there, days without open, days without clicks. We want the end user to click the button. So, we want this days without clicks is exactly we'll say maybe four days, something like that. We'll give them four days to click on it and then we'll back out of that and we'll click on save. Okay. So, right there. So, true false branch one condition days without activity or days without click is exactly four days. Let me click over here click on activate that and then click on save. Okay. So, if this goes without, if this goes four days without any clicks, that's true. So, what happens? Well, they should be labeled as inactive. So, we know to just unsubscribe them. So, you just update the subscription right there. And then click over here to configure the step. And then active. Nope. Inactive. Keep or transition subscription status to inactive. Done. And then we can just unsubscribe them all together and click on save right there. And now they're going to be tagged as inactive. And then false. You do the same exact thing. Update subscription right there. And then click on this right there. Active right there. Looks good. Click on that. And then select tags if you want to add an additional tag if you want. Again, that's why you want to understand tags as well because then you could tag like people who went through this automation. If you, if you just want to have that detailed data, you can go ahead and do that. Click on save right there. And there we go. So, we'll click on that. Activate. Just you always got to make sure to click on the little activate button for everything. And there you go. And it's really that simple. So, the automation is triggered right there. Get the email with the button. Do they click the button within four days? If they don't click the button, that's true. Then this happens. If they do click the button, then this happens. But anyways, that's how you set up a simple automation with Beehive.

How to set up an onboarding welcome email series with your Beehive account. All right, so I just showed you how to create a segmentation, then how to set up an automation based on the segmentation data. How does that work? But you can create a bunch of other automations that just all run at the same time based on user data and user interaction activity. So a simple onboarding process. Let's click over here for new automation. And we want to call this onboarding. You can call it whatever you want. I'm going to call it on boarding and let's click on save automation. Okay, so automation has successfully been created and we can click over here to add in a trigger and once we do that we want to click on add trigger again and subscription event is when someone signed up. Okay, so when someone signs up, we can add in additional conditions if you want. I'm going to keep it simple and we're going to activate that. Click on confirm and then click on save. And there you go. So the trigger is when someone signs up. What happens when someone signs up to your email newsletter? You want them to get a welcome email. So like when they sign up and they confirm their email, what process, what automation do they go through? That's what you're building out right here. Okay. So this is going to be the first email they get from you. Now you want to click on configure step create new email. blank draft over here to actually write the email and then we want to click over here again to write it and the details over here. So this is the first email welcome email title right here. So you want to give it a good title because this is going to go to the person's inbox and really with the welcome email you want to establish like your services, what you provide. You want to set the context for what they can expect going forward with the emails and just provide as much value as possible. Anyways, click over here to write and then you write your email here. Okay. And so just provide helpful content and establish the value that they're going to get by being on your email list. So let's click over here to save. And there we go. So let's back out of this. Click on activate. Click on confirm. And then click on save. There we go. So now we have a trigger right there. When a user signs up, this happens. What happens? They get an email. All right. Do do we want to send another email right away? Like no, we want to have it be a little bit time delayed. So you need to use the time delay function. So navigate down here and we want to use time delay. So we want to have this email send out maybe like a day later. So let's say like one day done time delay right there. Good. Make sure to activate it. Click on confirm. Click on save. And after one day, what happens next? They get another email. And there you go. Rinse and repeat. Just keep building this out as long as you want. So they can wait one day, two days, three days. Typically, you want to be emailing your list like three times a week at a minimum. But it really depends on how you're branding your email newsletter. If it's like a Saturday entrepreneur newsletter, then send it out every Saturday. But if you're like sending out helpful content, you want to build out some type of funnel to sell products or services, that's what you can do with this and keep it as simple as this. So just use the time delay function and sending out emails.

Now, one little drawback of beehive I've noticed is that let me open up the low response over here. So if you use the low low response, if you use the true false branch, see how it splits it in true and false over here. There's no way to connect it here. So it's not like the user can go through this email, this email, this email, this email. Time delay, time delay, so forth. They get to like a true false section. They whatever happens happens like maybe you want to send out a poll like in a month, whatever. Uh, you can't there's no way to like connect it here. So if you split it with the true false function, this typically should be the end of any automation. So my point is like if you do want to use the true false function, maybe you want to send out a poll or a survey to your audience, you do want to set up a different automation for that. But anyways, that's how you set up a basic onboarding welcome email series.

How to send out a survey or poll to your email list. All right, with Behab, it's pretty simple. So let's create a separate automation for that. So click over here for new automation and I'm going to call this one survey. So, I'm going to send out a survey. Click on save automation right there. And because I have an onboarding email sequence set up, like maybe it's two weeks long, maybe I don't want to send it out at the same exact time. So, anyways, let me go over here to add a trigger. And I want to send out the survey to anyone who subscribes. So, click on add trigger. Signed up over here. There we go. Conditions if they sign up. Correct. Activate. Right? What happens? I want to send out a survey, but because I have the email onboarding sequence set up, maybe that goes for like a week. I don't want to send it out right away. You can just immediately lead off with a time delay. So maybe your onboarding process is like a week long, whatever. Maybe I want to wait like seven days before I send this out. Something like that if I want to set that up. And then over here, what happens? We want to just send out a quick email with a call to action to fill out a survey. So, click over here to configure step. Click over here to create new email. Blank draft. There we go. Okay. Let's go ahead and edit. Okay. And then we can call this survey and click on write and then call to action to fill out a survey. All right. So then we want to add in a button right there, custom, because we have our own URL link. And then you need a link to your survey. Now with Beehive, you can create surveys and polls within the platform. So let me click over here to save. Let me back out of this and back out of this and exit this. Okay. So let's navigate over here to audience again. And you have surveys and polls. Whichever one you want to send out. I'm going to send out a survey. So, I already created a test survey right here. Uh, creating a survey is pretty self-explanatory. So, title, description, call to action, thank you message, you have your responses right over here, and then you have the form builder over there to add in a first question. So, again, pretty easy to follow along. So, if I add in the first question right there, you have short response, multiple choice, drop down, long response, and you have a lot of different options over here. Uh, or a custom field value if you want to add in that over here. So anyways, simple as that over here. So let me exit out of that. Let's go ahead and go to the test survey right here. And the URL for your test survey is right here. So you can copy the link right there. Let me go ahead and paste that in right there. And this is what the survey looks like. So when people click on it, they'll be directed to this page. So I just have what's your eye color? Whatever. So, just build out a survey. Once you get the URL, just have to put it into that email. Simple as that. So, go over here to audience. We'll go back over here to our automation that we were working on. Go over here to the survey. Let's open that up again. Click on the workflow button. All right. Now, the email right there. Let's go ahead and actually activate that. Confirm and save. Then click over here to configure step. Edit that. Right. All right. Let's click over here and then we can paste the link into our survey. Let's fill out the survey. There we go. Simple as that. Then we're linking to the survey right there. Click on save. And there we go. And then we can back out of that. And then once we have the send email set up, uh, we want to check to make sure they fill it out or not. You can use the function again right down here, the true and false branch. And so once you click on the true and false branch, you can click over here to configure the step. Add in a condition. What's the condition? Email. Okay. But we want survey. They have survey right there now. So survey. Select the survey. We have like the test survey. Whatever you call it. And then was submitted. Okay. So if it was submitted, great over here. And then click on confirm. Let me actually let me do that again. survey test survey was submitted. Okay. Click on save. There we go. Okay. And yes, it was submitted. So, what happens next? Click over here for the plus sign. And we can just leave it there because we have this section up top there where we have the time delay waiting for seven days. But let's pretend we didn't have this. If we wanted to remove this then it just people who subscribed they get an email. What happens after this? You can set up so they enroll in an automation. So you can enroll them in an automation right there and then click over here for the configure setup. Select automations and we want them enroll them in the onboarding automation. So the subscriber will be enrolled in the selected automation bypassing any triggers and conditions. Okay. So this the way it should work now is that people subscribe and they should go through this automation first. So they go through this automation first. They get to the end right here and then they're directed to the onboarding process. So you have a few different options. So the way I set it up originally is the time delay for seven days because I want people to subscribe and then I want them to go through the onboarding email series. So maybe it's like a week long. They get all those emails. week later, they get sent this email. That's why this is set up. If you don't want to do that, you just want them to get the survey first, then just get rid of the time delay, send an email, true false branch, and then have this set up over here. When they fill out the survey, then they're directed to the specific automation. Now, if they don't fill out the survey, false, they did not fill out the survey, you could send up set up a follow-up email. So, just create another email. Click over here to configure, create new email. Click this over here and then this is going to be like a nudge like hey you didn't fill the survey and then just do the same thing again. So writes over here write your email and then have a button boom and then link to your survey as required right there. Click on save. There we go. Okay. Now the other me click over here to activate that. Confirm. Click on save. There we go. So that's false over there. And then you could just keep building this out a little bit. So if they didn't fill out the survey subject right there, you can have like another email for like a time delay if you want. You could do that and set this up. So like maybe one day later, one day later, then they get another email or if you want to have this be like a time delay setup right here. Uh, you could do that as well. So again, just these are your options. So send this out right here. Survey was submitted and then true direct onboarding process, false, they get the option to fill out another email. So anyways, let me move that up there. Okay. So with this true false branch, unfortunately, you can't drag and drop the boxes into place like you can over here. So for example, if I wanted to move that up, I could just do that and move things around. I don't know why it doesn't work over here. Doesn't work when you're building this little section out over here. Now, if you want to have it be a time delayed, so true, false, test survey was submitted. Boom. But if it wasn't submitted, then you can maybe have a time delay for like a couple days or something like that, then send an email if you want. Uh, again, totally up to you. And then after that, you know, you have a quick little process right here. Nothing too detailed. Uh, you can then enroll them in the automation. So just scroll down here, scroll down here, enroll an automation, and then you can direct them to the onboarding automation that you have set up. Anyways, that's how you set up a survey or a poll automation for your email list.

Creating subscriber forms for your email list. All right, so what Beehive has included under the audience tab right there is the ability to create subscribe forms. So create customizable and embeddible email subscribe forms for your other websites. So if you have another website or whatever you want to just copy and paste embed a form to sign up to this email list, you can do that. So for example, maybe you have like a WordPress blog for some reason you want to use Beehive for your email list. Again, whatever you have this functionality and flexibility to do this. So you just click over here to create a new form. Then the name over here is like the name of the form that you'd be using it on. Maybe for like WordPress something like that. Then the header, description, input placeholder, button text, button color, text right there. You can just customize everything over here. Typography you can customize. Then all you and then when people subscribe to this form, where are they directed to? So show a success message or you can redirect them to a specific page. Page could be your beehive website or whatever website you're embedding this on. Up to you. So, let me click over here to save. Okay. So, this is the subscribe form we just created. So, go ahead and click on the little dots right there and click on view. And now it's going to pop up with a bunch of different code that you can copy and paste into another site. Okay. So, you have full width right there. Full width will take the whole container of wherever it's embedded. Fix with, slim embed. And simple as that. So, for example, if I took this copy right here, we're in WordPress on the back end. Click on the plus sign. You want to use custom HTML, then paste this in here under the custom HTML. Then, what does it actually look like? It looks like this. So, you can edit and adjust the title right there in the subscribe form, all that good stuff, and embed it within your WordPress website. But that's what this functionality is for with creating different subscribe forms.

Editing the look and the feel of your website with the website builder. All right, so we finally reached the design section. And to be honest, it's not really a website builder in my opinion. It just has a few options. Uh, there's no drag and drop functionality. So anyways, let me just show you. So we navigate over here to the design. Let's click on the website builder. And our website's going to open up. Okay, so you have a few different options. So you have desktop right there. You have mobile right there. And then you can also have a preview right there to take a look at what your site looks like. And with the drop down right here, you have your homepage. You have your signup page. So your signup page is your website.com/subscribe. So you link to this page from like social media sites in what Instagram, like things like that. And like let me read first. And this is a good call to action right here to get people to subscribe. Then over here you have your upgrade page. So the first things first to have the upgrade page is you have to enable paid subscriptions if you are offering paid subscriptions as a revenue stream. You don't have to. You could have a completely free email list and make money in other ways. Uh, but paid subscription, paid subscriptions is an option. So anyways, just connect your Stripe account and it's really that simple over there. So anyways, anyways, let's jump back over here to the website builder and first things first. So, we have the expat weekly page separator, expat guide. Like, how do we reduce this title? This is a little bit too long at the top right there. I don't like it. So, if you want to change that, you go over here to exit. You click over here for settings, general info, and then you minimize this by backspacing it and delete it. And then just keep the publication name to whatever the name of your website is right there. And there you go. So, let's click over here for settings. And we'll navigate back over here to the website builder. And that should update. Yep, just did. So, there you go. That's how you remove this. Now, what's controlling the copy right here and right here. So, we're on the homepage right there. We want to go to layout. Now, you have your options right here. This is the hero section. That's what the top of the website's called, your hero section or your offer section. One of the other. Those words are used interchangeably to mean the same thing. So, right over here with the hero section, you have your page theme, the styles, default, signup widget. You can change things over here as you like. And then right when, when you scroll down right here, you have your headline. Then the headline you can adjust right there as well as the body for the headline right there. Then you can change the colors and the size, font, all that good stuff. You can play around with that on your own time, but it's all controlled over here. Nothing complicated, nothing fancy. So that's how you edit and adjust everything over here. So, for example, if I want to remove like the and have like number one expat guide for Thailand, Bali, Vietnam, whatever. There we go. So, it would update this shortly. I don't like the way that looks, but just showing you for examples how to change this over here. Uh, and overall looks quite good. And of course, you can add in emojis here if you want to. Like you want to have like a little hand pointing down emoji, you could add that in right there. So like handdown emoji. We'll just take that. Open up this. Copy that. And then paste that in right there. There we go. And we should add that to the end. Very good. Let me backspace out of that. So again, you could do little things like that to make it a little bit more attention grabbing at the top right here. So that's all you really need to know. That's your hero section. And you can really only edit and adjust like the colors, typography, things like that, and the copy. Nothing crazy. So, anyways, we cleaned up this. So, it's a nice word at the top right there, the name of the website. And there we go. So, that's your hero section.

Next, we have the post section. So, your post section is right here. And this is where you can add in a featured post. So, this is really helpful because you can have, I believe, up to six featured posts. So you can just click one of your favorite posts, one of your best-in-class piece of content, and it'll be displayed at the very top right here. So have your featured post right there, and it'll lay it out right here. I'll go ahead and add another post just so you see the layout right there. And looks good. So you can just build it out like that as you keep publishing content. Now, you do have the ability to enable latest posts, but this is a little bit confusing because your archive is right there. And so, your archive and your latest post are the same thing. So, with Beehive, I don't understand why they do that. That doesn't to me that makes no sense. So, I would not enable latest post because you have your archive right here. And archive looks good the way it's laid out like that. All right. So, let me back out of the post section.

Now, we have the slide widget section. And so this will just add in additional widgets. So for example, we have the sign up right there. And maybe I want to add in a signup. So click on add. Sign up right there. Then the signup will appear right there. So you could do that. So you have an offer section at the top right there with subscribe. You can have something right in the middle telling people to subscribe, whatever. Totally up to you. I do kind of like that because it does help separate the, uh, featured posts from the archive. And then let's open up the archive right over here. Then you have your archive section. You cannot turn off the archive section as far as I can tell. So like you can turn off the archive header.

If you don't like the word archive being displayed on your homepage, which I personally don't like. Or you can just enable it and then change this to latest post. So there you go.

Then you can also change like the layout of this. For example, if maybe you want a list instead. So like this is like a masonry grid layout and then this nice list post section just to break up the design. Totally up to you. Whatever it is you want to do and however you want to structure your site.

So anyways, let's back out of that and that's it. That's it for the homepage options. Really that minimal. And then you have your global navigation layout right there. And so over here you can add in menu groups and you can also add in category groups. Again, Beehive with the terminology that just makes it pointlessly confusing.

Now, what they mean by navigation menu groups is you can add menu items right here, and they'll be added to the top menu item up top here, or you can have like a little dropdown that shows your categories. So, let me go ahead and add a menu item right there. And we'll just call this menu. Go ahead and click on create. There we go. All right. And so now it's been added down here. Uh it'll appear down here because we have home posts then another menu item will appear down there.

Anyways, so that's the structure over here and we can also add in category groups. So category is in the menu will be in your navbar blah blah blah blah blah. So let's click on add and then turn on categories right there. And then I have one category on the site called tag. So now we have a dropdown right there that says categories.

So, uh where is this being powered from? Let me back out of that. Let's back out of this. And so if we go over here, back to our posts. Click on that. And then we click on manage content tags. We have one tag right there. So when you're writing your blog post, you can tag it as something. And that puts it in a category. So ideally with a site, you want to have like four to seven categories max. You don't want to overwhelm people with different items.

Anyways, let's jump back into the website builder. Okay, let's go back to our layout and let's go back to the global navigation layout right there. So now we have a menu section right there. So we can add in pages. So let's click over here for homepage. Navigate to custom pages. So we have one page, that thank you for subscribing page that we created at the very beginning. Let's create another internal page right here and add it to the website. And I want to add it to our navigation bar. So I just called the navbar menu. So there we go. And the title is about. Maybe we want to create an about page and the URL structure is about. So it'll be website.com/about. Then you want to build out a good SEO title that describes the page. And then same with the SEO description. So about us, then SEO. SEO description goes here. There we go. And simple as that. Let's click on create page. Create. Great. And so now it's been added to the navbar menu. Done. Simple. There we go.

Okay. So now you can see at the top right there we have about and we have categories. That's how you add things to your uh menu by uh menu item. And right down here because I called that menu, it's added underneath the menu. So I personally would keep it that simple. You don't really have that much control personally. So, I'd probably add in like about, categories, maybe like sponsorship, like about, contact, sponsorship, then have like categories at the top right here. I'd really keep it to like maybe four menu items max because you have like a nice login button and a join now button over here. But that's how you add in different pages to your site.

And to wrap up the homepage, let's just jump over here to our settings. And you have pixels. So, that's for tracking for social media websites. You have your SEO for your website breadcrumbs. I would definitely leave that enabled. Your social media links over here. So, self-explanatory. Email capture is actually something useful to know. And so, you can change the email capture type. So, you have the option of popup, none, or gated. By default, it's set to none. So, I just wanted to show you like what popup looks like. So, here's the site over here. Here's a publicly available blog post. Scroll down a little bit. This pops up that says subscribe to keep reading as a way to get people to subscribe.

Now the gated looks like this. So it's just a box where you can kind of block off the blog post and then people can unlock it by subscribing. So simple is that totally up to you. Now let me open up this again. I would keep it as either none or popup because the gated you can kind of manually input this into your piece of content whenever you feel like it an individual blog post and delete it whenever you feel like it. Whereas the popup over here is aggressive and it's across your site. So again your call totally up to you.

Uh so let me just show you like how the gated works on the back end. So I'll leave this as email capture type none but say I want that box to appear in a blog post. I can totally do that. So, let me go over here. Let's click on post. Traveling in Bali. Let's edit the post. And then the block that we're using is right there, the subscriber break block. So, you just click over here for the plus sign. Then it's the subscriber break. Boom. Then that will add in that black box. Okay? And cut off the blog post right here. So, people have to subscribe to get access to the rest of the content. Just make sure to update it.

And then you have your signup flow over here that you can play around with. But you have access to automation. So I already set up an automation for that. So there's not much to adjust over here personally. You have your comments, notifications, access to the mobile app, you have your security rights there. So the GDPR and CCPA compliance if you want to have a banner for that. Your static pages, so manage additional pages on your site. Customize the authors that appear on your publication author page. So you can customize the author page if you want. Then enable recommendations widgets. So add beehive recommendations to boost your external sites through our custom widget below. So you can enable that if you want. Then obviously theme reset. If you want to start from scratch and just redesign the site from scratch, you can do that by clicking this button right there.

Now onto the signup page. So click the dropdown right here and click on signup page. And it switches over to the signup page which looks a little bit different. It's the title of the publication with the copy right there and a subscribe box. Now, the only thing that changes over here is the layout. So, you have your hero section, testimonial section, featured post section, FAQ section. Personally, I like the way this looks just as it is. I wouldn't add in any of this additional content right there, but again, it's your call.

So, let me make open up like the hero section. So, you can have a background image over here if you want a specialized image over here. Again, it's up to you. And you could also have like a headline right there. You can have an overline. An overline like appears right at the top right there. Like uh every Monday, I don't know, whatever. Type something like that in. That will appear right should appear right there. That's what an overline is. There we go. Yep. Every Monday. Expat weekly. Discover the latest expat. Whatever. Actually, I don't like that, but you get the idea. That's what an overline is. Then the signup widget you can adjust right there. You can underline. The underline thing appears underneath. So just type in hello world right there and there we go. So we have the hello world. So that's the underline that appears underneath the subscribe box if you want to add that in right there. Then you have the redirect link. So just things like that.

So anyways, then you have your testimonial section. So you can enable a testimonial section if you want. Then you can have overline testimonials what people are saying. Then it builds this out over here. You can add in a testimonial like as such and there you go. So personally I wouldn't add in a testimonial section again it's up to you. I like this a nice squeeze page. User can only do two things. Enter their email or click let me read it first. I really like that.

Then of course you can add in feature post section. If we enable that then the featured post will just appear right here. So as such. So, anything that you've tagged as a feature post will be displayed on this page. So, let me toggle that off. And then the FAQ section over here. So, you can enable that. And same structure. Click over here to add, then add in FAQs or as such. So, again, I'll just leave that off. But those are your options over here with the signup page.

And finally, if you want to change the menu item color and layout, you can absolutely do that. So, when you're on the homepage, click on styles and underneath here, global navigation. That's where the settings are. So, I just went ahead and set the background color to be this light gray right there. And it's on template one, but template two looks like this. There we go. Template three. And we'll change to like template six. There we go. So, again, you can play around with this on your own time. I'm going to leave it as template one. I quite like that. And like always, make sure to publish styles to save all changes that you make to your site.

Okay, so our site is coming together quite nicely. Now, there's just a few tiny details on the back end. I just want to show you so you understand everything about Beehive. All right, so we navigate over here to grow. You have the referral program, recommendations, magic links, and boosts. So the referral program, you can set up your own little referral program for your newsletter where people get rewarded by referring new subscribers. So, if I click over here for like new referral reward name and maybe I'll give send out a promo code or digital download. So, add the reward compose the milestone email. So, when people refer maybe like one person or three people to your email newsletter, then they're automatically sent a milestone email that has a coupon code or a digital download, whatever, something like that. Okay.

Then we have recommendations. So, you can curate and share your favorite publications with your audience. So recommending other publications is a great way to establish yourself and it also increases the chances of you being recommended by others. So by turning on by recommending others you have increase the chance of your newsletter getting recommended. So I click over here for like recommendations. We have daily drop from Cara and Nate and then we'll click on add recommendation right there and then referred subscribers. There we go. So you can set that up on the back end.

Magic link is another unique thing. So you get a custom link that you can share with someone else if they were going to promote you in their email newsletter and you can change to what platform they use. So maybe I'm working with someone who's using ConvertKit. So it says ConvertKit but it's now called Kits. So right there give them this link then they automatically drive subscribers to me using this magic link. Uh so anyways that's the magic link and then boosts over here. So, it's a powerful new way to grow your audience, leverage the Beehive Network, so you can boost your newsletter to other Beehive accounts, but this requires money, okay? It's not a free thing.

So, let me click over here and then we'll click on the monetize right there and boost over here. So, monetize with boost. So, this is the boost marketplace. These are other accounts that are currently boosting their uh their email newsletter. So, web boost $2 per subscriber up to this amount to spend. So, this is the boost marketplace over here. So, monetize your newsletter by boosting other publications. So, if you're boost these publications to your audience and you actually drive subscribers, this is like what you'll get paid. Okay? So, you get paid that amount per subscriber. That's just how this is working. It's a unique thing with Beehive and it only works with the Beehive network. Other websites that are using Beehive. That makes any sense?

And like I touched on earlier, you can set up paid subscriptions over here. Paid subscriptions are exactly what it sounds like. So you can set up different tiers. People can subscribe to get exclusive content, exclusive email content sent to them via paid subscriptions.

And finally, you have your analyze tab down there. So you have your subscriber reports. So you can learn about your audience over here and how they're interacting with your content, active, pending, new subscriber, acquisition, source, all this useful data. You have your post reports over here. So your post report provides a ton of information. Verify clicks, unique clicks, open, delivered. You can export this as a PDF as well. And you can also have your clicks report over here to see what people are actually clicking on and interacting with.

Anyways, that is it for this tutorial. All right, everyone. That's it for this tutorial video on how to create an email newsletter website with Beehive. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you were able to create an email newsletter website based on this tutorial video. Anyways, my name is David. Thank you very much for watching and have a great day. Bye-bye. [Music]