The Hello Bar Alternative: How I Got 196 New Subscribers in 15 Minutes
Recently, I thought about adding a hello bar to the top of my site.
As you probably know, I’m always looking for ways to build my email list.
I mean, I even wrote a post about how you can get more subscribers by optimizing your website.
In this post, I’ll be covering how I got 196 new subscribers with just 15 minutes of work.
Yes, really.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, Hello Bar adds a “slim bar” at the top of your website that sticks to the top as you scroll down.
Mine looked a little something like that:

Hello Bar Alternatives?
Unfortunately, Hello Bar didn’t quite work out for me…
After a few minutes, I realized that Hello Bar’s free plan has quite a lot of restrictions.
Particularly, there’s a huge “H” at the left side of each Hello Bar – this will direct people away from my site to the Hello Bar website.
Needless to say, that’s something I’m trying to avoid.
I thought about paying for the paid plan, but not before doing a quick search for any other alternatives.
And that’s when I found WP Notification Bars, a WordPress plugin that’s 100% free!
Both seem to work in exactly the same way too, so why not?
Proceeding to the “Hello Bar” Experiment

For the sake of convenience, I shall call this experiment the “Hello Bar” Experiment, even though I’m technically not using Hello Bar. I’ll be using WP Notification Bars instead.
Here’s why:
- No need to give Hello Bar credit and bring people away from my website
- WP Notification Bars allow people to click on a button first before inserting their details, as compared to Hellobar’s free plan whereby people have to fill in their details right inside the Hellobar (this decreases the opt-in rate).
- I can link the “submit” button to a Leadbox and hence have control over what thank you page people are directed to, unlike Hello Bar whereby subscriber emails are collected into Hellobar and I cannot connect the Hellobar to my email service provider without paying.
Wondering what a Leadbox is? Check out my Leadpages review.
Hello Bar probably offers some more advanced options like A/B testing using its paid plan, but most of my readers aren’t at that stage yet.
So… how did the experiment go?
The end result: 196 new subscribers, without me doing anything!
All I had to do was set it up.
I’ve only installed the bar for slightly over a month, so I must say that it has been really effective.
And the best part? The only thing I did was to install the bar! 🙂

By the way, I have absolutely no affiliation with WP Notification Bars and this post is not sponsored. 😉
You can download the plugin here.
I hope this helps! [Tweet “The Hello Bar Experiment: How to get 196 new subscribers with just 15 minutes of work?”]
Check out the other list building articles on my blog:
- List Building 101: How to Build An Email List That Makes Money (Cheatsheet Included)
- Why Building an Email List is a MUST for Your Blog & Business
- Why I Switched to Using Convertkit As My Email Service Provider
- Newsletter Content Ideas To Send & Engage Your Subscribers
- 10 Game-Changing Strategies I Used To Create an Irresistible Lead Magnet/ Freebie That Got Me 711 Downloads in 3 Months
- Get More Subscribers: 6 Hotspots To Place Your Email Opt-in Boxes
- The Hello Bar Alternative: How I Got 196 New Subscribers With Just 15 Minutes of Work
- 31 Content Upgrade Ideas For Your Blog (With real examples!)=
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xx Raelyn
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