Is this low?

It depends on a lot of factors. What you should do is split test as much as possible in order to get the highest conversion rate. There really isn't a way to tell without looking at your site and sign up form placement.

Yes indeed, Brandon - it's those "tons of factors" that make answering helpfully so difficult.

It's all personal opinion and personal experience and it depends on your traffic sources and on the extent to which you try to opt people in and on the extent to which you test and adjust. And what I'm about to say is offered tentatively only and on that basis, ok?

I think a figure of 22%/23% opt-ins on a blog, for quality, highly targeted traffic, is really good, and it's what I aim for with my own sites. Not always successfully. (If I use squeeze pages instead of the home page of a blog, I can sometimes get that figure up to 50%, but those lists don't earn me nearly as much money, because the biggest lists are almost never the biggest income producers, and without writing a book about it, here, let's just say that there are good and valid reasons for that. So I don't use squeeze pages any more.)

I know three people here all of whom have "started fairly recently" and so far have figures between 6% and 12%, (that's for mixed traffic).

So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I think 2.5% probably is pretty low, yes.

(Bear in mind that if most of your traffic is SEO traffic, then your figures are possibly going to be lower than the average: over the years, in every single niche in which I've ever had a site, search engine visitors have always opted in significantly less often than traffic from any other source, and there are reasons for that, too, I think.)

So, what are the things you can think about doing, with a view to testing, to improve that?

I get around that %, without offering any free ebook or anything... so yeah.

depends on your offer, copywriting skills, and overall user engagement.

yes that is extremely low, you should be shooting for anywhere from 20-50%

Need to change something up, that's very low! Change the sign-up forms location, copy, colours, your offer or add a popup if those don't help. Try changing those one at a time though, not all at once

This isn't a blog but as an example the one in my sig has so far got a 70% opt-in rate My old IM blog with a sidebar form that only offered IM tips and updates, no ebook or freebies had a 25% opt-in and 40ish when I added a popup form. I could have probably done better with my offers, but I haven't been one to market to IM'ers until I felt I had a good graps on the parts of IM I was interested in working on. I'm now about to release a few WSO's, given the knowledge I have built over the years and the results I have received. I always said I wouldn't release a WSO, but it's funny how your mind changes the moment you see how things work and how others are going about it the wrong way, and you feel as if you could help some of them.

I agree to a degree with people here.

Here's some figures from my site: 2.2% sign up in the sidebar, 3.4% sign up in the optin form at the bottom of the articles, 32.3% sign up from a pop up.

So maybe consider adding a pop up? I know they're annoying but they get the sign ups!

Hmmm

Would you guys mind cretiquing my page? It's Celiac Disease | Gluten Intolerance | Gluten Sensitivity (GS) - In Just 10 Pages

We do already have a pop-up and we just put up the banner on the right. Also, in the blue space where you see "blog" that will soon be a banner as well.

Just as an FYI most of our traffic is from SEO.

Thanks,

Brandon