Arif Chowdhury March 25, 2021 Ever since Justin Hall created the first blog Links.net, people have become habituated to reading blogs. Jorn Barger coined the word weblog, used to denote logging the web.
Jonathan Dube created the first blog on a news site, Hurricane Bonnie for The Charlotte Observer in 1998. Peter Merholz, a programmer, shortened the weblog to just Blog and the name stuck. Bloggers abound.
Today there are over 570 million blogs. Some are driven by the passion to simply share their knowledge. Others, more practical, view blogs as a source of publicity, traffic, and revenues.
The last two are key objectives for a majority of bloggers. If you happen to believe in getting value from your blog, then you will like these methods to get more blog subscribers.
1. Leverage the power of your content
Why do people read and subscribe to blogs? The short answer is it is for the content and knowledge/information your blog contains. That there are millions of blogs and quite a few in your niche offering specialized and focused content makes it a constant headache to be able to come up with something new and engaging. You must try harder.
This means you have to put in considerable time and effort to research what readers need, new content available on the web, and even refer to books. Bloggers, like any writer, can suffer from writer’s block and ideas block.
This means you have to explore sideways and reference relevant fields to give a new perspective to an existing idea. Draw inspiration from Youtubers who come up with amazing and innovative hacks.
Think of topics like they think of materials and it should not be difficult to keep the word mill going. Readers will like the newer ways you present a topic.
Blog on your blogging site by all means. Go a step further and create options to send the same content through newsletters. These need not necessarily contain the full text. You can put in a “click here to read more” to direct readers to your blog or your website.
Do the same for social media. Insert social media buttons on your blog so that visitors can head over to your Facebook page or tweet, which in turn could be picked up by more people. The key here is to incentivize targets with interesting content and some reward.
The way people read blogs has changed. You cannot expect them to go through a 2000 words post. So, your content should have a brief synopsis, also carried forward to the newsletter that would motivate readers to stay glued.
While we are here we might as well repeat what most people know: give some thought to the use of fonts, legibility, spacing, and ease of use on desktops and mobiles.
2. Interactive is the key to your success
Set up your blog using the right platform. For instance, 34.5% of websites are powered by WordPress, and 70 million new posts are published on this platform.
This says something about WordPress: it allows interaction, control, and management of responses as well as your blogs. If you are on some less-featured platform, consider a shift to an interactive platform. It helps by making it easy for visitors to sign up and post and receive thanks and appreciation for responding.
3. Offer freebies to attract your target audience
Content, by itself, is good. However, the human mind works differently. Do you insist on visitors signing up before they can read your blogs? If yes, then why should they unless they can get something valuable.
Offer them freebies for signing up. For example, Deposit photos offer free tutorials and free images as well as valuable editing tips for those who sign up. Jimmy McIntyre at shutter valve invites people to sign up, read and get free newsletters as well as access to tips and tools for photo editing plus eBooks and discounts on some packages.
4. Guest blogging can increase your brand awareness
Be generous. Why stay limited only to your blog. One sure way to increase traffic to your blog site and signup subscribers is to become a guest blogger on an authoritative blog site.
You get a byline and a backlink. Some sites let you submit for free whereas some will charge you a modest amount. Still, it is worth the investment.
5. Make interactive videos related to your niche
Guest blogging is one way to venture out into the big internet world. There are other ways too to create backlinks and inveigle visitors to your blog. This is by creating interesting videos.
You know how it is these days: people love to watch videos over a 2,000 words post. So you can create a podcast and list it on podcast sites or create videos you can launch on your YouTube channel with a mention to viewers to visit your blog to get a bonus or to read or both.
6. Contribute in the forum to get leads & backlinks
Forums are frequented by experts preferring advice and by greenhorns looking for top tips. It is only logical that if you want to cast the net wider you should visit relevant forums and keep posting responses to queries raised on different topics. Reddit, for example, is a prime location.
There are lots of such specialized forums like, for instance, diyaudio.com for audio specialists and enthusiasts.
7. Collaborate with other bloggers within your niche
More if you like. Do not live in isolation. Offer your content to other bloggers in the same field, give recommendations, suggest they blog on your site in return for accepting your content on their site.
If you help others, others will help you and their subscribers could be coming your way too. If you are on a WordPress blog, then you can use their free advertising plugin to associate with another blogger and promote each other. You can put up to six rotating links using this plugin.
8. Use AdWords PPC advertisement
Nothing unethical in using Google’s AdWords program to get people to visit your blog. The logic is that people who are looking for information on topics are likely to use Google search. What do they see in search results? There are so many results, most of them want to sell their products.
You will see PPC ads too at the top. These relate to companies selling products while the searcher is looking for information. How frustrating. Step into the breach. Put up your PPC ad offering, not products but information and you get visitors to a landing page, where, on signing up, they access your informative content.
You could cheat a little. Instead of putting all your expert knowledge into one blog site, create two-three different blogs and promote them independently besides cross-linking them as above.
9. Build an eye-catchy landing page
So, if you are getting traffic from other sources, the key to getting visitors to sign up and stay is to set up a landing page. Invite them to sign up and give them a free resource through email. It could be an eBook or tutorial.
10. Use social media marketing
Social media is a great channel from where your traffic can originate at very little cost. Create a teaser post on your social media post on, say, Facebook, include a link inviting readers to explore more with the promise of a gift.
You can think up more ways but implementing only a few of the methods shown above could lead to tangible benefits of more value subscribers to your blog.
Conclusion
Do you know only 20% of readers generally pass your headline & read the content, while 80% simply read the headline & leave? Even those little 20% readers do not read the whole content line by line, they just skim your article bullet points, links, images, charts, etc. to find information about what they are looking for.
And most of the time, they do not remember your site URL or even its name. If for some reason they need to find your content again they will use Google to search or in a grim situation, they might search in browsing history, but it is an extremely rare case.
So what to do to keep them with you? Collect their contact information through the subscription option. If you receive 10,000 visitors per month & do not have any subscription option for your audience, then you will lose all of them. While you may get 1,000 subscribers every month by implementing these tactics I have shown you. Use these strategies to increase your loyal customers & revenue.
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