5 Most Useful Ways to Increase Your Email Subscribers

January 28, 2012 By 1 Comment

This guest post is by Adelicia Davies

Most bloggers do not know this, but getting more email subscribers is the best way to make more money from your blog.

Ways to Increase Email SubscribersConsider the statistics – People who buy products advertised in email they get spend 138% more than other people. Also, 44% of email recipients buy at least one item a year from promotional emails they get.

The question now is how to grow your email list? You can focus on five main techniques, or methods which are given below:

1. Subscribe Box: Many bloggers make the mistake of putting ads prominently and hiding the subscribe box somewhere down below in the sidebar or in the footer. Instead, put a big box up top and in front of the visitor. Hammer them with the box on every page and in multiple locations on each page.

2. Incentive: You do not have to pay anyone to get them to subscribe to your list. But you can create something useful that they get free when they sign up. This can be a free eBook, downloadable software or a discount coupon or something related to your blog that might be considered to be of some value.

3. Human Face: People respond to and connect with a human face, rather than a site name or anonymous site administrator. Put a photo and a name next to the box, and add a personal appeal wherein the human face asks visitors to subscribe.

4. Maintaining Loyalty: It is not just sufficient to convince visitors to subscribe. You also need to take care of your existing subscribers with interesting and useful newsletters. Just sending them a newsletter filled with ads or product copy is not going to help. Each newsletter should make them want to eagerly await the next one. This is the same as publishing interesting posts on your blog to maintain reader loyalty.

5. Tracking: Use embedded analytics code to track the response to each newsletter. Find out what is working and make sure you know when a specific newsletter ends up reducing the number of subscribers. This will tell you what you are doing right and what should not be done.

Some bloggers sell email lists to third-parties, while a business blog will simply use it to build customer loyalty, provide product updates, increase brand awareness and sell more products. But, it only works if you have enough visitors and a big email subscriber list.

Filed Under: blog network

5 Steps to a Loyal Blog following

January 2, 2012 By 4 Comments

This guest post is by Ranchy Stephan

There’s a famous cartoon where a dog explains that he gave up blogging to go back to pointless, incessant barking. It’s a blow below the belt for bloggers struggling to gain a following, but there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

There are currently 122.6 million blog readers in the United States, predicted to go up to 150.4 million by 2014.

Even so, 60 to 80 percent of new blogs are still being abandoned by their owners inside of the first month.

Blog Readers in USA

More than 50% of the internet users is USA are people who read blogs

By the time three months go by, a full 95 percent of new blogs end up as just so much more junk cluttering up the internet.

There’s a good and simple reason why readers gravitate to a few popular blogs while the majority remain shunned. It is called expertise, which means that people will only listen when they feel the blogger understands the subject. They expect the blogger to share expertise and provide information which they didn’t know previously.

This is why subject-oriented blogs tend to do better than blogs where the subject of each post is vastly different. This topical style is just one of five major points which have a major impact on whether the blog has a loyal following.

The second issue is about having the blog plug-ins needed to allow readers to post comments easily. Some blogs require people to register and login first, while others may have a simple one-time moderation requirement. Then there is plug-ins like do-follow which allows bloggers to reciprocate to comments on each other’s blogs as part of an SEO strategy.

Reciprocation to comments posted by blog readers is just as important. When readers find that the blogger is responding to posted comments, it motivates them to come back and talk some more. This is how loyalty gets built, and readers start turning up every day just to see what’s going on and which new post has the most comments where they can add their own 2 cents.

Getting readers and visitors to subscribe to feeds is probably the single most important factor that fosters loyalty. Subscribers are essentially letting you know that they want to read every new post. It doesn’t get any more loyal than this.

To gain this loyalty, Bill has posted one video – 5 most important SEO tips for blog posts, just for the subscribers of  TheTrafficProfessor.

For viewing that video, one has to be a subscriber of TheTrafficProfessor. However, that’s easy enough by clicking through and jumping through the hoops.

Then there’s the incredible impact of social media, which is currently the second highest traffic source for blogs after search engines. Whenever a new post is published, a link has to be instantly posted to all the major social networks.

Social media is not replacing blogs, but the same 122.6 million blog readers are also on the networks. So ask blog readers to follow the blog’s social accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Letting readers know about new blog posts is essential to maintain a loyal following, whether it is done via subscriber feeds and/or social network updates.

Filed Under: blog network, increase blog traffic Tagged With: ,
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