Sin #6: Not Aggressively Building a Subscriber List

No offline magazine, newspaper or publication can survive without a core of loyal readers. The same goes for your blog. The faster you can build a list of blog subscribers, the faster your blog gains momentum and popularity. There are 2 “normal” ways of doing this: 

  1. Feed subscribers – Get people to subscribe to your RSS feeds using an “RSS Reader” like Google Reader or BlogLines
  2. Email subscribers – Get people to subscribe to your blog posts via email. You can use a regular email management service like Aweber, but the easier way to do this is to use Feedburner The mistake most people do is to just display these options on their blog and expect people to subscribe by themselves. It’s true that if your content is good, people will subscribe to your blog and come back for more. But I’m talking about marketing your blog here, and that usually means adding a “cal to action” in your blog post or elsewhere on your blog.
A call-to-action can be a simple statement like: 
  1. “If you like this post, make sure you subscribe to our blog via RSS feeds or via email…
  2. “To get more updates on this issue, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates.”
  3. “I’ll be covering more on this issue in the next few days so make sure you stay in touch. You can do this by subscribing to our feed.”
 If you don’t want to put a call-to-action is each blog post you write, then make sure you hard-code the text into your blog’s template files so it shows up on each post you publish, automatically.  Make sure the text is linked like the example above so people can click and subscribe directly. The next thing you’d want to do is offer something of value if people subscribe to your RSS feeds. Some cal it “bribery” but I just cal it marketing.
Think about it: how many survey forms have you filed up just so you may stand a chance at winning something? The bottom line is that if you can offer something of value, more people will subscribe, and stay subscribed to your blog. So how do you do it? 
The easiest way is to hold a time-limited contest, where you can offer any of the following:
  • Physical gifts or cash rewards to a random winner
  • Your services or consultation to a random winner
  • Digital downloads of ebooks, software or anything you can deliver online at no cost
The key is to understand what people really want, and ask them to subscribe to your blog if they want to stand a chance to win it. I understand that my market (bloggers) place an enormous amount of value to beautiful themes and templates, so I bought the multi-user license to some of the best themes around and offer them for free. To win one, al they need to do is to subscribe to my blog via email.

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