Good traffic, but few subscribers – 20 Simple ways to get “new” Subscribers – Day 10 of 20.

The main blog series post is Good traffic, but few subscribers – 20 Simple ways to get “new” Subscribers – Day 1 of 20.

“This post contains affiliate links, which means I will make a commission at no extra cost to you should you click through and make a purchase.“

Review of Day 9): Nothing to report for the review of Day 9.

Day 9) Include a Subscription CTA in the Footer of Marketing Emails

Use your email marketing real estate — whether it’s within dedicated email sends or lead nurturing emails — to encourage blog subscriptions by adding a simple, text-based footer CTA to the bottom of your emails.

It has been suggested to put a call to action text based notice for people to subscribe to your blog within your emails. My thoughts on this are that I use it very sparingly. My suggestion is to use it when people are contacting you for blog related activities and use it only in those circumstances. By just putting a call to action in random e-mails doesn’t seem to be prudent, because the people may not be into the blogging arena.

However, if people have contacted you and are asking about blog-related questions, they may have already visited your website, or are knowledgeable that you are an expert in your field. Therefore, the likelihood is greater in these circumstances that they may subscribe to your blog.

On any given day, I usually have about a dozen to two dozen emails from various bloggers (because as a blogger, I like to see other blogger’s ideas for e-mail marketing). I haven’t tried this yet, but in the near future I’m going to be putting all of the blogger’s e-mails into my Outlook contacts and then I can sparingly send them an e-mail to kindly request that they subscribe to my blog (since I subscribed to theirs). I haven’t worked out all of the details, but I figure to get started I’ll reply to at least one or two per day with a call to action text-based subscription notice.

Day 10) Leverage Your Social Presence

Incorporate blog subscriber promo into your social media updates. Promote the dedicated subscription landing page you set up in tip number 3, and share it in updates for your various social media accounts such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook. You could even create a dedicated tab on your Facebook page and collect subscriptions right within Facebook!

There’s a way to create a tab on Facebook where you can get subscriptions to your blog from within Facebook. The instructions are in the link above (create a dedicated tab on your Facebook page). I took a look at the instructions and once I start getting more people to subscribe via regular means I’ll consider adding a tab to Facebook because it looks a little out of the ordinary to add a tab. Personally, I don’t know if it’s worth spending the time to do it, unless you have a lot of Facebook visitors.

I don’t want to leave without making an important point about social presence. Next to Pinterest, Facebook is one of the biggest social presences. When you publish a new post on your blog, post a copy of the link in your Facebook Group (the one that points to people interested in your blog).

Especially for your cornerstone post articles.

I’m not going to do a blog post for Day 11 because it’s already been addressed several times before that you need to ensure that you make it easy for people to share your information via social share buttons. I’ll just skip to Day 12 (for the next post).

Day 11) Make Blog Content Easy to Share

Let your readers do some of the work for you! Another indirect way to boost subscribers is to make the social sharing of your blog content as simple as possible. Add social sharing buttons to every blog post you publish so your readers can easily promote your blog content to their networks and expand your blog’s reach beyond your current fans, followers, and subscribers.

Day 12) Guest Blog, and Include a Link in the Author Byline

Guest blogging can be a powerful link-building tool. But you can milk guest blogging opportunities for more than just the inbound links. Because other blogs can be a great source of readers who don’t know about your own blog, you can use your author byline as a way to generate new subscribers. Here’s an example of how I might use a guest blogging author byline to drive subscribers for the HubSpot blog:

Pamela Vaughan is the blog manager for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Blog, which has more than 57K subscribers. You can read more of Pamela’s content on inbound marketing by subscribing to the HubSpot blog here.

Day 13) Promote on Thank-You Pages

Thank-you pages are the pages your visitors get redirected to after they’ve completed a form on a landing page. As a result, these pages are prime real estate to encourage reconversions — especially blog subscriptions! Add CTAs that compel your newly converted leads to also subscribe to your blog content. It’s a great way to boost blog subscribers while also continuing to nurture leads.

Day 14) Promote Within Other Content

Include blog subscription CTAs within some of your other content such as your ebooks, webinars, or other downloads. Just as with the footer at the end of your blog posts, this will enable you to capitalize on the people who are already interested in your content. If leads think the content they’re already consuming is valuable, they’ll be more inclined to subscribe to the other content you offer on your blog.

Day 15) Hold a Contest

Do a push for blog subscribers using your other promotional channels, and treat it like a contest. Offer an enticing prize to a randomly selected subscriber who subscribes between the launch of your promotion and a designated date.

Day 16) Commit to Content Quality

Face it: You’re never going to convince readers to become a ‘regular’ if they’re unimpressed by the quality of the content on your blog in the first place. Make a commitment to increase the quality of the content on your blog. As TopRank Online Marketing’s Lee Odden says, you need to publish a “quantity of quality” in order to get a leg up on all the other blogs that are also vying for your audience’s attention. Not convinced that quality content is that important? Read this post.

Day 17) Be Consistent

The fastest way to churn your subscriber base is by failing to consistently publish content. Subscribers have an expectation of regularity, so if potential new subscribers don’t see that you’re regularly publishing blog content, they’re not going to see much value in subscribing, and you’ll lose some of the subscribers you’ve already worked so hard to attract. And publishing frequently can reward you with a lot more than just subscribers — HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report shows that the more frequently you publish to your blog, the more likely you’ll generate customers from it. 

Day 18) Promote Blog Subscription in Your Personal Email Signature

Add a CTA and link to subscribe to your blog in your personal email signature, and encourage the rest of your company to do so as well — particularly your sales team. Using HubSpot’s free email signature generator, you can create a custom email signature that includes a link to your blog subscription page or latest blog post.

Day 19) Do a Paid Push

Put some paid marketing muscle behind your subscriber push. Use PPC to direct traffic to your dedicated blog subscriber landing page, or leverage Facebook Sponsored Stories to drive traffic to the subscriber tab you created for your Facebook business page in number 10.

Day 20) Use Full Feeds

To provide a full RSS feed, or not to provide a full RSS feed — that is the much-debated question. If you’re not hip to the difference, a partial RSS feed delivers just a snippet of the blog post with a link to read more on the blog, whereas a full RSS feed provides the entire post within the reader’s feed aggregator. The full feed provides a more user-friendly experience, whereas the partial feed is beneficial in driving traffic to your blog itself. The problem is, many readers won’t subscribe to your blog if you’re only offering a partial feed, so while partial feeds save you some blog traffic, you end up losing subscribers and hurting user experience. While there are definitely opposing points of view, we recommend providing subscribers with the full feed.

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Please fill in a comment if you know of other things you can do to increase your blog’s subscriber base? And … ahem … have you subscribed to this blog yet?