20 Simple ways to get “new” Subscribers – Day 4

Last Updated on May 29, 2021 by scottkandh

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

Each day, I’ll move on to the next topic. If necessary, I’ll briefly discuss something from the previous blog post that wasn’t published earlier. The topics coincide with the day of the month (for example, day 8 will be published on November 8th, etc.).

Review of Day 3): The one thing that I wanted to comment on Day 3 is this is the new Landing Page that has been created that includes the spacing with the use of CSS code – label {padding-left: 38px !important; }.

End of Review

Day 3) Create a Dedicated Subscription Landing Page

In addition to the subscribe module right there on your blog, create a dedicated landing page that you can direct people to via other channels such as social media, other pages on your website, PPC, or email. This way, rather than saying, “Visit myblog.com, then look for the subscriber option at the top right. You know — right below the banner CTA,” you can say “Visit myblog.com/subscribe to be the first to receive our latest blog content!” You can also use the extra real estate on this page to better demonstrate your blog’s value, as we did with HubSpot’s blog subscription landing page.

Here’s a copy of the subscription landing page referenced above from HubSpot.

There’s a plug-in called CrowdSignal that allows you to select from one of three options: 1) Poll, 2) Vote, or 3) Applause

In an effort to emulate HubSpot’s Subscription Landing Page and have an E-mail Subscriber List setup I’m going to set up each of the three options to see if one of them might work.

1. Poll

2. Vote: It doesn’t appear this will work. It’s simply a vote in the form of a like (thumbs-up) or a dislike (thumbs-down).

3. Applause: I have no idea what this will offer, so I’ll see what it does now. Okay, it’s just a different form of likes in the form of clapping.

After looking at the three options available in CrowdSignal, none of these options will suffice, back to the drawing board. Looks like I might have to turn to a program called Interact (the program I have for quizzes). If you want to see it in action, click on the menu labeled Quizzes. I took a brief look at the Interact site to make a new quiz, but I don’t think that visitors can select multiple answers.

I finally got the answer that I’ve been looking for from the fine folks at ConvertKit. For your information, all of their forms and landing pages have the capability to add checkboxes.

You might have read about this already but if in case you missed it, please take a look and this may be able to help you:

Adding Tag Dropdowns + Checkboxes to Forms

How to add dropdowns and checkboxes to your Forms and Landing Pages, so that your Subscribers can self-select their own Tags!

Form / Landing Page with checkboxes

My new E-mail Subscriber List form:

I’m nearly there, I have the form setup but for some reason, my checkboxes aren’t showing up. Just in the event that you might run into the same problem, I’m showing a before and after and I’ll provide the solution (once I get the fix from the ConvertKit team).

Before:

After: For some odd reason, the text is running into the checkbox. But at least I’m that much closer to having a “select” E-mail Subscriber list. I’ve requested some help with that issue. But I don’t know if it’s a doable fix.

This is awesome, no sooner than did I add the information into the blog and I got two subscribers within seconds of one another. Cool beans! I think this is going to pay off big dividends.

It’s actually quite a simple fix to make the changes to the spacing.

If you want to adjust them, add CSS code to make the checkboxes have some spaces between the text.

label {padding-left: 38px !important; }    – Change the value “38” into the best value that will suit your need.

The higher the number, the greater the space it’ll create.

Day 4) Offer an Incentive for Subscribing

Do a push to boost subscribers, such as a dedicated email send or a social media campaign, and offer an incentive for subscribing, such as an exclusive ebook, download, or coupon. Set up a dedicated landing page, and reward anyone who subscribes via that landing page with the exclusive offer.

Okay, I’ve set up a dedicated landing page. At the current time it doesn’t have an exclusive offer as mentioned above. So I’m going to modify the landing page to add my eBook. For starters, I’ll replace the “Free Resource Library” image with a picture of an e-book image that you can download (once you’ve subscribed).

Before

After

Subscribe and get the Blogging and Pinterest 101 Free e-Book.

Day 5) Promote on Your ‘About Us’ Page and Press Room Pages

Include a link to subscribe to your blog on other high-trafficked pages of your website such as your ‘About Us’ page and Press Room. These pages are likely to attract a lot of new visitors to your website, so use the opportunity to funnel them into your blog so they can learn more about you and read all of the awesome blog content you offer.

Day 6) Add a Footer to Each Blog Article

To each of your blog articles, add a simple, text-based footer that acts as a call-to-action to subscribe to your blog — like we’ve done to the bottom of this very post! If a visitor finishes reading an article on your blog and has found the content they read valuable, you’ll capture them at the height of their interest.

Day 7) Search Engine Optimize Your Content

An indirect way to boost subscribers is to drive more traffic to your blog. The more traffic you drive to your blog — assuming you’ve also optimized your blog to convert visitors into subscribers — the more subscribers you’ll gain. Don’t overlook the importance of search engine optimizing each blog article you publish. Brush up on your blog SEO, and target the keywords you want to rank for in search.

Day 8) Leverage Social Proof

‘Social proof‘ is the concept that people will conform to the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behavior. This third-party validation can be a very powerful motivator for your site visitors’ and prospects’ actions. You can leverage social proof on your blog to boost subscribers by highlighting the number of subscribers your blog has already accumulated, as we’ve done on this very blog. This makes blog visitors think, “Well, if so many other have already subscribed to this blog, maybe I should, too!”

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.

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!

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.

What other things can you do to increase your blog’s subscriber base? And … ahem … have you subscribed to this blog yet?

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