Last Updated on October 18, 2021 by scottkandh

This post is How to get new subscribers – Set up an RSS feed.

Review of Day 6): It’s extremely important to listen to the advice of your readers. One of my latest subscribers pointed out to me that my sidebar was too busy and I couldn’t have agreed more. So I moved the RSS feed and Popular posts to the bottom footer. Now the RSS feed is a lot easier to read. FYI, the RSS feed is updated to a website called Feedspot at https://www.feedspot.com. From there you can read all of your favorite blogs in one place. If you’d like to set up an RSS feed on your blog, see item #8 (Set up an RSS Feed for your blog) available in the hyperlink.

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

I like the cleaner new look of the sidebar and it now has three items: 1) a search bar, 2) a Subscriber Opt-in, and 3) An About Me widget.

On another note, as a blogger, you might have to decide between which is more important to you – having a good bounce rate or having more subscribers. They kind of go hand in hand. I temporarily turned off my pop-up subscriber; however, I have designed a new pop-up (that’s on the PinArtwork front page) that offers a free e-Book that I hope helps people to subscribe.

End of Review

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.

In addition to having a suggestion in the footer, also add a comment like the one below to the bottom of all your posts.

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?

The suggestion (in the footer) simply reads: “Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.” It’s my goal that by the end of the month, the number of subscribers will grow to at least one more so it says” Join 6 other subscribers. I won’t be able to get there without your help, so please subscribe, especially if you find this information valuable.

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.

I can’t think of anything else to add to ensure that you’ve optimized your blog posts for search engine optimization other than to add that one of the best ways I learned about SEO was to write about it. If you don’t want to take that route, then please go to my blog post on how to boost your SEO that provides a lot of step by step instructions and insights into how to use SEO to your advantage.

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.

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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?