7 WAYS TO DRAMATICALLY INCREASE YOUR SUBSCRIBER LIST

This section will show you what you can do today to get more subscribers to your list.

 

#1 - Offer your readers something for signing up

You've got to think like a typical reader if you want to have more subscribers. Ask yourself the question why would someone give up their email address. Yes, to get updates whenever your blog publishes a new post, but if you offer them something for free which is also valuable they are much more likely to sign up.

You can offer a free ebook as an enticement, you can offer software, a free 7 day course.

You don't need to make the free product yourself. when I have been doing blog coaching with clients and I have advised them to offer something for free, the typical response is, I don't have anything to give them. The very fact that you have a blog means you have something to give. Just make a 'best of' compilation of your best posts, turn it into a pdf file and you have an ebook worth between $10 - $20.

If you are literally just starting out and have nothing to give away go to www.master-resale-rights.com/ buy something for $5 and then offer it to your readers for free. Who says it has to be your product you give away for free. When you become more established then you can produce a free report or ebook, stamp your name on it, and then offer that for free.

When subscribers sign up via the RSS feed button, they don't have to give up their email address they just have to hit the RSS button and add your feed to their favourite reader service such as Google Reader so you can't offer the reader something for free in this situation. That's why, I believe, it is best to get an Aweber account, so you have a lot more control over interacting with your subscribers.

#2 Start Using Aweber

Aweber is an auto responder service whereby readers will subscribe to your list and you can write to them directly as you have their email address. It costs around $19 per month, but I honestly believe it is worth the investment as it will dramatically increase your subscriber list in the shortest time possible. As your list grows you pay extra, for example I am currently paying $50 per month as I have nearly 10,000 subscribers from various other lists as well.

With Aweber they have a feature where you can make your own subscriber box like the one time subscriber box I have on my site:

 

A lot of people don't like these pop ups, however it only shows with a first time visitor. So if you are going to get people passing through, you might as well show them this box and increase your subscriber count.

You will notice I have an offer to entice the first time reader to sign up, free ebooks worth $39. The ebooks are just 'best of' posts from my blog and turned into an ebook.

This pop up box, which I implemented in June 2010, is responsible for a 300% increase in my daily subscriber count, which went from around 13 per day to 40 per day from the day I started using it.
Once you have someone's email address and they have opted in to receive emails from you they are added to your subscriber count.

You can then start sending them emails about your blogs posts, your ebooks you have for sale, and just generally keep in touch with them and offer them great value to keep them subscribed.

Whenever I am thinking about producing an ebook, such as the one you are reading just now, I ask my list their thoughts about it and what is their biggest issues they have around a particular topic. In return I will offer the ebook for free or half price just for being on my list.

Imagine being able to write out 1 email, which may take you 10 minutes to write, and have it sent out to 4,100 people with the click of a button. This is the power of Aweber. Internet marketers have a saying 'The money is in the list' and it's is very true, if you have a large list of subscribers via aweber you can sell to them quality products and make money with your products or affiliate products.

You can't do this with RSS as you don't really know who is subscribed to you and you can only talk to them via the medium they signed up with i.e. your blog. We will talk a little about RSS email subscriptions which has a little more control.

You can of course sign up with another autoresponder service such as GetResponse to do your email marketing, however their stats are not included in your subscriber count automatically, I think there is some work on your part to integrate GetResponse to Feedburner.

#3 Join in a giveaway event

A great tactic to use to grow your subscribers is to participate in a giveaway event. A giveaway event is where you give away a free product to the visitors to your site, but you are part of a group of people offering free giveaways. For example, I participated in a giveaway event recently for selfhelpgiftsgiveaway.com and it was very successful, bringing in an extra 400 subscribers to my site and more importantly brining new readers to my blog.

Giveaway events fall into two categories: Particiaption giveway or organizing a giveaway event.

 

Particpation giveaway

This basically consists of finding a giveaway event to join and offering your free product to anyone who signs up. The power of this model is that everyone who participates emails out their list, or blogs about the event and their readers get to see your product and gets to sign up if they wish.

This is extremely powerful as you are compounding the number of readers to your site as you are joining forces with other bloggers readers.

 

Okay put it like this:

You offer a free ebook and blog about it. Say 5% of everyone who reads your blog signs up for the free ebook. So for every 1000 visitors to your site 50 people sign up for the ebook. So as long as you keep getting visitors to your site you will get readers signing up for your ebook.

Now imagine you have 200 bloggers blogging about the event and sending readers to your site.

So say out the 200 bloggers participating if they each send a small proportion of readers to your site (not everyone will come to your site from other bloggers). So every blogger sends 1000 readers to the event, so potentially 200,000 readers see your offer. Of that 200,000 a small percentage will click to your site to get your offer. Even if 0.25% of the 200,000 click to your site to sign up you have just gained 500 extra subscribers. This won't all happen in 1 day, typically a giveaway event last for 1 month, and if it's a big event you can gain a lot of subscribers simply by offering your free ebook.

The downside to giveaway events is that a lot of readers will unsubscribe once they have your free giveaway, but I still think it's a great tactic to grow your subscriber list. Organizing a giveaway event

 

Organizing a giveaway event can be much more lucrative in terms of growing your subscribers

However, there is a hell of a lot of work involved in organzing these events as you will need a website, a good giveaway script to manage the event and a few helpers helping out with the organization of this.

I have not, as yet, held a giveaway event as I think it is too much work to take on just now but you might be interested in this.

 

Finding giveaway events

 

This is quite simple to do.

 

Go to Google.com and type in (your niche) giveaway event

 

So for example if I want to find out about a self help giveaway event I would type in:

 

Self Help Giveaway event and I should get a few results.

 

Another way is to go to a prominent forum in your niche and ask about giveaway events.

As I said, giveaway events can be very lucrative but there are downsides and things you have to look out for. be careful to choose a well organized event as your readers will be put off by a poorly organized event.

Also a lot of readers will give false names and email addresses, but if you are using aweber as an autoresponder this should be minimized as it is a double opt in.

 

#4 Use other lists you already have

A lot of bloggers are also internet marketers and have various lists that they have marketed to in the past. For example before I sold all my websites, I had a binaural beats website which I used to sell various binaural beat products for personal development. I had a few free products that I could offer to readers. So I simply emailed out my binaural beats list of subscribers and told them if they would sign up to my personal development blog i would give them a few new binaural beat downloads for free.

This may seem a little crafty, but it worked, it brought an extra few hundred subscribers to the blog and a lot of them wrote to me to thank me as they didn't know about my blog previously, so everyone's a winner.

If you have a list of previous dead lists you can revitalize the list by giving them something for free, in their field of interest, in exchange for signing up to your blog.

#5 Help another blogger

 

This is another great way to grow your list.

 

It is a lot like a giveaway event, but it is much more personal and the power of a recommendation from someone you know will yield much higher results.

 

It works like this:

 

You know 4 bloggers, in your field, very well and you respect their work and know it's quality stuff.

They each have a list of 1000 email subscribers. So all in all between you, you have 5000 email subscribers. Once every two weeks for 10 weeks you each send out an email to your list advising that blogger friend 1 has a great ebook for free they can get for signing up to blogger friend 1s site. The subscribers on your list, because of your recommendation and the trust you have built up with them will go to blogger friends 1 site and sign up for the free ebook, increasing blogger friend 1s list size. You do this again in two weeks time saying blogger friend 2 has a great new ebook.

Meanwhile your blogger friends will be doing the same, so you will promoting each other in a circular fashion: Blogger friend 1 promotes blogger friend 2 who promotes blogger friend 3 etc etc

If the group of five of you in the circle do this for each other you can potentially grow your list by a few hundred each month. If you produce an ebook every 10 weeks you can start the process all over again. Or even better get a bigger group of blogger friends who you trust and promote their stuff whilst they promote yours.

I recently launched a product in which Sid Sivara, Jonathan wells and Dragos Roua promoted it to their lists and within the space of 2 weeks a brand new list grew from 0 to 700. That is the power of personal recommendations.

If you are going to do this make sure your ebook has some great quality and make it the best it can be, you don't want to get a reputation for putting out rubbish, as that reputation will last a long time.

#6 Building your tribe

 

Social Media can help you tremendously in your quest to grow blog subscribers. however you have to build your own following first using your blog.

To start building a tribe of loyal followers you have to get into the trenches and start interacting with your readers on all the platforms availabel. These platforms include:

Your Blog - reply to every single comment, answer every single email and write great content.

Twitter - Mix with the influencers in your field of interest and start conversing with them. They may not respond to you however their list of twitter followers will see your interactions with them and hopefully start following you.

Facebook - facebook has become a must for everyone trying to build their following. try and use facebook every day and 'like' other bloggers quality content as a way of rewarding your followers from Facebook.

Stumbleupon - This is not as big a traffic generator as it used to be, but it's still a great way to interact with your followers. I have more conversations with blogger friends on SU than I do with twitter or Facebook.

There are lots of new ways to interact with your readers and keeping up to date with the popular platforms is a must so I would suggest subscribing to somewhere like Mashable to keep up to date with all things techie.

Once you have a tribe of readers following you they will do a lot of the work in your promotional efforts such as digging, tweeting, facebooking, SUing, Buzzing etc.

#7 JV with the bloggers above you

You are a blogger who is on a ladder, where you are on the ladder depends on all the factors I've mentioned previously. To move yourself quicker up the ladder it's important you stay in touch with the ones who are a few rungs above you on that ladder.

A great way to do this is to interact with other 'higher rung' bloggers by commenting on their blogs, tweeting their posts and generally helping them out. You will get noticed and after a few months of doing this you can ask to help out in a bigger way.

If you see a blogger who is bringing out a new product you can write a complimentary report which you offer to them for free. So when 'Higher rung' blogger brings out his product he offers your complimentary report as a bonus.

You will need to make sure this report is top quality and has great information for the 'higher rung' blogger to even consider giving it away. You see their reputation is on the line, even though you are giving it to them for free, so it has to be great content.

Although you won't directly get subscribers from the free report you will get some new readers who have bought 'higher rung' blogger's product and downloaded your free report and consequently they come to your blog if they like what they read. If they like your blog they will subscribe.

Now, when the 'higher rung' blogger thinks of someone who might be able to help him produce his next product he might just come to you and ask you to help out. Now you have moved yourself up another rung of the ladder as the 'higher rung' blogger will tell his friends about a great blogger who gave him a quality free report, and they recommend you to help them out in some way, and the subscribers just keep coming.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE ... A HEADS-UP

Hopefully you have enjoyed reading this guide on building your blog subscriber list and you're itching to find out more information. I would like to give you a heads up about how I can help you.

If you want to build a great blog and build your subscriber list in the fastest possible time, then I think you might benefit from my one on one blog coaching lasting from 1 session to as many sessions as you want.

why not take a look and find out if I can help you at

 

www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/coaching