Today, my friend Vivek was having a chat with me on the phone and asked a common however, a difficult question – “how many blog subscribers do you have and how to increase the subscriber base?” The first part of the question is not difficult at all, as I can easily track my subscriber base with the help of Feedburner and currently this blog’s subscriber base hovers between 920-950 subscribers. It is the second part of the question that is slightly difficult to answer as it has been already answered by most of the professional bloggers who have more than 50,000 subscribers.
It may sound like that we don’t have many subscribers however, I’ve really not done enough work on this blog to gain that many subscribers too. I’ve just stuck to basics that I’m putting here and will also put other practical tips that other bloggers have used to ensure that they get more and more number of subscribers.
Increase your blog subscriber base
1. Niche blogs enjoy more number of subscribers – It has been noticed that if you have a blog on one particular topic/subject then you’d definitely get more number of bloggers. Blog Design Studio focuses specifically on WordPress & Blogging related tips and that’s why we’ve got these many subscribers and that too without much efforts.
2. Write posts regularly – I’ve kept a low pace of posts on this blog and normally I post not more than 4-5 posts in a week. Although, I’ve got plans to post more and more posts on it as I’ve noticed that the more posts you publish, you’d attract more subscribers as most of the subscribers are interested in a particular topic and want more and more information about it.
3. Don’t forget to add the value in the posts – If you really want to increase the subscriber base, then you should ask these questions every time you decide to write a blog post -
- Will this add value for my subscribers?
- Will this post serve the purpose for the new visitor and will it make sense to them?
- Am I bringing a new perspective to this news?
The moment you’ll take care of these questions in your blog post, you’ll definitely churn out a high quality post that’ll attract readers and in turn they’ll become the subscribers. If there is any blog that I’d consider
4. Good marketing is a must – I’ve seen many wonderful posts that deserve digg front page or retweets that Mashable attracts, however they don’t have good number of subscribers. Why is that? The answer is “they lack good marketing”! I’m working on it, so I won’t be the best person however, I’ll list out common stuff, quotes, links from other famous and popular bloggers -
4a) 30 web design seo tips for web masters (also true for bloggers).
4b) How to market your blog in 2007 (its true in 2009 and will be true in coming years as well)
4c) Hit Digg’s front page by writing killer headlines.
4d) It’s important to be in touch and network with bloggers. You’d see that most of the tips will be around latest and “IN” thing of the year. Be active on most of the social networks, however focus mainly on one of them (you’d have to find out which one is easy to use and the one which is working for you).
Remember these wonderful lines by Darren (my blogging guru) -
20 minutes onTwitter, 5 minutes on MySpace, 20 minutes reading other blogs on Google Reader, 30 minutes checking out photos of friends on Facebook, 20 minutes checking out the latest threads on our favorite forums, back to Twitter for 20 minutes, 15 minutes following links we found on Digg……..
It’s easy to get to the end of the day and wonder what it was that we really achieved. We aimlessly drift around the web and have very little to show for the time we spend.
5. Blog design plays an important role too – One of the key reasons due to which we’ve got a decent subscriber base is that we have a good blog design and we focused in ensuring that the readers should see the subscribing options at important places. Check out these posts to find out that the role of a blog design in increasing the subscriber base -
5a) “Who sees ads” trick increased email subscriber base by 180%.
5b) How to increase subscribers by 50% in 30 days.
By good blog design, I don’t mean visually appealing and jazzy graphics! By good blog design, I mean that it the navigation should be easy and important things should be placed well in the sidebar and should be above the fold. Any good blog designer will work on those elements for you if you’ll tell them about your blog strategy of increasing the subscriber base.
I think if you would follow what I’ve written above and what you’d read in the links that I’ve mentioned in this blog post, you’d really be able to increase the blog subscriber base to the level you want to see. There is no other rocket science involved and no computer algorithms are required! It’s pretty simple and yet complicated, so the choice is yours! Don’t lose your focus and keep blogging with a plan in mind and you’d be one of popular blogger on charts!
yes! these are great.