The Importance Of Subscribers

Building a list of subscribers to your blog is one of the best ways to increase the overall traffic to your site.  While there are several ways you could do this, one of my preferred methods is by giving my readers the ability to subscribe to my content either via email or an RSS feed.

Thanks to Google, there is a wonderful tool to do this called Feedburner.  I’ve actually done tutorials before on how to install Feedburner on your WordPress site.  It’s pretty easy to set up and can prove to be rather rewarding as you can see by Feedburner showing up twice in my top 10 sources of traffic to my website according to Google Analytics.

Also, what I have noticed is a steady climb in overall traffic to my site on a daily basis.  I truly believe that one of the main reasons for this increase is attributed to the increase in numbers of subscribers to my website via email or RSS.

Tips To Build Your Subscriber List

Getting a large group of subscribers is not always the easiest thing to do.  It definitely isn’t something that can happen overnight.  Here are a few simple tips to building your subscriber list.

1.  Make it simple to subscribe.  Feedburner does this very well by making the opt-in form as simple as can be.  Readers simply add their email address to the Feedburner widget on the right side of my page.  Feedburner will then send an email to confirm and they are now subscribed via email.  From that point forward, whenever I write a new blog post, readers will receive it directly in your inbox.

If the subscription process asks for their name, email, phone number, and name of their first child, the chances of someone filling out the form will go down exponentially.  Remember, this isn’t gathering contacts for your database, this is simply growing the readership of your blog by giving readers an easier way to get your content.

2.  Ask people more than once without being annoying.  When I first added Feedburner to my site, I only had it on the sidebar of my site in the widget section.  I’d get a few people who would sign up for it each month, but it never seemed to pick up that many.

Then, one day I added a simple link into the footer of my blog posts that gives readers the ability to subscribe again.  The moment I did that, my subscribers started increasing at a much more rapid pace.  So, offering the ability to subscribe more than once can be rather beneficial.

What you do not want to do though is become spammy with it and turn into a total annoyance.  Skip the pop-ups, and don’t put the link every other paragraph of your post.

3.  Say it in a way that makes sense.  When I first set up subscriptions to my blog, I had it simply set as an RSS feed and posted it as such.  It said “subscribe via RSS.”  Then one day as I was thinking about ways to make my site more user friendly I realized that probably 80% of consumers have no clue what an RSS feed is or what it does.  So, I changed the text & option over to something that would make more sense.  Once I changed everything to say, “subscribe via email” more readers began subscribing to my blog.

So, if you do not have a simple way for readers to subscribe to your blog, you may want to set up Feedburner now.  The benefits of having a large group of subscribers to your blog is tremendous.