While many bloggers focus primarily on RSS feeds, there’s still a lot to be said for good old fashioned newsletters. Not only are many web users unfamiliar with the intricacies of RSS feeds, many business owners also argue that when it comes to product promotions, emails lead to higher conversion rates. Regardless of where you stand in the RSS v email debate, one thing should be certain, it cannot harm your blog to offer your visitors both. Here are ten tips for getting your readers to both sign up to your newsletters and to continue reading them.
Don’t Waste Time
Many bloggers make the mistake of waiting until their traffic builds up before they begin to worry about getting subscribers. This is foolish for a number of reasons, with the biggest reason being that getting subscribers early on can help to build your initial following. You should therefore be inviting your blogs visitors to sign up from day one.
Everyone Likes Free Stuff
You might have noticed that many bloggers offer visitors to their blog a free gift in return for becoming a subscriber. The reason for this is simple, it works. You don’t need to come up with anything spectacular, an e book with a couple of pages of useful content is generally all that is required.
Reward Subscribers with Exclusive Content
Another bribe like means of increasing your subscriber numbers is posting exclusive content. The idea is very simple. You write a great post but you only allow the public to see the introduction. To access the rest of the post, visitors must either log in or become a subscriber. While subscriber exclusive content is certainly effective, it’s important to use it sparingly. Forcing visitors to log in to read your posts is the very opposite of usability.
Use a Pop Up (Sparingly)
Pop ups are well known to be highly effective when it comes to building a healthy list of subscribers. This is because a well designed pop up combined with an attractive free gift is often very difficult to resist. On the other hand however, poorly designed pop ups rarely lead to anything other than irritation. Therefore utilize pop ups, but be very careful about both their appearance and the frequency that they appear.
Utilize Social Media
Social networks are not only incredibly useful when it comes to promoting your blog, they are also incredibly useful when it comes to increasing your subscriber count. In between updates about your blog and those necessary updates about other peoples blogs, let your followers know about why they should subscribe to receive email updates from you. And don’t forget to include a direct link to your sign up page.
Less is More
If there’s one thing that can really kill your subscriber numbers, it’s sending out too many emails. Nobody likes to receive endless updates from any blog and sending out too many emails can easily make you look like a spammer. You should focus on quality, not quantity. And unless you happen to be posting new content on a daily basis, this means only contacting your subscribers once a week at most.
Always Make Your Identity Known
When emailing your subscribers, always make it clear both who you are and why you are emailing them i.e. they signed up. Your emails should include your blogs logo and they should be consistent with your blogs style and color scheme. If your subscribers don’t immediately associate your newsletter with your blog, they aren’t going to remain subscribers for long.
Keep on Topic
When somebody signs up to receive emails from you, they are signing up to receive information on a specific topic, nothing else. You can’t post cat articles on a tech blog and the same applies to newsletters. If you promise your subscribers information on a specific topic, keep the focus of your newsletters strictly on that topic.
Be Careful What You Promise
When writing your newsletters, be careful about the promises that you make. Of course, you want to make sure that readers of your newsletter both visit your blog and continue to subscribe but empty promises are only going to hurt you in the long term. Don’t promise anything regarding your blog or your future newsletters unless you are certain that you can delver.
Be Careful When Selling
Aside from increasing your blogs traffic, the primary benefit of having a lot of subscribers is that occasionally you can attempt to sell to them. While sending promotional emails is certainly profitable, it’s important to remember two rules when doing so.
- First off, ninety five percent of what you send your subscribers shouldn’t be promoting anything other than your blog.
- Secondly, choose your promotions wisely. Never attempt to sell your subscribers anything that’s unrelated to your blogs niche. And never attempt to sell anything that you don’t personally believe that your readers will benefit from.
These tips were shared with us by guest blogger Tom Koh. Tom is an internet marketer with many years of successful marketing career with Fortune 500 companies. He shares ideas and tips to help you bring traffic to your website. He has written many internet marketing posts and articles on his blogs and he has also contributed to many leading online marketing blogs as a guest blogger.