Do you feel like your blog views are minimal? Would you like to get more dedicated subscribers who sign up for your email lists and buy from you? In a thorough, soup-to-nuts guide, The Blog Starter has some good tips for promoting your blog. This is important if you plan on monetizing your blog in the future.
If you just start optimizing your blog, you might not reach that goal. There is an art to growing your following, and it’s multi-faceted. If you want more blog subscribers, here’s what you need to do.
Dive Deep Into Market Research
Market research is the most fundamental aspect of any marketing strategy. How well do you know your market? Who is your ideal blog reader? If you don’t know much about who reads your blog and who might be interested in your content, it’s time to get back to basics.
Although companies with large budgets often use surveys and hold focus groups to gain insight, some of the best market research will come from getting involved in the social spaces related to your niche.
For instance, join some subreddits and see what people are talking about, what matters to them, and what they want most. Once you have this information, assess whether or not your content meets their needs. If not, you’ll have a better idea of where to take your content in order to increase your subscriber base.
If you find that the market you’ve been targeting is a mismatch to your content, adjust your market until you get it right.
Focus on Converting Existing Traffic Before You Scale
Before embarking on a quest to get more subscribers, your energy might be better spent working on converting existing traffic first. If you have any amount of decent traffic, your fundamental problem may not be a lack of subscribers. Either you’re targeting the wrong market and they aren’t interested in your content, or your content isn’t persuasive enough to get signups and subscriptions.
The easiest way to find out is to look at your stats and see what your visitors are doing. If they land and bounce fast, you’re probably targeting the wrong market. If they check out your content for a bit and just never sign up for your email list, you probably need a better lead magnet and call to action.
Take a good, honest look at your lead magnet to see if it’s interesting enough for someone to give you their email address. If the title isn’t that enticing, make it as irresistible as possible.
Stop Posting Links to Your Blog on Twitter
If you’re posting links to social media to get people to read and subscribe, it’s probably not going to work, especially on Twitter. This might come as a shock, but unless you have a massive following and people already can’t get enough of your content, your links will just go into a black hole.
People on Twitter want to read interesting content as they scroll. If they have to click a link to get your content, they won’t. To see how true this is, Hootsuite ran a study and found 75% of their best performing posts had no links, no CTAs, and were just purely helpful information. They also concluded that Twitter’s algorithm actually suppresses Tweets with external links. This makes sense because links take people off the platform.
Instead of posting links to your blog all over the place, take a more calculated approach and choose a platform that you can commit to using in a way that works for its users. For instance, you can post links and quality content on Facebook. You can even start a discussion group for your niche. However, Twitter is better when you can commit to just sharing information without turning your posts into a CTA.
Cover Your Niche Better Than the Rest
If you’ve dreamed of dominating your niche, now’s the time. When you start covering topics better and more thoroughly than your competitors, you’ll get some of their traffic, too. Your subscriber base will naturally grow larger because you’ll become an authority.
Hold raffles and fun contests for subscribers
To be a little different, why not host monthly raffles for dedicated subscribers? Have them earn their entry tickets by finding hidden messages in your content to prove they’re actually reading your stuff.
Subscribers are great; conversions are better
At the end of the day, it’s wonderful if you can get a ton of subscribers. However, if your end goal is to get conversions, make sure you focus on conversions as much as traffic. Traffic stats can be impressive, but only conversions will pay the bills.
Featured image provided by Andrew Neel; Unsplash; Thanks!
