About Steven AitchisonDramatically increase your subscriber numbers
I have embarked on a journey of gaining readers for my blog. I have had the blog since August 2006 and up until March 2007 I had 189 RSS Subscribers. I was looking at a fellow PBN Members blog www.zenhabits.net and noticed he was up to about 7000 subscribers in a very short space of time. I was happy with gaining about 10 subscribers per week and Leo was getting about 500 – 800 new subscribers per week. This blew my mind and I had to find out what to do to gain more subscribers.
The first thing I did was write to Leo from www.zenhabits.net and
congratulated him on his phenomenal success. He shared a few secrets with the PBN network and I think all concerned have gone on to raise our game on the subscriber front.
So for the last 4 weeks I set a goal to raise my subscriber numbers by 100 per week. I have gone from 189 subscribers to 638 (peak) subscribers on May 23. It goes up and down but it is stable at about 600 just now.
Here are the 5 ways to get your subscriber numbers up
Quality Content
It goes without saying that what you write has to give something back to thereader. If your articles are not up to scratch and you are not giving anything on a regular basis you will not get the readers or subscribers in.
To write quality articles read quality blogs and articles and get a feel for what other people are writing in your niche. You are now talking about competing with the big guns in your niche as you will soon have over 500 subscribers if you follow the plan below.
Traffic
It’s all about getting the traffic in. If you get the traffic in you’ll get the new subscribers in. The way to do this is to use the social media sites:
Netscape
Digg
Reddit
Stumbleupon
Delicious
MyBlogLog
That’s the only ones you’ll ever need to use. There are new ones coming out all the time and no doubt they will take over. The likes of reddit and Digg are already dropping in popularity but they are still very useful in helping your traffic.
Sign up with all the sites mentioned above and start socialising in them. Take 1 week to build up your friends and submit quality articles to all of them. You can have a stumbleupon toolbar which makes it easy to stumble articles. You can also use the social bookmark icons on nearly all blog posts; again this makes it easy to submit articles to the sites. At this point do not submit any of your own articles unless you have been using the sites for a while.
It is very important to build up your friends lists and submit articles. Make a point of submitting for an hour every day for 1 week (believe me it well be well worth your time after the week).
As you continue to build up your friend lists on these sites, continue to write your articles and post them as usual and resist the temptation to submit your articles to any of these sites.
What you are doing is building credibility. Can you really do this in 1 week? A little credibility is better than no credibility.
Great headlines
Having a great headline can dramatically increase your traffic from the search engines in the short term and the long term. Consider the two headlines:
Getting more subscribers
How to get 500 RSS subscribers per month
What one grabs you the most? Consider what your readers will search for when you are writing your article. Some friends www.askdanandjennifer.com recommended an eBook from Joe Vitale called Hypnotic headlines which I read and thought was a great book for any blogger to read. It gives some great advice about drwaing readers in and wanting to make them read more. Consider
the two headlines above again and you can see instantly which one you would click on. Also you’ll notice that one of them looks like a bigger font size, this is not the case, the bottom headline is capitalised which therefore gives the illusion of larger font, this also draws the readers eyes to the text much more.
Look at the headlines in your blog and think about how you could reword them to make them more appealing to your readers. Better yet why not leave a comment with a post title and ask the readers to change it to make it more appealing.
One great way of getting headlines and finding what people are searching for is enlisting the help of Google.
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in a few keywords you are considering using for your title. You can look at the previous months search volume to get an idea of searches that are being conducted on a particular keyword. This is only for search engine traffic, but it’s a great way to write sustainable posts that will have a long tail effect.
Enlist the help of your friends
Everybody else is doing it and if you want to get more readers and subscribers this is the way to do it. If you don’t have friends ask bloggers from your niche to take a look at some of your posts and ask them to submit them to the social sites and you could do the same for them.
I have helped friends get over 5000 visitors in just because I stumbled his article. I have to say I love Stumble the best as it is the easiest and most unobtrusive site to use.
Consider joining or setting up a community of like minded bloggers. This way you can help each other out. However be careful when doing this as you could get banned if all your are doing is submitting your friends sites. Make sure you continue the practice of submitting quality sites to all the sites above and you should be okay.
SEO
This is another often overlooked area of writing articles on your blog. Make sure they are optimised for the search engines. Use 7 – 15 keywords for every single blogpost your write. There are widgets and plugins for most blog platforms now to be able to do this with ease.
You can also use Meta tags in your posts which will hep in the long run when spiders crawl your site, although some say this is not quite as useful as it once was. However I feel this is coming back into fashion.
The 4 week challenge
This is only a short version of what I was going to write and had another few thousand words to go into more detail about getting more subscribers, but I will leave that for an eBook.
Why not take the 4 week challenge and use the exalt method above and share with us how you got on. Remember if you have never used the social sites mentioned do not submit any of your own posts until you have built up some credibility.
If you like this post why not submit it to your favourite social bookmarking site.
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Thanks Steven for these great ideas. I m now starting to get some nice numbers of hits as each month is doubling. I need ideas where to go next. I will use your ideas and maybe join with others as you suggest. I haven’t been by your blog recently and boy I have been missing out.
Keep up the great stuff. I so much appreciate what you are doing and the quality of it and you,
Joseph
Congratulations Steven! Your success is empowering!
I’m eagerly taking up your challenge…and I took it up a notch (or 2). Hope you like my changes enough to be My Friend…
Details here!
Great post Steven. I’ll definitely be incorporating some of these ideas in my quest to increase subscribers!
I’ve been trying to do all these things and I’ve been seeing 100% upto 1000% increase in traffic and subscribers. My actual numbers are still not huge, but every day things are increasing and I know it’s a result of focus mainly on quality content, consistent posting frequency, and some rallying of my online buddies for some social network support.
I you’re interested in reciprocal support, come on over and visit anytime and let me know if you need a vote somewhere. Best regards.
Hi Jospeh
Thank you for coming back to the blog it nice to have you here. I hope you blog is doing well? keep in touch.
Ponn, I hope it goes well for you. I know you will get there using this method, let me know if you need any help.
Heather thanks for the link.
Agent Sully, I can always count on you. let me know if you need any help.
MrRich, thanks for linking to this post.
Hi Ed
You’ve got a great blog, I don’t think you’ll have to try very hard to get your subscriber numbers up.
Thanks Steven. I must admit, the thought of adding – or finding – 1-hour a day is a bit daunting. But it’s obviously paying off for you! Great work and great blog.
Hi Steven!
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
I must say one of my biggest pet peeves about these sites is their lack of ability to find ‘friends’ easily. Therefore, I modified your challenge by adding and asking others to join my networks by placing my profiles directly in my post.
For example, I could only find you at StumbleUpon, no where else…I’d love if you hop over to my challenge and offer your “friend”ship by joining us!
Just by this post, I met Heather and Sully and we’re sharing our “friend”-ships everywhere with extra pats on our backs along the way, so thank you for making this forum so welcoming!
Ed and I have been friends for a while…but we’ve even had troubles finding one another at each site.
I look forward to hoping over to Marco’s now
I’m determined to keep our “networks” alive and open for all our readers to join in.
A quick ‘digg’ would be much obliged…only because you asked
Great tips – I’ll definately be back to read more from your blog. I found this on stumbleupon… I think that its a great start.
Those are some good ideas. In my experience it takes longer than a few weeks to build credibility on Digg. About half of the page 1 articles are submitted by a core of 100 or so members who have been since the beginning. I have been commenting and voting on other stories (while adding my own posts every now and then) for a month or so. Most of my submissions get about 10 or so Diggs, which is gradually increasing but no page 1s yet.
Nice story and it’s obviously worked well for you.
I’m upto around 400 subscribers at the moment but would like to get to 500+ before the end of the year.
Hi Steven,
Consider this stumbled.
Also, I will be adding you to my main website. Keep up the great work!
Cheers,
Jeremy
Some very good and interesting ideas and keep up the good work.
This a good post, a long read but a well-deserved read after all. You have interesting ideas that i would like to follow. I’m on for the 4 weeks challenge!
This is a great reminder that we can only control ourselves, not others. So, while someone may give us harsh negative feedback, we still have the ability to be graceful in our response.
Just stumbled across your blog and this article. Interesting info and will give your 4 week challende a go at start of November. Don’t have a target figure in mind and as new to it think each one gained at the start would be an achievement.
I have had some problems getting people to register to my Blog via RSS, which is visible and has always been there. However they register using the WordPress Registration link, which is almost hidden. But for some reason they don’t register to my RSS. Strange case.
I always wonder how is it possible that some sites have 4000 subscribers, when I can’t even dream with 1/10 of that.
I will try to implement these tips for sure, but I feel those sites have some kind of secrets to have a huge number of subscribers.
BTW Very Good Article,
Alex.
.-= Alex´s last blog ..Patagonia Theme and WordPress MU =-.
You have interesting ideas that i would like to follow. My actual numbers are still not huge, but every day things are increasing and I know it’s a result of focus mainly on quality content, consistent posting frequency, and some rallying of my online buddies for some social network support
.-= Mayweather´s last blog ..‘Look Of Love’ – Mayweather and Mosley pair of gagsters =-.
Thanks for the great post. I have one reader and that’s all. Can you give me any further guidance. I have signed up for DIGG, Technorati, etc and nothing has changed. Pretty pathetic huh? Thanks for your help.
You can also use Meta tags in your posts which will hep in the long run when
spiders crawl your site, although some say this is not quite as useful as it
once was.
Very useful post. I’m going to start giving these ideas a go straight away.
Hello Steven,
no doubt this is an great article. This can be almost converted into a 5-10 page white paper!! Although I have to admit I knew all this already and have learned the same techniques from few other other blogs over the past few day, while i’m searching for How to increase Feed Subscriber, but your this blog pretty much consolidates everything at one place!
Thanks for spending time on such a great effort!