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How To Increase Your Blogs Email Subscribers by 1,833%

Written by - 19 Comments
Categories: Blog, Blogging, Email Marketing

I have recently upgraded my blog and added new features as part of a continual optimization of the platform. Optimizing is a journey and not a destination and adding new features such as Retweet buttonsHow To Increase Your Blogs Subscribers by 1,833% and Facebook share are some of the elements that can make a big difference.

Part of the fun of tweaking the blog is measuring the before and after figures to traffic and subscriber numbers. Different strategies will produce varying degrees of  success and part of the challenge is to implement the options that provide the biggest benefit for the least amount of effort .

In a recent post “How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 55% with One Button” (shortly after transferring my blog from WordPress.com to a self hosted platform on Hostmonster)  I wrote about how effective a ReTweet button had been by measuring the difference in the blogs traffic before the addition of the feature compared to after.

One of the marketing tools that most blogs and websites use to spread their content and continually market their services is to build up a list of email and RSS subscribers that you use for newsletters, announce special offers and launch new products. Most blogs have a passive feature that is mostly in the right panel near the top of the website that provides a subscribe option for readers. This feature on my blog is powered by Feedburner which is a free service and also provides a RSS subscriber option as well. As a blogger I am always looking at what the top bloggers are doing and trialling as they continue to evolve their blogs and increase their traffic and subscribers.

The latest and so far successful addition I have just added to this blog is an email service provided by Aweber. One of the features of this is that you can provide a ‘Lightbox’ option to your blog once you have setup the service. The Lightbox feature is a fade in box that offers a free eBook or Guide to people for subscribing  to the blog, this can be setup to appear every time someone views a post or page or it can be customized so that it only appears every ‘X’ days ( I currently have it set at 7 days).

To make the strategy effective you will need to offer a free eBook or Guide as part of this feature. So far the email subscription rate on this blog is up by 1,833%!!

What that effectively means is that I am increasing the same number of subscribers in  two days that used to take me one month. It is early days but I think it something worth considering.


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  • http://oooooozoooooone.com Fatin

    Effectively, so many widgets are so important to be added to a blog , the most common ones are RETWEET & SHARE buttons that most bloggers now have an general idea about it but still so many of us ignore some of the stuff for promoting blogs same Rss feed & aweber & others which can bring a good traffic to our website !
    Excellent article, waiting for more similar issues that can help for gaining followers .
    Thanks a lot :)

  • http://www.TheFranchiseKingBlog.com Joel Libava

    Jeff,

    I started to use Aweber about 6 months ago, and I like it a lot.

    A friend of mine (@JonathanFields) was critiquing a landing page for me, a while back, and it included a fade-in email sign-up box.

    He said that “it was too aggressive.”

    Now, it was for an informational product, not for my blog.

    I trust his judgment. He’s a smart guy.

    Could you be unwittingly scaring some folks off, even though your sub rate is getting a lot better?

    Thanks!

    The Franchise King®

  • http://www.toddweisscfa.com ToddWeissCFA

    Thanks for the post Jeff. You’re definitely on top of the game in terms of blog traffic. These tips are very helpful. I have been making a few tweaks since launching my blog to improve traffic. I will definitely check this out.

  • http://www.melodylealamb.com Melody Lamb

    Great tips Jeff! I love the simplicity and clarity of your blog. I agree that SEO is a process, ongoing and (to me) allot of fun! I see the grooming of my online presence rather like a garden… SEO requires pruning, trimming, nurturing, adjusting and tending daily!

  • http://RichardBejah.com Richard Bejah

    Great idea.. I used Aweber about 12 months ago… but stopped as I wasn’t involved in any online business that needed it. I regret that I closed the account as I lost all my leads! Not a good thing to happen I can assure you. VERY EFFECTIVE and certainly is a valuable to increase the number of contacts or leads that you have…. VERY EFFECTIVE and GREAT POST! RICH :0)

  • http://seohandle.com alamin

    You cannot believe how long ive been looking for something like this. Browsed through 10 pages of Yahoo results without finding anything. One search on Bing. There this is…. Really gotta start using that more often

    Thanks
    Md.Alamin Khan

  • Pingback: How To Increase Your Blogs Email Subscribers by 1,833% - Bobst Marketing

  • http://annalaurabrown.com AnnaLaura Brown

    I actually use Get Response for my autoresponder as well as pop-up domination which is a paid plugin for wordpress. They work just as well and yes my subscribers have gone up quite a bit too.

  • http://www.unleashingthetiger.com Dean Carlton

    Wow, I have been considering using Aweber for a while now, and those numbers are impressive Jeff – so I think that may be sufficient justification to make me take the plunge!

    Thanks – as ever!

  • http://twitter.com/orangewalk Amy Middleton

    Is this still working for you? I’m seeing those lightbox popups all over the place and I won’t fill them out on principle. Curious how it’s going.

    • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

      Thanks for the question Amy. The lightbox does work, I added over 1,000 email subscribers in a very quick time but I had a technical issue that caused it to create a bug when viewing my blog in Internet Explorer but I will have it up again shortly

  • Diane Noboa

    I´m checking Aweber out as I write this comment. Thanks for the tip. I was also considering Constant Contact as an option to manage subscribers, what´s your take?

    • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

      Thanks for your comment and question Diane. I have not used Constant Contact but the top bloggers have found Aweber very flexible and powerful. Eg Copyblogger.com, Social Media Examiner and John Chow and I am ramping up my skills and use of the platform.

  • http://twitter.com/niquefoture Dominika Turek

    I would also suggest RSS Graffiti which shares your blog posts to Facebook page right after you publish them online. I wrote about few useful tools that will make your site more sociala http://goo.gl/xvOPz

    • http://twitter.com/natedevore Nate Devore

      I am curious what you think of using automated serves like RSS Graffiti or dlvr.it vs posting manually? In terms of engagement and people reached? Thanks!

      • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

        Automate your distribution of your content if you can and where it is appropriate and engage as a human!

  • http://about.me/kringas Nick Kringas

    I have used the popup domination plugin (not free), which sounds exactly like the aweber lightbox option, and have seen similar results.
    Aweber is the autoresponder of choice for so top Internet marketers.

    Thanks for sharing.

    ps. You have to be one of the best headline writers on Twitter!

    • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

      Thanks for the comment and the heads up on the plugin. Oh yes…thanks for kind compliment!

  • http://creativeagencysecrets.com/ Rebecca Caroe

    Beware of migrating your list to AWeber – they force subscribers to re-confirm their subscription and you’ll loose heaps of emails in the move.

    I use FeedBlitz.com for both RSS, RSS to email and Autoresponder distribution for my blog(s) as it’s designed for bloggers.