Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant

10 ways to turn new blog visitors into subscribers

Apr 17, 2008 Blogging

Getting a person to your blog for the first time is hard enough work as it is, but what can you do to encourage those readers to come back for a second (and third and fourth) visit in the coming days or weeks? There are some simple things you can do to encourage new blog visitors to feel at home so that they subscribe, return and participate in your blog.

First impressions
As much as we hate to admit it, first impressions count. Make sure your font is large enough - and “normal” enough - to be read easily. Make sure you have a clean yet unique design… one that people can identify as yours, even without seeing the URL. I have been to blogs where the content was decent but I was completely turned off by what it looked like. Black background and red text? No thanks.

Remind people to subscribe
Not only should you make it obvious and noticeable for people to subscribe, you should also hit them up with an RSS reminder at the end of each post. Look at the bottom of this entry to see how I do it… and be sure to subscribe while you are at it

Subscribing Made Easy
First, make it easy to subscribe to your blog and give them lots of ways to subscribe. Offer standard RSS feed links, but also offer quick links for adding to Bloglines, Google Reader and the other main RSS services (more on this below) to make the subscription process as painless as possible for frequent RSS readers. And whatever you do, don’t make people fill out a survey to get the feed link like one recent blog wanted me to do. Yes, the information can be useful for advertisers, but that blog lost at least one subscriber because of it, and likely many others. Always be sure to have your subscription options in the sidebar of your blog, and make sure it is on every page, not just the index page.

Offer solutions for subsciber reading preferences
Perhaps you have plenty of potential Google Reader, Feedburner or Bloglines subscribers. Make sure you offer quick buttons so that your visitors can subscribe to a variety of services quickly and easily. Feedbutton is one way to do it, rollover to see it in action:

Email subscriptions
Especially if your blog is in a market area where you have readers that have no idea what an RSS reader is, or what RSS is, offer to send new posts via email. This will enable you to make those who aren’t RSS savvy to keep updated with your new blog posts, which will make them return visitors.

Engaging
Comments are not just for visitors, they are for the blog writer too. If someone asks a question in your comments, answer it within the comments. If a new visitor has made a thoughtful comment, reply back to it, even if it didn’t require an answer per se. Visitors love to be engaged by the authors and this personal contact - albiet in a public form - will be remembered by many of those visitors. You can also make it obvious you are responding in the comments by making your comments a different color so they are easily identifiable. Major Nelson’s XBox blog is a perfect example, and it makes it easy to scan through the comments to see where he has responded, as his comments are in green. Likewise, don’t consistently ignore the oldtimers either just because they are regulars. They can easily find somewhere else to go to get their daily dose of whatever you are providing.

Showcase your most interesting blog posts
Many have posts that are way more popular than others. Be sure to include your top blog posts, or even just your favorite ones if you don’t have enough traffic yet. The blog post that brought that visitor initially might not have been enough to convince that reader to subscribe, but maybe the blog post you did a year and a half ago that you list in your sidebar is the one that will make him or her subscribe. There are many WP plugins that do this, I will be adding one shortly now that this blog is all WP 2.5 happy Not sure what you reader favorites are? Do a post with your top 10-20 blog posts and ask readers which 3-5 should be listed in the sidebar.

Offer a freebie or make a contest
Really want to get a lot of subscribers quickly? Give people an incentive for subscribing, whether it is a free ebook, report or whitepaper, or do a contest with prized which is based upon getting new subscribers. Shoemoney & John Chow held a contest with over $13,000 in donated prizes. I have seen others offer free books, t-shirts and even iPods. So think about what you have to offer that people might want and gain subscribers that way.

Make sure you write often enough
If people land on your blog homepage and see 2007 (or worse, even earlier!) as the most recent blog post, they are much less likely to subscribe. So make sure you write consistently, and if you can’t, try writing some blog entries that will still be relevant a month from now that you can set to automatically post in the coming weeks when you will be sitting on a beach in Hawaii instead of at your desk.

Make sure you have auto-discover feeds enabled
This means if someone goes to your homepage - www.jenniferslegg.com for example - in Firefox, you will see an RSS icon appear on the right side of the address bar, showing that Firefox was able to find my RSS feed right from the homepage. In IE7, the RSS icon will change to orange on the right side (placed between the home button and the print button). And also make sure it is pointing to the correct feed

Need help doing some of these things? I have more detail on how to make subscribing easy, how to highlight your own comments, how to add additional RSS buttons, etc in my post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break

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