5 Top Tips For SEO

When bigger businesses tighten their grip on the web, it’s imperative that smaller businesses do anything and everything they can to get noticed. This is where search engine optimization can help. More commonly referred to as SEO, search engine optimization does exactly that, in that its primary goal is to optimize your website to make it easier for search engines to find.

There are a number of different elements in SEO, and whole careers have been spent analyzing and perfecting them. But if you’re new to SEO, there are five things you can do right now that will instantly improve your website’s visibility.

1. Use web analytic s
In order to measure the success of your SEO endeavors, you need to be signed up to a web analytics program such as Google Analytics. This free, web-based analytics program allows you to track activity on your website, such as counting visitors, how long they spend there and what keywords they searched for which brought them to your site. Doing this allows you to streamline your SEO, narrowing your focus to the most popular keyword searches or the most profitable traffic sources.

2. Keyword density and prominence
The thing to ask when choosing keywords is - what words would you use to search for your company? There a number of keyword density and prominence analysers available for free online which allow you to input possible keywords and assess their potential based on their search regularity. You should throw all your weight behind these particular keywords in order to build up your search engine popularity.

3. Edit page titles
The title of your web pages (the words or phrases at the very top) are the key to how relevant the page is to the keywords being searched. When your web page appears in a Google search, the words in your title will be the words that comprise the blue underlined link. Titles should be not only be relevant to the content that is on the page, but should be designed to achieve maximum search engine visibility when combined with keyword density and prominence in the body of the text.

4. Build quality links
In SEO, the amount of back-links you can acquire is essentially currency for search engine visibility. A search engine judges the importance and relevance of a website on the amount of links it has pointing to it and the quality of these links. This long process can be put in motion by submitting your company details to as many free directories as you can. Quality links will come in time, but in the mean time it’s essential that your company is linked to from as many relevant sources as possible.

5. Include your company details
If you add your company name, address and contact number to your website in a universally accepted format, search engines that trawl web pages are more likely to extract the information and add it to their databases. A verified address and contact number will also ensure your site isn’t ignored as a questionable source.

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

You know from the 80/20 Rule of Headlines that the best way to get your writing read is to improve your headline. It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most people, even among those who subscribe to your blog, are not reading every post, but it’s not just you — it happens to us all.

So what was it about the headline of this post that got you to read this far?

Well, it’s not only that the headline makes a promise to deliver unique and useful information to my audience of bloggers. It’s also the way that it makes that promise.

The headline is very specific.

While certainly not the only method for writing good blog post titles, just about any headline can be made better by being as specific as you possibly can. Specificity increases credibility because specific details are simply more believable than broad assertions. Plus, a specific headline conveys more valuable information to a potential reader, which acts to draw them magnetically into the content.

Here are a few examples of ultra-specific headlines:

• How I Made $19,931.42 Last Month With Google AdSense
• In This Free 10 Chapter, 123 Page Ebook You’ll Learn…
• Eleven Secret Techniques That Make Bloggers Money
• Lose 36 Pounds in Only 7 Weeks
• How to Shave 5 Strokes Off Your Golf Score in 3 Days

Of course, the single most important rule of ultra-specific headlines is that you need to be able to back up your assertions. And as I’ve done before, I break the rule in order to make the point (which is the true joy of writing a copywriting blog).

While I’m positive that being more specific in your post titles will increase the number of people who read your post, I have no earthly idea what the actual percentage will be for you. There are way too many variables involved.

So I really should have said:

How to Get More Readers for Every Blog Post Your Write

But that’s simply not as good a headline.

UPDATE: I had forgotten all about this Marketing Experiments test that showed that an optimized headline increased website conversion rates by 73%. This means that not only did overall readership of the content rise, but 73% more people took the requested action, due only to a modified headline. In the first case study, the winning headline simply used a specific dollar amount!

So 53% is likely too low just for increased readership. My apologies for underestimating.

by Brian Clark

8 Simple Rules For Social Media Marketing in Business to Business Markets

B2B folks tend to struggle with social media marketing. After repeatedly being asked the question of how b2b folks can use social media marketing, I’ve come up with a handful of rules that apply. If you’re not willing to comply, chances are you should stick to direct marketing and cold calling people.

1. Get on the Clue Train
There is no good for having not yet read the Clue Train Manifesto. Don’t even attempt a campaign until you’ve read this. At bare minimum read the 95 Thesis points. Social media marketing is just the cluetrain come to fruition with some new technology. The logic and process remains the same. As much as AJAX, gradients, and mirror effects are really cool - that’s about all that’s different. This is now prerequisite reading for all social media marketing (if it wasn’t already). The concepts are not new, and their is very little real process.

2. Don’t be "that guy"
You know who I’m talking about. The wanker that is always trying to impress people telling them how cool he is. Cool people don’t tell you how cool they are. He’s the same guy trying to put a press release on digg, or wondering why his "industry news" isn’t compelling enough to garner traffic and links. Don’t be an idiot blogger. Just because you win a game of whip it out, doesn’t mean people will like you.

You will kill all your creativity if you second guess, and put everything through committees. If you have no creativity, you will fail at social media marketing. You could always pay a consultant to come in and do it for you if your scared, or need someone to blame the fallout on (I’ve got broad shoulders, or friends with great ideas - we generally work in our bathrobes - though I do have a few suits for meetings, I still prefer jeans and retro jordans).

3. Don’t be "professional"
This is what we love about blogs and the internet. Despite sitting in front of a computer all day it makes us feel more human. We can experience emotions from people we barely even know, and it sure as hell isn’t from a "professionally" written memo that we could read in the corporate propoganda. It’s from humor, shared experiences, stories, and HUMAN emotions. Not from some corporate zombie wearing a suit, trying to figure out how to game the internet for higher quarterly earnings.

4. Have a personality
No - not a personality according to the company bylaws and mission statement. A REAL personality. Even large corporate websites had a personality in 1996 - the personality of the one person in the company that could build them. How come when MORE people were added to the mix, the sites got LESS personality? Don’t be the CEO that doesn’t get the web, and is scared to experiment. What’s wrong with a little corporate punk?

5. There’s No Magic Bullet
Social media applies to everyone. Yes, even b2b folks. The question is how? The answer is - in speaking to your customers/clients/vendors/partners/friends on a one-to-many basis. The magic bullet is in figuring out how to do that. There is no process. There is no direct correlation to productivity or efficiency. There is no solution that will raise revenue in a quantitive fashion for next quarter. What there *IS* - is the opportunity to speak to other humans like humans, and have them appreciate you doing so.

There is not a process for social media marketing. There is only opportunities. How you approach and execute on the opportunities will determine your success. How well you understand linkbaiting will determine how many links you get.

6. Pander to the mind of your audience
Great marketers know this. It’s not really rocket science. Speak to your audience. Don’t TALK AT THEM. Talk WITH them. Give them something to talk about. Speak to them on a personal level. Entertain them. Cater to their egos. There’s not much that is more powerful than the ego hook.

Remember also - you are pandering to TWO audiences - 1. The audience that is your distribution point (digg, reddit, netscape, myspace, facebook, etc. etc.) and 2. Your usual audience. You have to get through audience number 1 to effectively get to audience number 2. Make sure to know BOTH audiences, and craft your campaigns to be effective to BOTH groups, and the crossover between them. This, as well as a lack of creativity (and willingness to stretch relevance) are the two top reasons that I have seen people fail at social media marketing.

7. Don’t be afraid of failure
If you sit around debating every decision in a committee meeting, your little competitor is going to kick your ass. That’s the beauty of the web (at least right now) - it’s small, it’s fast, it’s efficient, and it gives the little guys a fighting chance to compete on big playing field if they use these assets to their advantage.

If you’re worried about getting fired - you’re never going to create anything cool. If your company is always worried about offending someone, or what the legal team say - you’re dead, and you’re likely on a long, painful decline.

8. Stretch the relevance
This should probably be number 1, as it’s the most important, but I wanted to make sure you were paying attention. I have a good friend who could really stretch the relevance of a link. Not too many people could think that a fish oil link would be relevant to a motor oil page, but when you’re thinking laterally, this is the type of results that you will get. It worked for anchor text, and though it was a stretch, there was some marginal relevance there. Think to this extreme, then scale it back - but only a little.

This is THE most important part of social media marketing. You MUST stand out. It’s scary - you make yourself and your company vulnerable, but it works. And when it works great, it is an amazing thing. When it doesn’t work, most the time nobody notices most times, and you might only end up offending 3 of the people you didn’t like anyways.

Example of stretching the relevance:

You need to attract engineers to your website since they are the decision makers. You build a trebuchet builder. Whoever pitched that project deserves a huge raise because they have giant brass balls. I can picture the meeting now as they describe building a flash game that will generate zero revenue, but "be really cool" for engineers. The fact that it was produced and launched is truly a miracle. The results in links alone speak to it’s success for those that understand their value. I can only imagine how many engineers sent it to their buddies and wasted hours at work on it instead of playing tetris or doing ACTUAL work.

1. Get on the Clue Train
2. Don’t be "that guy"
3. Don’t be "professional"
4. Have a personality
5. There’s No Magic Bullet
6. Pander to the mind of your audience
7. Don’t be afraid of failure
8. Stretch the relevance

by Stuntdubl

The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging

If you write a blog, the bad news is you have millions of competitors.

The good news is most of them suck.

The same problems come up again and again, keeping bloggers from building a real audience for what they have to say. So how about you? Do you commit one of these seven deadly sins with your content?

1. Selfishness
This is the big one.

Here’s how making money with social media works:

You give away information of value. Maybe it solves an important problem. Maybe it makes people laugh. Maybe it makes life a little less boring to millions who are getting through a day of cubicle hell. Whatever.

You give. And then tomorrow, you give some more. And the next day, you give more.

After a heck of a lot of giving, you make a terrific offer and you get to ask for something in return. And a small fraction of your audience will respond.

How can this possibly work? Because if what you give is valuable enough, it will attract lots and lots of people. It’s roughly the same amount of work to give terrific content to a million users as it is to share it with one.

But to each individual reader, you’re giving much more than you’re asking for.

This is why so many “get rich quick” schemes don’t work, and why they’re particularly ill-suited to social media. They’re about taking. They’re not about giving.

2. Sloth
Here’s why I don’t do much social media and content marketing consulting any more.

The 1,000th time I heard a client say, “But that sounds like a lot of work,” my brain exploded.

You know what’s a lot of work? Running a bricks and mortar business. 12 hour days, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Maybe after a couple of successful years you’ll let yourself take a weekend off.

By contrast, running a content-based business is a lot of fun, with wonderfully low overhead, few to no employees, not much stress (by comparison, anyway), and yes, less work.

Not no work. Less work.

3. Impatience
I don’t think there’s a blogger in the world (ok, except Leo) who hasn’t been frustrated at the three- or six-month mark when things just aren’t moving as fast as we want.

It takes some time to build an audience, and momentum is your friend. Most of us don’t take off like rockets. We build slowly at first, then the snowball starts to grow.

If you’re not finding the audience you want yet, ask yourself:

•Is my topic actually interesting to someone other than my mom and my cat?
•Do I give my readers more than I ask to receive from them?
•Am I working on cultivating a network of like-minded bloggers, and supporting their work as much as I hope they’ll support mine?
If the answers are yes, you’ll need to cultivate a little patience. Maybe even a good dose of stubbornness. Trust me, I know it isn’t easy. Read The Dip to keep yourself motivated while you get there.

4. Lameness
Blogging isn’t like traditional advertising, where you spend more money to reach more eyeballs. In social media marketing, the currency you pay is being totally amazing.

If your content is lame, you don’t find an audience and your message doesn’t get through. If your content is fantastic, you’ll find a nice-sized audience who love what you have to say. Many of those folks will be happy to give you additional money to get more of what you offer, whether in the form of an ebook, consulting time, a comprehensive membership site, or just a snazzy t-shirt.

To paraphrase the sales and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, lame bloggers have skinny kids.

5. Identicality
Some may disagree, but I think it’s totally fine to start your blog wanting to be someone else. That might be because I started my first blog wanting to be Seth Godin.

I didn’t become Seth (the hairstyle wouldn’t suit me anyway), but I did find a wonderful audience and a niche in which I could make real contributions.

It’s great to be inspired by a big blogger. But in order to create your own audience and your own place in the blogging world, you’re going to have to find your own voice.

Why not instead be:

•Weirder than Dooce
•Godin with a Potty Mouth
•Marketing Profs for Hippies
Maybe you’re Problogger for drag queens, or the Chris Brogan of healthcare.

Be inspired by others, but find your own place.

Interestingly, that place is often defined by the people you serve. Think more about them.

6. Irrelevance
It’s lovely to put your heart into your content, to infuse it with your personality, to come across as a real and likeable human being.

The game still ain’t about you, baby.

Some people are naturally attracted to topics that other people care about. Others aren’t. Don’t try to sell broccoli ice cream, even if that’s your favorite.

7. Boorishness
Boorishness usually comes from one of the other deadly sins. Selfishness being the most common.

You know that guy at the party who just refuses to shut up? The one who lectures you for 45 minutes about his Warcraft collectible figurines, without ever noticing that you’re desperately wishing you had a cyanide pill so you could quietly end it all?

Don’t be that guy.
by Sonia Simone

A Social Media Evolution - Whats Next

.

"ASK, YES ASK?

If not literally (although this is BEST), then figuratively. The following questions are a good place to start:

1. "What will make you happy - what can I offer you to put a smile on your face?"
2. "Do you actually want what I’m offering in this sales letter?"
3. "Can you afford what I’m offering? If it’s pricey for you ... then can I structure a payment plan of some kind (to make it easy to pay for)?"
4. "Why are you afraid of purchasing from anybody, including me? How can I prove to you that I’m honest and reliable and will stand behind my product / service? What can I say to you (or show you) that will convince you I’m telling you the truth about this?"
5. "What kind of a guarantee can I give you that will make you 110% comfortable with trying out what I’m offering?"

These things cannot be over-stressed. You can only craft a persuasive letter if you know beforehand what the person you’re writing to wants. They only care about what you can do for them. And the best way to find out what your potential buyer wants is to ask.

BARE NAKED LADIES AND PERSUASIVE WRITING

You can only craft a persuasive letter if you KNOW beforehand WHAT THE PERSON you’re writing to WANTS.

A persuasive letter is essentially selling in print. And if you know what a successful salesperson would "say" to an interested potential buyer then your job is 80% done.

Next comes fact-gathering about the actual product /service you’re selling. Gather your facts, then separate the most important … and most interesting facts … from the others.

List them one by one … and match each with at least one positive benefit your reader will experience if they acquire what you’re selling.

For example, if I wanted to write a persuasive letter about a miniature, vent-less, indoor propane heater I’d make a fact-benefit sheet like the following:

• FACT: Heater is small (20 inches x 28 inches) -- BENEFIT: Compact; easy to fit in any room.
• FACT: Is vent-less -- BENEFIT: Don’t need to cut any holes in walls or install expensive ducts.
• FACT: Has 30,000 Btu capacity -- BENEFIT: Heats over 1,400 sq/ft easily and efficiently.
• FACT: Has 3 temperature settings -- BENEFIT: Saves money heating as little or as much as you like.
• FACT: Has its own Piezo Ignitor -- BENEFIT: Needs no matches or electricity to start.
• FACT: Runs on propane -- BENEFIT: No electricity needed, can even heat your home even if the power is out during a winter storm.

The facts you gather before writing even one word of sales copy are the ingredients for a persuasive letter. You cannot craft a persuasive letter without knowing what your reader wants. And whatever you’re selling won’t have any appeal unless you tell them how they’re going to benefit from it.

So you want to write a persuasive letter. Let's discuss how to do this.

The most important thing you need to know doesn’t have anything to do with writing though. Persuasion relies on understanding human nature, not eloquence.
Think of the most successful salespeople you know. Do they strike you as eloquent? Perhaps. But probably not.

A persuasive letter doesn’t need to be a finely crafted literary masterpiece. But it does need to do something very important - - stir deep feelings within the person it's written to.

But how to do this?

Well … first you need to do a little homework. Fact-finding homework!

Copywriter Gary Halbert gives a priceless tidbit in one of his newsletters every writer of sales copy needs to know. He says that when it comes to sales copy, most people pay attention to the writing part … while neglecting to gather all the facts about what they’re selling first.

A persuasive letter begins with fact-gathering. Gather all the facts you can. Big ones. Little ones. Obvious details. Not-so-obvious. Etc. About …

a) the person you’re sending your letter to …and....
b) the thing you’re trying to sell.

To write a persuasive letter you have to know what the reader really cares about. The best way to do this is simply ASK them.

Better HEADLINES=Better ODDS

Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.

Here are some interesting statistics.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

The better the headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people. This 11-part Magnetic Headlines series will provide you with concrete guidance that’ll have you writing better headlines in no time.

Email Deliverability

Email deliverability incorporates all the issues which stop your emails from arriving in your recipient’s inbox. Improving email deliverability, therefore, involves increasing the amount of emails which get delivered by looking at the issues which are hindering email deliverability such as bounces and spam filters.

For those new to email marketing, it may be difficult to understand how an email could be prevented from being delivered. Bounces are akin to return mail, in that, when the email isn’t delivered it is returned to the sender’s inbox with a notification of failed email delivery. Bounces are divided into two types; hard bounces are the fault of permanent or technical error such as a non-existent address or a misspelt address. Hard bounces are common because people regularly change addresses resulting in the old ones being deleted after a period of time, or if people use their work email as their primary email access, this will be deleted if they change jobs. Soft bounces, on the other hand, are the result of a temporary technical error such as a faulty connection or a full inbox. Soft bounces will normally remain in the sender’s outbox until the email can be successfully sent, and some mailboxes may accompany this with a notification message.

Anti-spam measures such as spam filters are a deliberate interference from the recipient’s mailbox. Unsolicited bulk email, or spam, is illegal, and mailboxes go to great lengths to prevent this sort of mail being delivered. Some mailboxes will delete the mail outright, or place it in a junk or spam folder for the recipient to open at their discretion. The problems for email marketers is that spam filters aren’t perfect, and often legitimate mail will go undelivered because 1) not all mailboxes uses the same anti-spam measures, and 2) the sender won’t receive any notification of non-delivery meaning there isn’t any feedback on why the message was considered illegitimate.

Bounces are easier to improve because a notification is received, meaning the problem can be rectified immediately or even automatically if an email marketing software is being used. This bounce management system makes list hygiene a lot easier to keep on top of

20 Ways to be an Idiot Blogger that No one likes

1. Never spend more than twenty minutes writing a post.
2. Don’t research anything before you write - just talk out of your ass like you’re God’s gift to technorati, and link everything that needs clarification to it’s respective wikipedia page (you should be able to obtain a wordpress plugin for this).
3. Format articles to be either 50 words or 5,000 words and NEVER USE bullet points, paragraph breaks, and absolutely NO PICTURES. People hate scanning articles, and have all day to read what YOU write because you are special and write a blog.
4. Entice your readers by saying you have inside info on a topic, which your NDA procludes you from discussing.
5. Don’t edit anything. Don’t recheck your work. Say the same thing repeatedly. Repeat yourself. Make your point again, by changing the wording, and be sure you made the point you are trying to say with what you are saying in your writing.
6. Whine that no one ever links to you, and you can’t get your articles on digg.
7. Spend at least 50% of your posts explaining why the blogosphere is like an echo chamber.
8. Think people care about your life. Despite not writing for catster - everyone on the planet really should know that you have a cat that you love dearly. It’s very important to your job in computer networking. It is CRITICAL that your industry cohorts understand that you have the perspective of a feline owner. When people comment on their own cats, be sure to set them straight, and let them know that it’s really all about YOUR cat, and they shouldn’t be straying off topic.
9. Try to stay away from any semblance of an original thought process, and just regurgitate news, or write some agreeable commentary about a post you found from the Technorati top 100.
10. Spend less time writing your titles than booting your computer.
11. Don’t get any feedback from friends or family that understand the subject BEFORE writing your posts.
12. Never agree with anyone - even if it means contradicting yourself repeated times per day (you may do this with or without selling a company to AOL). Be sure to use the attack hook whenever possible.
13. Write about how to be a successful blogger with tons of traffic (and forget to mention it requires never leaving the keyboard)
14. Start a blog about politics or religion. Proceed to argue the supremecy of your God and political party.
15. Be sure to tell everyone all the private information you hear from friends or associates, because the world SHOULD KNOW.
16. Have no sense of humor unless it is at the expense of someone other than yourself.
17. Always promote your site when commenting on others, and create as many trackback links as possible in every post.
18. Vent all your frustrations about friends, family, and your boss, as well as their most personal secrets, because other people won’t be able to figure out who you’re talking about.
19. Don’t spend any time communicating with other bloggers unless it is to state reasons why they should link to you. Be sure you never link out to anyone else, unless it’s with a nofollow tag (you don’t want to leak your pagerank).
20. Always mention the news you will be breaking tomorrow, and restate it days after it is broke in case people missed it.

10 Things to Ask Your SEO Clients

Since yesterday I gave a bit of insight for those searching for SEO services, I thought it only fair to do a piece on things that an SEO consultant should know before commissioning work with a prospective client. So without further ado…

1. How long have you been in business?
2. How old is your website?
3. Have you ever worked with another SEO company?
4. If you’ve worked with another SEO company, why was the relationship dissolved?
5. What is your monthly budget? (ask delicately or destroy the deal)
6. What are your goals and revenue models of the business?
7. What are your goals with a SEO campaign?
8. Do you have an in-house designer/ developer/ copywriter?
9. When do you plan to make a decision on your project?
10.What is your current internet marketing strategy?

Encourage prospective clients to shop around if you feel your services are the best. One of the great aspects of being a good SEO is that with the current overabundance of work, we can be picky about who we take on as clients. Choosing the right clients is key to continued success, as SEO is as much about educating a client with consulting as it is about doing actual development. You don’t want to teach the problem child internet marketing strategy. If you do get a crappy client, find out when you should fire a client. Here is a a bit more on web design and seo sales, but try to be nice if their website sucks.

A note on titles, target audience, and school of thought.

The importance of good titles cannot be underestimated. For folks take linkbaiting seriously take titlebaiting seriously as well, and understand that a great title is half the battle of a successful linkbait campaign. I suggest several reads and references to CopyBlogger’s headline formulas from his magnetic headlines series. Studying direct marketing headlines, as well as sales letters by Dan Kennedy will probably help as well. Create your own headline swipe file. Please don’t forget to include some quality anchor text if possible, since the goal is to have it linked to often, the title will be used as the link in many cases. Understanding your audience is critical to knowing what will succeed as well, but if you can’t figure that out, I would suggest you search for a different career path.

Just a quote

"Top rankings won’t fix a shitty product"

WTF is social media - one year on

If you excuse the suggestive language, this slide show provides an excellent birds-eye view of the extent of the social media landscape. Social media has profoundly altered the way companies market and communicate. Millions of people have made online sharing part of their everyday lives, creating new communication channels and challenges for companies.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

Marketing vs. Money & The Brain vs. The Brawn

I was thinking today about the uphill battle that many small business owners face. They're fighting for business against larger, better funded competitors. How can you win?

In war, you can amass the biggest army and throw your soldiers at the enemy. The bigger the enemy is, the more soldiers you'll need - but hey, it works. Mostly.

In business, if you want to solve a problem, you can throw money at it. The bigger the problem, the more money you'll need to throw - but hey, it works. Mostly.

Big companies tend to throw money at problems, just like big guys are more likely to muscle their way through conflict. Little guys prefer to talk their way out of conflicts, like little companies attack their competitors with smart and efficient marketing.

When I say "marketing" I'm not talking about advertising and spending money on billboards. I'm talking about having a conversation with your customers; about making deals with like minded companies; about letting your customers spread the word for you; about making your product that much better than anyone elses; about making your service shine and delight.

History shows us that the biggest armies can fall to superior strategy and tactics; think Henry V and the battle of Agincourt. History also shows us that diplomacy and negotiation can achieve better outcomes than any war, and hence the saying that "the pen is mightier than the sword."

Well, I say Marketing is mightier than Money.

Right now, times are tough. And I've heard many business owners wish that they had more funding, or the resources of their larger competitors, so that they could weather the storm more comfortably.

That's fair. But the true winners out of this are going to be the smart, little companies who figure out that this a storm that they can talk themselves out of.

In this climate, smart marketing is a thousand times better than deep pockets.
Brett Welch

10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers

The question I seem to be getting over and over these days is…

How did you get 6,000 subscribers in 10 months?

The answer is simple—I value subscribers more than any other measure of blog success, such as page views or raw traffic. Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog in my opinion, and frankly, I wish I had more of them.

OK, that may be a bit vague.

So here are 10 specific strategies you can begin to implement today and start getting more blog subscribers right away.

1. Make it easy and obvious

As I’ve said before in more detail, make your subscription options prominent, offer an email alternative to RSS, and ask for the subscription, preferably at the bottom of each post.

2. Be laser focused

Make sure that you are primarily focusing on a particular topic, and the more specialized that topic is, the better you’ll do. It’s also key to step back and evaluate whether there are enough prospective readers in your chosen niche. It’s better to be brutally honest with yourself than to toil away and end up disappointed.

3. Offer a bribe

Relax, it’s nothing illegal. It’s an ethical bribe, in the form of a free ebook, report, e-course or audio series. Typically this only works with email subscriptions tied to autoresponders, because you want to condition delivery of the bonus on subscription.

But here’s a nifty way to do it with RSS:

If you have a WordPress blog, use the free Feedvertising plugin to link to the download page for your free gift. Since Feedvertising links only show up in the feed (and not in the post), only feed subscribers will see the link and have access to the bonus.

4. Use viral ebooks

This is a spin on the ethical bribe strategy, but instead you let other people give away your PDF ebook or even bundle it for sale with other products. The PDF in turn promotes your blog. Check out this post to see how I bundled my free Viral Copy report with a book that spent several days at the top of the Amazon bestseller list.

5. Dedicated subscription landing page

Create a page that is dedicated to nothing more than obtaining a subscription, and drive traffic to it from your blog, AdWords, or really any other source you want. You can even put it on a unique URL, and add in the ethical bribe strategy to increase signups. For more information on doing this with AdWords, read this article, and then this one.

6. Become a guest blogger

Contributing content to someone else’s blog may seem crazy, but it’s a solid strategy to gain exposure for your own blog and build your subscriber base. Just make it very clear to the blog owner that you require a very brief byline at the end of the post, with a link back to your site. And make sure it’s original content, not something recycled off of your blog.

7. Start a podcast

Start a related podcast on your subject matter, and get it into iTunes and listed in the various podcasting directories. Mention your blog in every episode and the benefits of subscribing, and try to land some interviews with prominent players in your niche. Not only will you be opening up a new promotional channel, you’re also creating bonus content that can be reused as part of your ethical bribe campaign for new subscribers.

8. Post in forums

A tried and true technique since the earliest days of the Internet is to be a helpful, proactive participant in forums that are important in your niche. People will notice that you are offering yourself up to others, and will be more inclined to see what else you have to offer with your blog.

9. Networking

This is perhaps the most overlooked strategy for gaining traffic and subscribers. Don’t badger other bloggers for links, because it rarely works anymore. Find a way to help them with something, and then eventually work that initial graciousness into a business relationship and even friendship. There are real people behind these blogs, and they respond to good will just like people do offline.

10. Cross-promotional deals

Here’s another cool way to make use of the Feedvertising plugin for WordPress.

Find a blogger that publishes related, but non-competitive content. Work out a deal where you both promote each other in your RSS feeds, using Feedvertising. If one blog has way more subscribers than the other, work out a ratio deal. Since Feedvertising allows you to create up to six rotating links, the smaller blog would promote the other blog continuously, while the larger blog would reserve one slot for the smaller blog, and use the other slots for other cross-promotion deals, affiliate links, or sponsor ads.

So there you have it, with one additional word of caution.

All of the above presupposes that you are producing the best content you can. If you honestly cannot say that you are doing your best work content-wise, start there. But afterwards, using some or all of the above will definitely increase your subscriber count.v

by Brian Clark

Social Media Strategy

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Social Media Strategy

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Online Business Solution

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