Internet Babel

Before anything else, I think the ultimate aim for a blogger should be to get more people to subscribe to their feed. Without subscribers, there’s no one to market to, speak to, comment, listen, nothing.

So before you focus on anything else, focus on that! it should be the primary goal above all. Making money, marketing to people etc. will all fall into place much easier for you if you have a solid readership.

So… here are my top 3 ways to increase your subscribers:

1. Competitions

Competitions are the king of subscriber increase. It gives people an incentive to subscribe to your feed aka to win something. The amount of subscribers you gain during a competition run will all depend on the prize and the marketing.

I’m currently running a contest for 3 of my readers to each win a free logo. Now, to market this I haven’t done much to be honest. All I’ve done is buy a review on John Cow dot com for $200. Apart from that… my current readers saw it and due to this and all the people from John Cow who saw it, it’s resulted in about 60 new subscribers (entries) in a few days and quite a lot of backlinks. And this competition is only for a free logo… can you imagine the impact if the prize was something much bigger.

Only real problem with people who subscribe for competitions is that… they can be disposable. A lot of the time, people will subscribe for the contest, see if they’ve won… and unsubscribe. This of course depends on how good your blog and content actually is to.

If people stay for the result, don’t win and your content is rubbish, they will leave. If it’s good, they usually keep reading. Like when John Chow had the showdown with Shoemoney and Chow started on… 8,000 odd readers but ended up on 14,000 +! and they’ve all stayed to keep reading!

2. Advertising

I think this depends a lot on what your niche is. If you blog about movies or pop culture, it’s all about content and regularity but in the world of Internet marketing… it’s a lot about status and perception. If you are a self made millionaire from marketing online and you can prove it then… gaining and sustaining readers isn’t as big of an issue. Mainly because everyone wants you to ‘teach’ them how to do it. Obviously your content still needs to be good but it won’t be as much of a stuggle to have people listen to you.

If you are however, just a regular Internet marketer. Make an average wage from affiliates and ad income and what not, it’s much more of a constant effort to pull people in. You need an edge, opinion and basically…. brilliant content to do so.

Advertising can be that extra push to give your blog more of a natural awareness in the blogesphere and obviously will or should – send you more readers. Advertising in my experience, can be effective just depending on where you advertise. A paid review on a big blog can be very effective indeed where as a banner or post ad may not do much for you. All depends on how creative you make your advertisement.

Remember, the people who see your ads will be humans. Not Google bots, so market your ads for people. Would you click on your ad? if not, why!

3. Commenting

One way to gain some well targeted visitors / readers here and there is to make insightful, useful comments on other blogs. There’s pros and cons to commenting on both high profile blogs and small blogs.

High Profile Blogs

Advantages

• Commenting 1st on a post will get it seen by a lot more people.
• You will get more clicks to your blog, if you link it to your name when commenting.
• If said high profile blog has a Top Commentators plugin, getting to the top of that can also provide extra traffic and potential readers. More often than not a targeted visitor that clicks on your name, usually subscribes. Providing of course that your content is good.

Disadvantages

• As posts on high profile blogs usually get a lot of comments, the more likely it is that your post will soon get lost amongst the majority and slowly not seen by most. Most people usually only tend to read 1st and last comments and sometimes glance a few mid-range

Low Profile Blogs

Advantages

• Less people comment, therefore if you comment on a post, it could be possible that you stay near the top or even top comment for a much longer period of time. Obviously this is a catch-22 as if it’s staying as the top comment, this means there is nobody else commenting so how popular can said blog be? this is true, but it can still help gain general awareness of your name or brand if done routinely enough.
• Your useful comments will be much more appreciated. Small time bloggers don’t see hundreds of thousands of readers and hundreds of comment, so the readers that are kind enough to drop a comment here and there usually are noticed by the administrator. You may even get a thank you link back and form a relationship with a few bloggers, which is always a good thing. And all it takes is a few minutes now and then to write out your thoughts on their posts.

Disadvantages

• Low profile blogs usually = low comment rate which usually = low traffic. Obviously if you’re going to comment you want your comments seen. So commenting on small time blogs may be useful at times but can usually take a while to take effect.

As you can see, there’s good and bad on both sides of the fence. But don’t be too picky, don’t go on stats and logic. Just have fun! just go browse through blogs of your interest and comment when you can. Make decent comments to see decent results.

Final Thoughts

So, there you have it. 3 simple ways to get new readers on your blog. There are obviously lots and lots of ways, I just expanded on 3 prominent ways I thought of when going to write this post.

It all depends on your creativity. Don’t be afraid to test and experiment, don’t just duplicate what other bloggers do, let marketing be your art. Have fun tyring to think of new ways to get new readers to read your hard written content!