When Darren Rowse made a post about how to find new subscribers for your blog I was a little underwhelmed, but of course he was trying to prove his point that you can create suspense. I just didn’t want to wait.
Creating anticipation is nice but surely there was more. I started writing a comment and before I knew it I had listed 17 ’secrets’ of my own. It wasn’t long before I got an email from Matt at Poliblogs saying he loved the list and had reposted it to his network.
People subscribe to you because they think that based on what they can see today, that you will post something of value to them tomorrow.
Here are 17 ideas on how you can show value today and make it easier to subscribe for tomorrow:
Show recent articles
Don’t assume that I’m reading your blog through the homepage. If I find your blog through a google search and the post is interesting enough, I want to see what else you have recently written. Make it easy for me.
Show popular articles
If an article is popular it has already been proven. If other people like those posts more then your others, then chances are I will think the same way. Show me the good stuff!
Don’t show dates
You should only show dates if they are relevant. If you don’t have any recent posts then your blog will look stale, but if you have evergreen content and don’t show the date it will still appear fresh.
Subscriber Counts
Sure you want to know and show how popular you are, but unless you are ‘popular’ it will reduce your subscription rate. People want to listen to popular sources. If you have 100 subscribers, I wouldn’t promote it. If you have thousands then it is probably worth listing.
Prompt Subscription
If you want people to subscribe you need to give them the options. I blog I recently sold had 3 subscription buttons on each page. You might think that is overkill but remember that we don’t read every word on a page, so when we are scanning we effectively don’t see it unless we want to.
Run a series
If you have a 7 part series of posts and you have already posted 4 you can show the topics of the remaining posts and give people a simple shortcut to subscribe so that they don’t miss out on the rest.
Make sure every page presents value
We want to see signal not noise. I skip over any post that is a ‘link roundup’ – if the ideas within were valuable enough they would have a dedicated post instead of having to share a post with other ideas. If you have smaller pieces of information that you want to post, you can attach them to the bottom of your posts. Tim Ferris does this really well.
Have comments, get comments
Who wants to talk if they are the only person in the room? Having comments on every post shows that if I spend the time to write a comment somebody is going to read it and I might get a response. Comment on other blogs and people will come and check out your content. Invite your friends to post if the topic is relevant to them.
Show each author’s posts
If you have a multi-author blog I find it interesting to see what other posts that individual has made. You might have a ‘other posts by this author’ section separate to the ‘recent posts’ or ‘popular posts’ which represent the whole teams work.
Show third party endorsements
If you are part of a blog network you should show the badge, if you have sponsors you should show them, if you have people on your site you should highlight them. Again, we want to be on sites that are popular.
Mention your mentions, with value
If people link to you it can’t hurt to mention it but only if you are providing value. I can say ‘TechCrunch linked to me today!’ and just get all excited, or I could post an article expanding what they said.
Look nice
If you have a tight design like the A-listers you can most likely fool a few people. Although you don’t need to have a great design to be successful I think it can really help. There are plenty examples of ugly websites that are popular, but I think those sites would have been more popular faster if they had better templates.
Work on your About page
I want to see a photo of you, I want to know what else you are doing, I want to know what you have done. I also want your contact details so that we can keep talking. The About page is one of the most popular pages on any site so it is worth putting a bit of effort into.
Order by interestingness
Most blogs order their archives by date or category, but I would prefer to be able to browse by popularity or interestingness. If I want to read more and you give it to me in order of how good it is, I’m much more likely to subscribe because I am only seeing your best work.
Always add value
Every post needs to add value. There are so many posts on the internet that are basically a carbon-copy of what somebody else has already written. Whenever Apple release new products the same stories are on thousands of blogs but I only need to hear about it once. I know that Daring Fireball will always post about the interesting things that nobody else has mentioned, which is why I always drop by to see what he has to say around the Apple events.
Have recurring themes
If your blog is about startups, could you challenge yourself to use the word startup in every post you write? That would keep you on topic wouldn’t it! Every popular blog is eventually known for a particular topic. If you are new to blogging it might take you a while to find your voice and discover your topic, but once you have keep it in mind.
Relevant categories
When was the last time you looked at your list of categories? Are they still relevant? If they don’t represent what you want your blog to represent then change them. Delete the old ones. Merge similar ones. Keep it relevant.
Keep on-topic
Again this assumes that you know your topic – look around your site and ask yourself what each element says about your topic. Does your blogroll link to other people who talk about your topic, or just your mates?
Now, just before you get carried away – no I don’t do all of these things on this blog yet!
By Ross Hill - September 20th, 2008 at 10:13am with 4,159 views - darren rowse john gruber matt wardman
