Double Your Blog Newsletter Readers: Expand Beyond Your Blog

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

In the previous three posts on doubling your blog newsletter subscribers, we’ve talked about:

Adding subscribe opportunities within posts
Creating a dedicated blog subscribe page
Getting current readers to bring you new ones

Today, let’s take a step back from these online and email marketing tactics and look at how you can grow your blog newsletter away from your website.

Blog Newsletter Grower #4: Find Outside Subscribe Opportunities

In the past week, how many people have you talked to face-to-face (either in a business or casual setting) where your business came up?

What about on the phone? Anyone?

You have ample opportunities to ask people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, even when they’re not on your blog!

For example, near the end of each of our live webinars we ask attendees if they’d like to subscribe to our blog newsletter. We import the folks who say yes shortly after the webinar ends.

Since we started offering the blog newsletter to webinar attendees, we can directly attribute an increase of 15.97% in our readership – that’s a lot of potential readers we’d have lost out on if we didn’t ask them to subscribe!

Where Can You Find These Outside Subscribe Opportunities?

Here are a few possibilities:

In Person
Whether it’s at a trade show/conference, a Meetup, your office, or any other appropriate setting, “face time” is a great time to offer up your blog and newsletter.

If you exchange business cards with someone, bring up your blog in the conversation and ask for the subscribe. Write his/her response (”yes blog newsletter” or “no blog newsletter”) on the back of his/her card, so you know who to import and who not to.
On teleconferences, webinars, training calls, etc.
If you provide value on the call, attendees/callers are likely to want to get more value. Where better for them to get that than on your blog?

Your webinars/conferences/etc, like your blog posts themselves, are sales letters for your blog.

Put the effort into making them great, ask for the subscribe, and watch your blog newsletter grow.
In your email signature
There’s no law that says you have to put your site’s homepage in your email signature (well, unless you work for a company that mandates it).

Your blog, or even your blog subscribe page, may be a more useful landing page for people clicking from your email signature, and may lead to more subscribers.

This isn’t likely to bring in as many people as the other tactics discussed here, but every subscriber counts, right?
On articles or guest posts you write for other blogs
Typically, when you write an article (either for an article site or a news publication) or a guest post on another blog, you’re allowed a signature at the end of your article.

Just as you should add subscribe opportunities within posts, you should give people who read your articles and guest posts the chance to easily join your blog newsletter too.
Other business communications
Do you ship physical products? Take a recent post (or highlights from several recent posts) and print a one-page insert that exposes customers to your blog and encourages them to subscribe.

Do you give away or sell digital products (such as ebooks/whitepapers)? Include references to your blog and blog newsletter on the “about” section or in the footer of each page.

Can customers/readers reach you by phone? Mention your blog in your outgoing voicemail message, or in your phone menu.

Opportunities Are Everywhere… Take Them!

In reality, there’s an infinite number of ways you could translate “expanding beyond your blog.” These are just a few of the ways you can get more blog subscribers outside of having them find your blog on their own.

So let me close this 4-post series with a reminder: there are always opportunities to grow your blog newsletter. Keep your eyes open for them!

Do you promote your blog and blog newsletter in other “outside” situations like the ones mentioned today?

If so, where and when? What have you found to be effective? Share your experiences below!

Tags: blog newsletters, list building, rss to email

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6 Responses

Lalitha Brahma
August 18th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

I love to read your updates and look forward to them. Just by implementing one tip a day, we are able to increase traffic to our website.
Karin H.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:52 am

Hi Justin

There is one other way too - a very obvious one too imho.
If you use feedburner for your feeds (and much more Feedburner gives you) and you also have a ’static’ webiste you can create a page called: recent articles published etc. Feedburner includes a widget called: BuzzBoost (have feed, will travel), you paste the code in your ’static’ page and feeburner will placed excerpts of your latest articles on there.

Now, if you add your blog-alert webform on that page and invite ’static’ website visitors to subscribe to be notified immediately when a new article is publish you combine ‘old’ web with new ‘web’

(Works a treat for us, see our FAQ summery page)
Eliza J.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:01 am

Justin, you are right that we’ve ample opportunities to make our subscriber base.

In fact, when I got stuck at some point, I usually go away from my PC and try to think over it or solve that problem through offline strategies.

Although, I haven’t gone through the last 3 posts in this series, but even though I get what you would like to convey.

Thanks for sharing useful information. It’s really worth visiting Aweber’s blog.
Mieke Janssens
August 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Thanks again for the great tips.
I’ve applied most of them (and all previous ones) to my blog.

Here’s another tip: add a link to your subscription page at the bottom of your Feedburner feeds.
- If you don’t know how to do it, read the step-by-step guide I’ve posted on my blog - just click my name to go there. ;-D

Keep them coming, guys!
Rich Muir
August 20th, 2008 at 12:04 am

Hey great tips I really hadnt looked at some of those perspectives on increasing possible readers before so a big thank you.
Josiah Chua
September 1st, 2008 at 10:14 pm

Thanks for the great article! Your article is very informative and I will definitely start to use these opportunities to find subscribers to my blog.