Build Your Blog Subscriber List

Have you been blogging for six months — or maybe a year — and now you’re ready to get Really Serious about your marketing efforts?

You already know my problogging strategy is not about high-traffic — it’s all about subscribers.

  • My blog Shift Your Spirits launched in August 2006 — as of March 2009 there are 10,700+ subscribers and climbing

How did I grow this list? Or better yet — How can you get more blog subscribers? I’ll give the whole scoop in this 58 page ebook tutorial:

How I Built My (Huge) Blog Subscriber List

You want to keep building your subscriber list the way you’re already doing it? Or do you want to try my strategies? Come on, now — I made sure the price is not out of your reach. Even if I started blogging every page of it today, at the rate I post, we’ll both be waiting at least 6 months — why not devour it this weekend? How many more hundreds of subscribers could you have 6 months from now?

My Self-Publishing Tutorials detail the steps between starting a brand-new blog, from scratch, regardless of your technical skill level, to making a full-time income:

  • PageCoach Guide to Problogging is for beginners
  • How My Blogs Make Money is the ultimate goal you’re shooting for

But you’re already blogging — you’re somewhere in between these two stages — for you the next logical steps are to:

  • create your own passive income streams with unique, original products and services
  • build a list of highly targeted readers and — most importantly — more subscribers.

The crucial factor in making money from your blog, or making a big impact with your mission, is building your blog subscriber list. The right people paying attention to what you have to offer is the most important next step.

If you’ve been blogging for six months — or maybe a year — I wrote Build Your Blog Subscriber List just for you.

Easy and Simple are two different claims.
I am NOT telling you that writing, self-publishing, and blogging are easy but I am telling you that what makes blogging a viable career — what works — is simple — simpler than you’re making it.

Have you read my free report How My Blogs Make Money? It’s probably one of my best tutorials:

  • straight-forward
  • short
  • autobiographical

It’s the most likely to truly shift your understanding of how you can make money from your blogs, regardless of the amount of raw traffic you have. That free report is also the cornerstone of my subscriber-based, authority blogger problogging strategy. It’s, again, the best proof-of-concept for you to model.

How My Blogs Make Money may be the most valuable instruction I have to share — the answers to the questions the most bloggers want — so why don’t I sell it?

That’s what I plan to teach you here and now:
How to identify the absolute BEST you have to offer your audience — and instead of selling it — give it away. Prioritize building a priceless list of subscribers — and use your number one potential product or service as a gift.

Your first order of business is fishing for attention — your blog is your net — and your subscriber incentive is your bait.

I’ve written the tutorial Build Your Blog Subscriber List in the exact same spirit as How My Blogs Make Money — totally sharing my personal experience, in the most transparent way possible, while guiding you through the thought-process that you can apply to your blogging goals.

What You’ll Learn from The List Building Tutorial:

What’s Your Subscriber Incentive?

  • How your free reports generate more income in the long-run than offering the same information for sale
  • How to identify the most effective subscriber incentive for your blog
  • How to go beyond just offering subscriptions to making your subscription irresistible

The 5 Components of Subscriber List Building

I detail the exact 5 steps I used to build Shift Your Spirits from zero to 10,000 + subscribers in 2 years.

Blog Marketing Critique Checklist
Walk yourself through the same breakdown of blog marketing elements I look for when evaluating blogs for client consultations:

  • A Better Blog — the mechanics you need in place to capture and build a list of targeted subscribers
  • Better Blogging — the execution — the practice of delivering your mission, post after post

Are you fishing with a net that has holes in it?
Not all traffic is good traffic — learn about the relationship between Raw Traffic and Conversion Rates.

Are you fishing outside the blogosphere?
My “Secret” Online Traffic Source for tons more new readers than I could ever find just employing the “usual” blog promotion strategies — posting, commenting, emailing, guest blogging, participating in forums, submitting entries to blog carnivals…

My Personal Story — a blow-by-blow account of how I built my Shift Your Spirits subscriber list:

  • Read about how I launched, seeded, promoted, and built my Shift Your Spirits List for two months before I even started the Shift Your Spirits blog.
  • Find out the Five Basic Steps I performed — and repeated — to go from zero to 800 subscribers in less than six months
  • Understand the number one factor that sky-rocketed my list growth from day one
  • Borrow the simple Contest Strategy that tripled my list in one month
  • Discover how I use guest authoring to inherit fully matured lists of highly targeted readers from other publishers
  • Explore the thousands of online sources for guest authoring I’ll bet you haven’t even touched yet
  • Use my best kept secret for getting more readers with one article than all my guest blogging spots combined

Should you emphasize email subscriptions or RSS feeds?
Why email subscribers should STILL be your top priority.

What you could be doing to get more exposure with the same amount of words:

  • Guest blogging and commenting are a drop in a bucket — there’s a better strategy
  • Blog Carnivals are a great quality source of traffic and subscribers, but the quantity pay-off is tiny — where you should focus your republication efforts

Tools and Techniques
The 4 best WordPress plugins you can use to automate subscriber incentives and offer free downloads.

Totally free strategies anyone can employ:
Are you using Blogger, MovableType, TypePad, or some other publishing platform? This tutorial is not about screenshots or technical coding instructions — and with the exception of the WordPress plugins — ALL the strategies I discuss are about writing and marketing.

The strategies will work with ANY tool set:

  • The professional service incentive that I continue to use as a subscriber incentive on Shift Your Spirits that requires absolutely ZERO additional plugins, coding, or supporting technology
  • Low-tech and totally geek-speak free subscriber list building strategies that any publisher can use — no matter what publishing platform you’re using — no matter how web-savvy you are

Are you truly over-delivering with your current subscriber incentive?

  • Why any old “free download” is just not going to cut it anymore — how to crank up your freebies to irresistible!
  • How do you decide when it’s better to give something away than to try to sell it? The Right subscriber incentive can triple or even quadruple the rate of list growth.

A detailed walk through of the Blog Marketing Critique Checklist

  • Define your Mission in one sentence
  • 6 places you can use your elevator pitch once you’ve written it
  • Could your title be stronger? Your Blog title and description are independent of URL — are you communicating your mission to your ideal reader on the first visit?
  • 4 Questions to ask yourself about your blog tagline


What is your Flagship Content?

  • How do you identify the best content on your blog and make it instantly available to every reader, regardless of when they visit?
  • The 4 best places on your blog to include links to your flagship content

Better Branding

  • If you could only use 3 graphics or images on your blog, what should they be?
  • The 2 images that will do more for your blog than any other — including your logo
  • The most important elements to include on your About Page
  • The One crucial link that should be very visible on your About Page
  • What’s in your Author Byline?
  • Where should you be using an author’s resource box?
  • 3 things to include in your author byline

What’s the number one Call to Action that absolutely every post or article you publish should have, without exception? How the subscriber incentive works with your Call to Action.

What’s missing from your Email Address Capture form?

  • What’s a better graphic for promoting your RSS feed than the standardized feed icon?
  • Where — exactly — you should display your subscriber incentives and calls-to-action on your blog
  • What’s a Squeeze page? Where is yours? What do you include on your squeeze page?

Better Blogging

  • What’s your editorial schedule?
  • What keywords and phrases do you want to “own” in the blogosphere?
  • How often should you use keywords?
  • How do you pack in more natural search engine optimization into your writing?
  • Are you straying too much from your target topics?

Focus Your Blog in Your Niche

  • Looking for ways to bring sharper focus to your blog? The simple exercise that will help your blog stand out in a sea of copy-cats and over-saturated niche
  • Choose the best topics, categories, and keywords to target with every post
  • What’s the best source for identifying your sub-niche and blog topic focus? Who should you ask?

3 simple strategies for improving the comments you leave on other blogs — there’s one I use that I have not written a post about yet.

Looking for a bigger pond to go fishing in?

  • Are you guest authoring?
  • WHERE are you guest authoring?
  • Do you know the best place to guest author that will put your articles in front of hundreds or even thousands more readers?

Resource Pages

  • A list of 17 links to sites where you can start immediately finding readers who haven’t found your blog yet — I’ve only explored about 3 of these — barely scratched the surface of this resource list — and am not likely to run out of new traffic sources anytime soon
  • WordPress Plugins — 4 free plugins you can install to automate subscriber incentives and free downloads
  • Using Blogger/Blogspot? — The subscriber incentive strategies anyone can use, regardless of their blog publishing platform or technical skill level
  • PDF Creation Tools — A list of free tools, open source programs, and other PDF creation alternatives for Windows or Mac that you can use to create your own free ebooks and special reports
  • The free open source Windows sound editing program you can use to create your own audiobooks and mp3 products

$79

PS — If I were to decide to start blogging even a page per post — the information in this tutorial amounts to 6 months worth of blogging.

Six months from now, do you want to be reading my blogs and still doing what you’re doing — or do you want to start doing what I’m doing — TODAY?

How many hundreds or thousands of subscribers will you have six months from now?