How To Get 1000 Blog Subscribers Within 3 Months

Blogging June 9, 2011 19 Comments

We recently launched Simply Viral as a little side project to share one amazing piece of content every single day of the week. Even though it only features a video per day and a couple of lines of text it is essentially a blog and I wanted to share some of the secrets in how we have been able to grow it relatively quickly. Blog readers come and go and most people that find your site from sources like Google, links from other sites or via social networking sites will visit your site for one specific piece of content and never come back. That makes Subscribers (RSS, Email, Twitter, Facebook likes etc) absolutely crucial in growing a blog. Here are some of the simple tips we followed to grow to 1000 subscribers in 3 months and give us a good platform to build something meaningful going forward…

Find Your Hooks

Getting people to come back to your blog is all about getting them hooked in one way or another. That might be via email or Twitter or RSS or even via a Facebook page. It’s all about creating a captive audience who like your content and start seeing it a few times and then become regular readers. As you can see we have placed a simple graphic which features 4 different ways of capturing people on the page. As people watch the video there is a very good chance they will click in to one of the options and suddenly move from being a passive viewer to a long term subscriber.

Old School Emailing

We wanted to create a mini version of the Groupon model where instead of selling something we would provide one piece of stunning content. Email is at the center of that strategy. Give users a strong incentive to sign up to receive your content by email (make sure to make it easy to unsubscribe) and they will become loyal readers. We use a small pop up graphic that only appears the first time you visit the site. There is an argument that is could be slightly annoying but as a once off it is massively effective in capturing new email subscribers.

Shareable Content

In this day and age with the emergence of social networks the key is to produce content that people want to share. In our own case it is video that is curated for the users but it could be amazing text, resourceful guides or breaking news. The key is making the content so good that people want to share it and when they do share it have the sharing buttons wrapped around the post so as it is only one click for users and they push it on to their own networks.

Make sure to make your content very shareable

Google Ads

Most people probably don’t think about advertising their blog but getting the first few readers are always the hardest and there is no point you producing all the amazing content if nobody is ever going to see it. If your blog is for business and you want to raise it’s profile it might be an idea to throw even 10 Euros a day at targeting specific keywords that you are after. You market your website so why not throw a very reasonable 200-300 Euros a month on capturing some early readers?

Leverage Existing Sites

We are very lucky in that we have a main site here that gets over 300,000 visitors a month that we can use to link over to Simply Viral and we’ve made sure to flag this new project with links and banners. You should use all assets you have including your own website, personal profiles and any other way you have to pointing towards the new blog. It sounds very obvious but you would be surprised how many people make their blog invisible by not linking to it in any way.

Growth Accelerates Organically

The good news is that once you get the first 300-500 subscribers things really start flying from there. You’ll find that the second 500 come in about half the time. This is because you have people reading your content on a daily basis and sharing it with their networks. So put the hard slog in at the start and as long as your content is good enough the growth from then on will get easier and become somewhat of a formality.

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