Being Prepared Can Get You More Subscriber And Shares.

Generally, bloggers rely on an opt-in form in their sidebar or header to get subscribers.

And that’s okay but it may not bring a torrent of new people joining your list, as you may have discovered.

The trouble is though that building your list is paramount if you’re serious about building a business around your blog.

Why? Because it gives you the opportunity to correspond with your readers and followers on a more personal level.

That means that you can build more meaningful relationships and, of course, trust.

By maintaining these relationships and delivering value through your blog posts in conjunction with your emails, people will be more likely to buy from you as they will know and trust you.

But is an opt-in form in your sidebar enough to generate enough subscribers? More than likely not.

LET’S TALK ABOUT GOALS…

When it comes to blog posts, do you have a goal in mind each time you write?

In other words, does your post have a reason to be there – a purpose. For quite some time, mine didn’t really.

I thought of an idea, did some research, wrote the post, published it, and then moved onto the next one.

…But does that seem particularly targeted to you? No? Me neither.

I wasn’t actually targeting anything, other than hoping that someone might subscribe through my opt-in form and that I might get some traffic.

HOW CAN I USE THIS POST TO GET MORE EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS?

Rather than relying solely on the opt-in form in your sidebar, ask yourself how each blog post you write can add subscribers to your mailing list.

If you take the example of the Hubspot blog, all of their articles have a strong call to action at the end and a good majority of them offer a free giveaway.

And you guessed it, to get the free giveaway you have to provide your email address and quite a lot more information.

Now I’m sure in an ideal world we could all put together a free eBook for every blog post we write but that’s not really realistic.

However, it doesn’t have to be an eBook. As a practice run, I put together a blog post checklist and it’s a one page document.

That’s the sort of thing I’d think about using as a giveaway in a future blog post.

It definitely needs to be relevant to the post where you’re offering the giveaway but not so specific that you can’t use it in more than one post.

Having an additional way to gain more subscribers can only improve your opt-in rate.

I recommend using LeadPages to gather subscriber details from your giveaway.

You can connect any text, image or button to a lead capture box which pops up when clicked so people can enter their email address.

WHAT DO I WANT PEOPLE TO DO AFTER THEY’VE READ THE POST?

So, you’ve got to the end of the post and you may have offered a free giveaway to get people to subscribe.

But if you didn’t have one prepared for a particular post, it’s important to tell people what you want them to do.

I touched on the call to action previously. You really need to have an idea of what you want people to do at the end of your post before you even start writing it.

If you’re writing a review of a product for example, you might want people to click on an affiliate link.

Maybe you want them to leave a comment or share your post? Whatever it is, they’re more likely to do it if you ask them to.

I’ve been trying out a plugin just recently to add a more prominent call to action at the end of some of my posts.

You can see the result in my last post where I’ve included a call to action box with a clickable button.

I’m testing it to see whether giving people an obvious clickable button might increase the click-through rate.

SO, WHAT NEXT?

If you haven’t done so already, please grab your FREE guide.

Please also share this post with people who you think will find it valuable. There’s some handy sharing buttons at the top of the post in case you missed them.

And finally, I’d like to end with a question for you…

How do you think being more strategic about your blog posts will help your blog and business in the long run?