No one knows how many blogs there are on the internet and what subjects are covered – new blogs keep appearing every moment and there is no subject that is not being blogged about by someone somewhere. Blogs have been around for a little over 10 years although having become a part of so many peoples lives, it seems that they have been in existence for much longer than that. Blogs, or web logs to give them their full name, began in the late 1990s as posts of personal information and opinions by individuals – thus the term “log” as in log book or record. In other words, the first blogs were personal blogs and the majority today is still the same.
Many people who would like to start blogging do not do so because they are not sure what they can write about and also what subjects will find readers. These questions have answers that are very simple – bloggers can write about anything they have strong opinions on which they want to share with the world and as to the matter of whether there will be readers, the fact is that the internet has people of every kind, opinion and taste and whatever comes out in a personal blog will find people who will read it and respond. Often little known but important issues have been brought to the public’s notice through personal blogs.
But even well known issues are subjects for personal blogs when the blogger feels that they are not being shown in the proper light or that people do not understand their significance. Personal blogs are also used to spread awareness of what the blogger thinks are unseen, unappreciated or deliberately concealed aspects of issues of popular concerns as can be seen by the huge number of blogs that comment on what the authors think are hidden aspects of things like the war, the recession, the World Series, The failure of Pakistan as a nation and so on.
A personal blog that is popular and has a regular and loyal bunch of readers can be a money maker for the blogger – it is possible to sell advertising space on the blog and this can be a source of regular income to the author; although since the money paid depends on the regular readership, a blog has to be very popular to earn a significant amount. Personal blogs have a larger social service to perform as may be seen in the cases of countries where press freedom is curtailed and the only way the people in the rest of the world get to know what is really happening is by reading the personal blogs that emerge from these places. Money making and social responsibility are secondary aspects – the main function of a personal blog is to allow the blogger to have his say.
6 Ways For Acquiring More Blog Subscribers
So, you say you want visitors to your blog? You are not the first and will probably not be the last person seeking this fortune. Truth is though, some people make it harder than it has to be.
One of the first things you need is traffic. And once you get it then you have to know how to convert that traffic into subscribers. Use these six tips to assist you in achieving that goal:
1. Focus on SEO
One of the better ways of attaining long-term traffic is by making sure you get ranked in the search engines. This won’t come without a little work so don’t set unrealistic expectations.
Getting those desired results in SEO could take some time. This is where a lot of people will get frustrated when they don’t achieve their desired results of ranking for their chosen keywords, and then might give up. But, if you can learn to be patient and continue to work hard you will start to see results.
Think about the what keywords you are targeting. A lot could be determined by the time you are investing in your blog. For a smaller site you may want to go after long tailed keywords. But if you want to go after a bigger site, you might be able to use more popular keywords for your site.
2. Leave comments
You might look at this as being obvious but it is one of the oldest strategies for getting more blog traffic and it still works just fine. You just want to make sure you are leaving quality comments on forums and blogs that you find are related to your site.
You just want to be sure you are leaving these comments on places that allow you to leave a backlink to your site. You will want to try to include your keywords in the link. This should help to generate some traffic and should also help your rankings in the search engines.
Make sure that people will find your comments useful. You do not want to be like those others that like to use the “spammer approach”. You know, the kind of person that is leaving similar comments on all of the blogs and forums that will allow a do-follow link. You might discover this will help you with your SEO but it probably won’t do much for attracting visitors to your site.
A far different strategy that could actually work well for you is to hang out in a few of those forums and make some intelligent comments on a few blogs for a while and try to establish yourself as an expert. This will show that you are there to provide some helpful information and quality content and soon people will be much more interested in what you have to say.
As people see that you do really want to help others instead of trying to acquire backlinks, you could be seen as an expert. And then this could increase your traffic.
3. Guest posting
A good way for you to be seen by more people is by guest blogging. When you are contributing to other people’s blogs you could get a backlink in return. And if you run into a popular blog that will let you become a regular contributor, this could help you gain a long-term source of traffic.
4. Make it easy to subscribe
Acquiring visitors is but a part of the puzzle. The other part is to be able to get them to sign up for your list. But even this is not that hard.
You can start by making it easy to subscribe. A real good strategy for this is to put a squeeze page or sign up box on the bottom or side of every post. Then you can test it out to see what would be a more effective area, but this is where you tend to get the most sign ups. I tend to use the right side of my post.
5. Write great content
Probably should be near the top as this is oh so important. If you can provide great content for you site, you will find that more people will be willing sign up for your newsletter.
And you do not want to rewrite some of those public domain articles. It would probably work better if you can give some help with personal experiences about the niche. Try telling your own story to get some good results. You might also consider some PLR articles.
6. Give incentives to sign up
As an example, offer a free e-book or an interview when they decide to sign up on your squeeze page.
As you can see, getting more sign-ups is not that hard. In fact, none of these strategies are very difficult, but they will work well. It will require some work and you will have to be patient but it could lead to a very sizeable list of subscribers you can market to again and again.
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