The Practical Advice You Need to Grow Your Blog Subscriber List

Feeling like a little fish in a big pond? Like no matter what you say, it feels like your voice is never loud enough to break ground?

Rather than wait around for your fairy godmother to transform your rags to riches with a twist of her wand, why don't you do something about it? After all, the road to success wasn't meant to be paved with flowers and open doors. 

If the audience for your business blog parallels the turn out for a crappy garage band, remember that you're the one driving it. You're the one producing the content. You're in charge of quality control, frequency, tone, subject matter, optimization, photo selection, and the list goes on.

It's up to you to position your blog in the most favorable light to ensure that people will not only find it, but actually want to read it.

So try if you will, but waiting on fairy godmothers and "open sesames" won't get you to where you want to be. If you're serious about growing your blog subscriber list, we've come up with 5 ways to help you get your numbers up, no magic required. 

Focus on Community

Just because you built it, doesn't mean that people are frantically running in pairs to your blog like it's Noah's ark or something. In order to build a community around your content, you actually have to speak up.

Forming a community requires the formation of genuine relationships, participation in real conversations, and the give and take of constructive insight. You have to attract people who want to consume your information because it speaks to their interests, wants, and needs. These are the people that will read, comment, share, and appreciate what you've written. These are also the people that will help you generate more traffic and leads through their promotion and dedication. 

So where do these types of conversations and relationships begin? Well, they begin wherever and whenever you initiate them. 

Start by sharing the work of other bloggers and businesses that you find informative, interesting, and relevant. Connect with them on social media and start engaging with their content. 

Reach out to other bloggers to discuss guest blogging opportunities on both their blog and your own. By joining forces on content creation you have the ability to produce back links to your blog that play a vital role in amping up your SEO. Not only that, but posting your work on a new blog will provide you with an opportunity to get in front of a new set of eyes.

Essentially, expanding your outreach, engaging with a new audience, and improving your performance on search engine results pages are all perks that come with growing your blog's community, so why wait?

Avoid "Buttoned-Up" Writing

The other day a blog article entitled "Why Bitchy Blogs Work For Inbound Marketing" really got me thinking about the way people present their content. 

While we prefer to call it "snarky" in our neck of the woods, the article made note of the success blogger's have seen by turning to unconventional titles and tones as a way to shatter the preconceived crackerjack stigma that comes with professional writing. 

The article came from the LytonWeb, a inbound marketing agency that is no stranger to the snarky approach we've grown to love, and with good reason. Their article The Top 10 Reasons Your Homepage Sucks quickly made it's way into their top 10 most viewed blogs, followed by The Top 10 Reasons Your Landing Pages Suck which came in at #12. 

Point being, articles that doesn't adhere to the textbook standard are the ones that resonate. 

Why? They appeal to readers because behind the desks, computers, suits, and skirts, we're all just humans looking to hear out other humans. Our real-life conversations don't commonly involve a slew of 10 dollar words and jargon. 

Stop Following, Start Leading

I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of jumping on the occasional bandwagon.

When Beyoncé surprised fans everywhere with a surprise album on Instagram, everyone and their mother (and myself) published the article "4 Reasons Why Beyoncé's Social Media Surprise Worked" or some variation of it. What can I say? You caught me red handed.

I'm not saying the occasional newsjack isn't worth your while, but there comes a point where you have to learn to break free from the heard. As Seth Godin would advise, be a purple cow.

Every morning I make the rounds to catch up on articles from blogs that I subscribe to as well as articles being shared in the Twitter feed. I think it's safe to say that for every awesome, innovative article I read, there are 10 overused, cliché titles trailing behind it. 

You know, articles like "5 Things Lady Gaga Can Teach You About Social Media", "10 Reasons Why Blogging is Like Wearing a Thong" (yes, I actually saw this), and the infamous "Is SEO Dead?" ...just to name a few. 

Yes, these articles are playful and likely to receive their fair share of clicks, but they tend to get a little bit redundant. Every once and a while I want to read something a little more substantial than a comparative piece on inbound marketing and [insert pop culture reference here]

So don't be a afraid to start a new trend. Take a new stand on a overlooked topic. When you dare to be a little different, that's when people begin to recognize you as a thought leader worth keeping up with.