Hi everybody, I'm looking for some thoughts on how to greatly increase feed subscribers to my humor blog ( Say No to Crack ). I currently have a little over 500, which doesn't seem bad for ~4 months, but I'd like to get it nearer to 10,000. I've noticed that some humor sites have 1,000's of subscribers, many via e-mail. Some of these are simple joke sites that do nothing but pull jokes from a database, and also have relatively little traffic (e.g. not even in top 1,000,000 in Alexa & < 500 visits per day). On the other hand, my site gets 5,000-10,000 visitors per day, but has a proportionally smaller subscriber base. I'm thinking they must have used some type of technique to get so many subscribers, but I'm not sure what. Any ideas? Thanks, Anita
Humor in your mail to start off your day with laugh. This might be a good start? Try having a squeeze page.
How about making the subscribe link more prominent, maybe even using some Web2.0 designed buttons to help the style aspect.
THis is a good point. Your visitors need to be able to see the subscription link before they can join it.
yes, since most of them might not be so tech savvy maybe just a little post to tell them how to subscribe
http://leonho.com/articles/0-to-12000-rss-subscribers-ways-to-attract-more-subscriptions/ and there is a post from problogger but i can't find it now ..
Do an occasional give-a-way and they'll be back too. Make it fun, exciting, and memorable...something no one else is doing.
may be start a contest like "we will send out 3 special code via RSS feed in the next month. The first 50 person return all three code will receive a say no to crack t-shirt. To enter, simply subscribe our RSS feed and check it everyday_)
ahkip - that's a good idea! I've been putting together 2 big contests (but think I might need to move to a VPS before implementing them), and this might be a great way to make the results more effective. Thanks for the ideas so far everyone! Anita
Wow, a jump from 500 to 10,000 is a pretty big aim. I've always found that getting a site up to 500 is quite straight forward, but getting up to 1,000 is really tough. Good luck though!
Go to Social bookmarking sites and online communities. Post useful comments on other people's blog in your niche. This should bring you some users. You can also try podcasting.
Definitely try and write unique-ish posts that will do well on social bookmarking sites. This is my personal number 1 site growth strategy.