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Running a successful and popular blog means completing several steps that work together to increase your chances of achieving your target visitor numbers. Your blog will need good on-page search engine optimisation (SEO), good off-site SEO, good content that is regularly updated, and good anchor text backlinks from high Page Rank websites.

Once your blog has all those factors lining up with good results, the visitor numbers will start to increase. But once you have all these new visitors, how do you retain them? To make your blog successful you must learn how to increase blog subscribers, also known as the art of blog subscriptions, guaranteeing that your visitors can’t help but return, again and again.

Increasing blog subscribers is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog yet surprisingly under appreciated by many internet marketers and bloggers. Now don’t confuse yourself with Blog Traffic and Blog Subscribers. It’s fine to have several thousand unique visitors every day, but if they never come back, then you will have had only one isolated opportunity to achieve your blog’s target. Whether it be an adsense click, an affiliate purchase, or a product sale, how much more likely would that objective be if your visitor returned twice instead of once, or 5 times, or every day?!

What do the pro bloggers mean when they say “Money is in the list”; even in this case, we are trying to get the email lead of the visitor which means turning the visitor into a subscriber so we can send them follow ups and blog updates. I bet now you can understand the value of return visits, and the very best vehicle for that return traffic is a subscription. If you can persuade your visitors to subscribe to your blog, they will return over and over again, and every time they return, they are increasing the value of your blog; in terms of traffic, sales, higher click through etc.

Whether you know this or not, if you can’t convince your visitors to subscribe to your blog, you will not be that successful in blogging industry. This is the bitter fact but you always have an option . Keep reading…

When a visitor subscribes to your blog, they are basically saying “yes, I like this blog and I appreciate the content”. Subscribers (not visitors) are most likely to fulfil your blog’s ultimate goal in the long run by purchasing your stuff, supporting you and looking up to you. There really is no better way to quickly increase return traffic than to increase blog subscribers.

So how do we entice blog visitors to click on to the RSS feed and become a loyal subscriber? There are lots of ways to get subscribers and retain them and I have posted several related articles previously such as Top 4 Methods to increase RSS subscribers but today, I will post my top 2 essential steps that always work. If you seriously follow them, I bet you will start to see an immediate increase in subscribers count.

The 2 Essential Steps to Increase Subscribers

Step 1 – Don’t Make it Difficult!

I know this sounds easy but I still see lots of blogs that are not following it. There are entire books on website usability; it is such an expansive topic. When it comes to persuading a site visitor to make a choice and actually click on something, usability has to be perfect. Anything less than perfect is a lost subscriber. So how do you make it easy, simple and a no brainier for your visitors to subscribe to your blog?

The most frequently used method of syndicating content and allowing visitors to subscribe to your blog updates is using an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Thousands if not millions of blogs have an RSS feed, but how many of them actually describe how to use the RSS feed? RSS means Really Simple Syndication, however to anyone who has never come across it before, it is far from simple.

You may be surprised to learn that many visitors simply click on the RSS logo, see a page of text, and then failing to understand what they have done, close the page and leave the blog! 80% of my friends and family do not know what RSS is. Surprised? Don’t be. Everyday the number of new internet users is increasing which means a lot of them will have/have no idea what RSS is and needs to be educated about it.

To ensure that these new visitors actually understand about RSS and subscribe to your blog, next to your RSS button or image, you can place a link to a page on your blog that explains what an RSS feed is and how to use it. To make it even better, you can include the following details:

• explain that RSS feeds are web-pages for computers, not visitors
• explain and link to example browser based RSS readers
• explain and link to downloadable desktop RSS readers
• describe where to find your RSS feed buttons, including the Firefox RSS feature
• explain how to subscribe using each type of RSS reader

By explaining these five crucial steps to understanding RSS feeds, you are massively increasing the chances of your visitors actually using your RSS feed and seeing content that they want to return and read in full. Make sure the link to this page is prominently displayed near to every RSS logo on your blog, and reap the benefits of RSS subscribers. This is a tip that you won’t find in many places; you will see this method in action on this blog in a few days so, I am giving you a head start

Step 2 – Encourage Visitors to Subscribe

With your RSS beginners guide in place, and your RSS feed button or link displayed on every page, you might think you have done enough to encourage visitors to subscribe, but no, you are only half way there!

Every web marketer should know that visitors need told what to do in order to close a sale, they need what is known as a “call to action” button. It is no different with RSS subscribers, they need a call to action i.e. you need to tell them to click that RSS feed button.

The best and most natural way to do this is to include a reminder at the end of the blog post along the lines of “if you liked this article, please subscribe to our blog!” You could make a subscriber link as your blog entry footer. On this blog, I have an intro plugin that asks to subscribe at the beginning of the post . You can also notice an email subscription option on the sidebar that clearly says what it does. I hope you get the point. I am listing some plugins that I personally use on my blogs. These will help you with the RSS stuff.

WordPress Plugins I found useful

1. What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors. I am sure you know what to do with it You can have a customized RSS or even Email Subscription form at the end or beginning of your posts by using this plugin.

2. WP Greet Box – I have this installed on this blog. It simply greets visitors with a small message. You have the option to include the RSS link and various other social icons. Just check it out.

Enough said; if you can follow these two essential steps on every blog you run, you will definitely see an increase in blog subscribers – taking you one massive step closer to achieving your goals!