As you're no doubt aware, subscribers are an essential element of a successful blog. They read more, comment more and return to your blog more than more passive visitors do. This means that blogs are excellent vehicles for list building.
Many people are now blogging in an attempt to develop a following and create a steady source of income for themselves. If you are not using efficient list building strategies to get the kind of internet traffic you need, let me give you three tips to get you started.
Do you have a subscriber box at the top on your blog? Where is it located? Is it in a place where everyone can access it easily? Make sure that there is no barrier to them signing up.
If you want to build your subscriber list, you have to think in terms of list building. There is no shortcut to solid marketing principles to bring in the dedicated readers.
Set up a special offer to your readers to get them to subscribe. You may offer them a free book or a program to get them into your opt-in list. Whether you display a banner or text based ad, establish your offer prominently on the page.
Make sure that you display your ads and links prominently in order to gain advantage of you current audience's interest in what you have to say. Offer people an incentive to sign up for your list and even tell a friend about you.
Even if you don't have a full fledged website, you should have an offer page for signups. This squeeze page should be dedicated to list building. I can't emphasize this too often.
Create a banner ad and place it on your blog to advertise your squeeze page. Set up a separate auto responder monitor your list building squeeze page results.
Prominently display your offer when guest blogging as well as linking to other bloggers. If you can get other bloggers to place your banner on their blogs, you'll be able to do the same for them.
If you go this route be sure to test out different banner ads to see which ones generate the highest response for you. Remembers this... testing and tracking of your results is everything online, it's the only way of knowing what truly works.
You can offer several bloggers an opportunity to join venture with you on an ad that features all of you blogs. This vertical group ad would be featured on all your blogs and websites. The list building potential is enormous dependent on the number of links participants. You could have a rotating system which would randomly display each participant. Think about it.
Another way to create a co-op vertical banner is to create a form that outputs names and links in a vertical format using actionscript and flash or javascript.
You can enhance your list building by offering an RSS feed. Another way that many successful bloggers build their lists. The RSS feed will allow more people to access your blog conveniently.
Focusing on list building is a great idea but it pays to remember what your goal is. You're trying to get more traffic to your page in order to achieve a goal. If you can get a link from another site that will give you more traffic to your site then it's a good link. If you're trying to get your search engine rankings up to the top of your niche list then you'll need to secure links with top ranked bloggers.
Either way, I think you can't go wrong with consistent list building; it's in your best interest to encourage people to become subscribers.