Win Over Subscribers

When your blog is starting out, your main goal should be attracting new subscribers. Translating these regular readers into dollars or into the other benefits you may be after is something that you can concern yourself with once your site is already established and has been up and running for a few months.

In the beginning, your goal is to increase your subscriber count. Sure, other metrics such as visitors, pageviews, time on the site, and bounce rate are all interesting and important in their own way, but nothing beats subscribers as an indicator of growth (and that you’re doing this whole blogging thing right). If your subscriber count isn’t growing, your blog isn’t growing and therefore not living up to its full potential.

By subscribers, I mean readers that follow your blog via feed or receive your posts via email.

What About Browser Push Notifications?

I classify web push notifications as an aggressive marketing technique. You might have seen them on sites that immediately prompt you with a dialog to enable browser notifications. If you—accidentally, most often—enable them, you’ll start receiving desktop notifications from the site even when you’re not on it. Unsubscribing isn’t so obvious either.

Push notifications are effective at increasing traffic and reader retention, of course, but they also disrupt people’s attention and, quite frankly, are invasive. I suspect most technical readers find them off-putting on a technical blog. They have selected uses (e.g., on apps like Google Calendar), but they’re controversial at best on blogs.

If you feel differently, or would like to run an experiment, companies like PushCrew make it trivial to enable this alternative subscription method.

Count RSS Feed Subscribers

As a blogger, you need to know three things about RSS feeds:

1. Readers who add your feed to a client of their choice (e.g., Feedly or Reeder) will receive a notification in their feed “inbox” when you post new articles to your blog. Once a reader subscribes, you can more or less count that person as a regular reader.

2. Despite being a brilliant technology, RSS is increasingly less used among the general public. But many programmers and other highly technical audiences will still use it to some degree, however, so it’s worth paying attention to.

3. Virtually all blog engines provide an RSS feed already. In WordPress, you can simply append /feed to your blog URL, to find its feed (e.g., http://programmingzen.com/feed).

Before discussing how to win over new subscribers, we’ll need a system that allows us to count how many RSS subscribers you have at a given time to measure progress. In fact, unlike email, you can’t easily count how many people subscribed to your RSS feed.

This problem was solved a long time ago by FeedBurner, a great service (acquired by Google) that allowed you to specify a feed and then provided you with a different feed URL that had analytics capabilities baked in. In a nutshell, it reported how many clients are requesting new posts from your FeedBurner feed, thereby giving you an estimate of how many people were actively subscribing to it.

In the past, I recommended FeedBurner. Today I wouldn’t. Google hasn’t updated the service since 2012, and the last two updates at the time were, respectively, shutting down the APIs and discontinuing their AdSense integration. Today FeedBurner is a zombie service I wouldn’t trust to last. (My full take on this matter is available on my blog at https://technicalblogging.com/google-killed-the-rss-feed/.)

There are two approaches here: pay for an alternative service like FeedPress,^[43] or ignore the feed count and instead focus solely on the number of email subscribers.

It’s also possible to accept that we could settle for monitoring progress, and therefore the delta in subscribers, rather than the absolute number per se. So we could use the number of followers displayed by Feedly, a popular web client, to see how our feed subscriber base grows on that site over time. This approach is far from foolproof but can give you a general idea for free.

You Need a Newsletter

Now that you have your feed taken care of, it’s time to discuss newsletters. A large portion of your readers will want to follow your blog via email rather than a feed reader. It’s imperative that you provide a post-to-email service for those who wish to subscribe via email.

Before you think, as most web-savvy people tend to, that this is a legacy service you just offer for old-fashioned people, allow me to let you in on a secret: newsletters are the most powerful tool an Internet marketer can have. Nothing else comes close. The money is in the list is an old adage among web marketers and it couldn’t be more true. The most valuable visitor you can have is the one who subscribes to your site via email.

The reason for this is that the relationship you have with email readers, unlike feed readers, is an intimate one. There’s an unwritten contract that people will at least consider reading most of the messages that they receive in their inbox. This implicit contract is weaker when dealing with newsletters, but you’re still in their inboxes every time you publish a new post, and that’s a very powerful advantage.

In my experience, the number of people who will open your newsletter will only be a small percentage of your total subscriber count—about 10%--50% (more if you have an exceptional following). However small that number may sound, it still tends to be massively higher than the number of people who will spontaneously revisit your site.

You have two main options when it comes to setting up an RSS-to-email newsletter. You can handle the newsletter yourself through a third-party mailing list management service such as MailChimp or Aweber,^[44] or, if you use WordPress, enable the option to “Allow users to subscribe to your posts and comments and receive notifications via email” in the Discussion tab of the Jetpack plugin.

The advantage of Jetpack is that it handles everything automatically for you and it’s free. Once enabled, WordPress will take care of the workflow for you, including forwarding your posts automatically, managing unsubscribes, and so on. You’ll also receive notifications when people subscribe and will be able to see a list of subscribers on WordPress.com.

The main disadvantage is that the interactions with your list are limited to what you publicly post to your blog. You can’t really send messages out for just those on your list, contact subscribers with autoresponders (messages sent at set intervals after a user signs up), customize emails with users’ names, or add all sorts of other nice touches that are often used by email marketers. In other words, it’s extremely easy to set up and accomplishes what it’s supposed to do, but it does little more beyond that.

You can see how the option to subscribe is presented at the bottom of the comment form in Figure 9, ​Jetpack's comment system in WordPress​. This also shows you what Jetpack’s commenting system with social logins looks like. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like the option to follow is very visible. You’ll still be able to publicize your newsletter in the sidebar by dragging the Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack) widget.

If you choose to go with a service like MailChimp or Aweber, you’ll generally have to pay for it, but you’ll have full control. MailChimp is freemium and offers a Forever Free plan that currently provides a generous free tier for up to 2,000 subscribers. That should cover you for many months at the very least. If you outgrow it sooner than that, you should definitely pay for this service, because your blog is Seabiscuit and you’d better feed that horse.

The main steps involved with emulating what you automatically get with Jetpack would be to create a list and then an RSS feed-to-email campaign with these email providers. You’ll need to customize the look of your messages and your sign-up forms and then embed one on your site (or use a plugin that does that for you). You’ll also have to provide your own address or a P.O. box in the footer of your emails to respect the CAN-SPAM Act (a funny name for antispam legislation).

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Figure 9. Jetpack’s comment system in WordPress

It’s worth noting that you could technically export email addresses from Jetpack and then import them via MailChimp at some point, but doing so is a delicate operation that must be handled very carefully due to the high probability of spam reports and complaints from readers who may see your new newsletter as something they didn’t technically sign up for. (And some email providers won’t even allow the procedure at all because of this.)

Which of the two is right for you? If you don’t mind spending some time setting it all up and assuming that the primary intent of your blog is commercial, go with a service like MailChimp. You’ll get your money’s worth from it. If, on the other hand, you’re mostly in it for other, non-monetary reasons and you’re using WordPress, then the built-in option in Jetpack is the quick and easy way to go.

Single vs. Double Opt-In

If you choose to operate your own newsletter and currently reside in Canada, you are legally required to make your sign-up process double opt-in. This means that your readers have to enter their email addresses and then confirm their request to join by clicking an activation link that gets sent to them by email.

Even if you are not legally required to do so where you live (e.g., in the United States), it’s a good idea to implement double, not single, opt-in. Your list will only contain addresses from people who genuinely signed up for your newsletter (i.e., they proved ownership of the email address). As a result, your subscriber list will be much more valuable than a list of unconfirmed emails.

You’ll also get fewer fake emails, misspelled emails, bounce responses, spam reports, and abuse complaints. You may lose a few subscribers who never received your activation email or didn’t bother reading it, but that’s a small negative compared to the benefits of having such a clean list.

Invite People to Subscribe

When it comes to attracting subscribers, two variables are at play: the number of visitors and your conversion rate. All things being equal, the larger the number of visitors, the higher the number of subscribers. The problem is that if your conversion rate (from visitor to subscriber) is low, most of your effort to attract new visitors will be wasted. These visitors will reach your blog and then leave. The majority of them are unlikely to ever return (especially not on any kind of regular basis).

The real issue then becomes increasing your subscriber conversion rate. Excellent content definitely helps, but that’s not enough in and of itself. You need to remind people that the subscription is available. Solicit them to take the action you want.

Create a Lead Magnet

If you want an even greater conversion rate, you may have to take things a step further. Don’t just invite people to join your newsletter: (ethically) bribe them. The easiest way to attract new subscribers is to offer them something valuable for free when they sign up for your newsletter. For example, if your blog’s niche is TypeScript, you could offer a short collection of TypeScript tips beautifully formatted in a PDF, or a mini-course on the topic via email that will send one lesson per day for two full workweeks.

This is known as a lead magnet because you’re offering an incentive that attracts new leads (in the form of their email address and the authorization to email them). This technique has three caveats:

1. You can’t verify feed subscriptions, so you will have to tie this to email sign-ups only.

2. You can’t automate this process with the built-in Jetpack email subscription in WordPress. You’ll need your own newsletter, and you’ll have to create an autoresponder, which will include a link to the download for those who sign up. In MailChimp, you could even include it in the confirmation email sent to new subscribers, without setting up a separate autoresponder for the download.

3. Technical people tend to dislike the idea of having to sign up just to download a file, so you may get a few people complaining about it. Remember, however, that you’re not doing anything wrong—you’re the one who sets the conditions for your own content. Readers can always subscribe, download, and then unsubscribe if they wish.

Some people go so far as to create so-called content upgrades, which are different lead magnets for different articles. This more advanced technique is best reserved for later on, when you already have a list of articles that perform really well. You can then capitalize on the large amount of traffic coming to them, and convert readers into subscribers by offering them a lead magnet that’s relevant to the specific article.

Even if you want to ignore freebies, which convert extremely well, you still need to promote your email subscription options throughout your blog. Do so in two spots. The first and most obvious spot is somewhere at the top of your theme or in the sidebar (as mentioned before). The second is at the bottom of your posts.

In WordPress the file that you need to edit to add custom code at the bottom of your posts is single.php, which you can find in your WordPress theme folder. But as usual, this isn’t a great idea unless you know what you’re doing. Instead, see if your theme offers an option to hook custom code at the bottom of posts, above the comment area. If not, plenty of plugins allow you to inject code in your posts. If you’re not using WordPress at all, do some research on what options are available to you to add a snippet of code at the bottom of every post on your blog.

At the bottom of each post you could have a message that says:

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter or feed.

Both the words newsletter and feed should be linked to their respective sign-up pages. (If you opted for a mailing list service like MailChimp, your sign-up form will also be available at a URL that will be provided to you.)

Even better, you could have an entire sign-up form at the bottom of your posts. Within your posts, you’ll also want to refer to your subscription options when it’s fitting to do so. For example, if you’re writing the first article in a series, you can suggest within the body of your article that your readers subscribe so as not to miss future installments.

Optimize Your Sign-Up Form

Whether you opted for a service like MailChimp or go for the built-in Jetpack subscription service, you’ll be provided with the ability to customize the look and feel of your newsletter sign-up form. You should take advantage of this ability. You can experiment to see what works best for you, but here are some general recommendations.

Add social proof to your title. Join 5,312 subscribers is better than Join thousands of subscribers, which in turn is better than Join my newsletter. If you’re just starting out and don’t have large numbers of subscribers yet, you could incorporate your social media followers into the number. For example, Join 1,257 subscribers and social media followers. If you don’t have social media followers either, skip the social proof for now, and use something like Never miss a post or Be the first to read my new posts. Later on, including specific numbers will act as proof of your site’s popularity and can help convince more people that your blog is well worth following.

If you produced a lead magnet, make sure you incorporate it in your subscription form’s text. Include an image of the freebie as well.

Don’t integrate your form so well that it becomes almost hidden by matching the theme colors perfectly. This might seem like odd advice, but you don’t want to camouflage it on your site. Instead, make it stand out. In particular, ensure the subscribe button is a bold, eye-catching color, such as orange or red.

Along the same lines, skip the boring, default “Subscribe” label for your button. Instead opt for something a little peppier or wittier. Cool. Let’s do this! or Sign me up for the goodies! is definitely better than the forgettable and unremarkable Subscribe.

If you are using a mailing list service like MailChimp, collect both the first name and email from your readers. Yes, skipping the first name field would help you sign up a few more people due to the reduced inertia at sign-up. But having the subscriber’s first name can be a powerful tool in your future email campaigns to help your messages come across as more personable. It’s also less likely that your emails, automatically addressed to the person’s first name, will be automatically flagged by spam filters.

All of these simple changes can help your subscription form stand out and in turn increase your rate of conversion from visitor to subscriber.

Are Pop-Ups Evil?

Most people would agree that pop-ups are annoying. Some may consider them downright evil. Yet, pop-up newsletter sign-up forms are also extremely effective at converting traffic into subscribers. Over time, I’ve seen them become more common even on technical blogs.

My take on this is that it’s up to you to decide whether you want to slightly annoy your readers and occasionally argue with them about your pop-up usage, or if the extra sign-ups are not worth it. There are sites, like https://simpleprogrammer.com, which run full-page modal pop-ups as soon as you arrive on their site. The first time I saw it I thought, Mad lad! But it clearly works and has enabled massive growth for that newsletter.

I suspect most of my readers would appreciate a more conservative approach, such as employing overlays that don’t take over the full page, like some modal pop-ups do. In the case of MailChimp, I’m referring to what it currently calls the slide and fixed formats, in particular.

Do they work? Absolutely. Should you employ them? It’s up to you.