5 Ideas for Attracting More Blog Subscribers

May 20, 2019
5:05 pm

Posted by Mackenzie McLeod

“How can we get more people to subscribe to the blog?”

It’s a question we hear often in our role as blog strategists and managers for brands in the fresh produce space. “If you build it, they will come…right?” When it comes to blogging, this is only partially true. While having engaging and helpful content is essential to the success of a blog, you won’t see new subscribers flowing in regularly without a strategy that goes beyond the content itself. Growing your subscribers will elevate consistent traffic to your blog and help your business reap the benefits that follow the significant investment (both time and $$$) that goes into blogging. Here are 5 simple ideas to help you to start attracting more blog subscribers quickly:

Simple Strategies to Attract More Blog Subscribers

Take a Closer Look at Your Blog’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you build it—and it shows up on the first page of Google when they search for it—THEN they might come! Publishing content regularly isn’t always enough to keep your blog faring well in the search rankings. These days, most website platforms like WordPress and Hubspot have user-friendly features on the back end to help marketers without HTML knowledge ensure their pages are optimized for search engines. Start by making sure every one of your posts includes a meta description, relevant heading tags, links and appropriately titled photos. Take a look at this basic keyword guide for more tips!

Advertise Your Blog on Social Media

This might seem obvious, but oftentimes the blog isn’t the first thing that comes to a marketer’s mind when they are setting up social media ads for their brand! We often want to drive people to current promotions, but what if you had a dedicated budget just for getting more eyes on your blog? Specifically, we have seen enormous success with utilizing Facebook’s lead ads to generate new blog subscriptions within a short time frame.

Add a Subscription Form to Your Blog Posts—and Make it Easy to Subscribe

This one might seem obvious too, but take a look to see if your blog includes a simple way for someone to subscribe if they are reading one of your posts. If I get to the end of a blog post, is there a button or a form giving me the opportunity to plug in my email quickly to subscribe? What about a pop up that surfaces after I’ve looked at 2–3 pages that can be completed without users ever having to leave the page? Making it really easy for someone to subscribe to your blog (and fast) will increase the chances that a visitor converts to a subscriber.

Add an Opt-in Field to Other Forms on Your Website

Let’s say someone is filling out a form to enter your summer sweepstakes. At the end of the form, there’s a simple check box that says “I would like to subscribe to the “Insert Brand Name here” blog.” You’d be surprised at how many people are willing to say yes if all they have to do is click the check box! This is true even for a contact form on your website. If someone is willing to fill out a form for a brand, they’re also probably okay with receiving content from that brand on a regular basis. Try it and see!

Enlist Your Influencers’ Partners to Help

When fresh produce brands partner with influencers, it’s often with a focus on recipe development or a specific promotion they want the influencers to share with their followers. But why not enlist your influencer partners to offer your blog a shining endorsement? If someone subscribes to an influencer’s content, they’re probably willing to subscribe to other similar content. If your influencer partners give your blog a thumbs up and ask their subscribers to check out your brand, those new subscriber notifications will roll in!

Bonus: Use Tradeshows as New Subscriber Opportunities for B2B Blogs

Wait—there’s more! If your blog is exclusively focused on serving a B2B audience, you can use tradeshows to your advantage to obtain leads and new subscribers at the same time. Consider making your blog a central focus of the messaging your sales team shares during customer conversations in the booth. To make it even easier on your prospects, you can ask folks who want to be added to the subscriber list to drop their cards into a bowl, or even go as far as having an iPad with a subscription form available in the booth.

Blogs are powerful tools, whether you are trying to attract consumers, customers, or both. Don’t make the mistake of focusing so much on the content production piece of blogging that you end up missing the bigger picture. You can have the most helpful and engaging content around, but if you don’t have an effective strategy behind it, no one will ever know.

If you’re still not sure whether blogging fits into your brand’s marketing toolbox, here are a few things to consider.