When you are trying to drive traffic to your blog, it’s easy to focus on just getting people to land on your home page. You hope that once they are there, they’ll fall in love with your stellar content and sing your praises to everyone they know!
The truth is, we’re all on information overload these days, so just hoping you get return traffic isn’t enough. You need to find ways to ensure it.
That’s where Social Media comes in, and why it’s so great! Make sure your Facebook, Twitter and other social media icons are super obvious and easily used and if you make the like/follow/share easy enough…you’ve got a new committed reader, right?
While it’s no secret that I enjoy getting new followers on Facebook and Twitter (Facebook specifically seems to be a fabulous traffic driving tool for my blog), it also makes me a bit nervous.
Remember MySpace? Remember Friendster? Remember all those other Social Media giants that disappeared overnight?
Yeah….
If you entrust your readers to social media, listen up…you are doing a major disservice to your blog.
Even if Facebook doesn’t shut down tomorrow, they could shut YOUR page down. From what I hear, they aren’t very forgiving or understanding when you plead your case either.
So why not traffic build the good old fashioned way?
By creating a mailing list!
Email subscriptions (and RSS subscribers…but many people don’t understand what an RSS subscription is) are a much safer basket to place your readers in. Think about it, if your Facebook and Twitter accounts were shut down tomorrow…where would your readers be?
I guarantee they’ll still be checking their emails.
There are many ways to handle your mailing list. I personally use Feedblitz, and have for years. You could also give Aweber a shot and I have also heard great things about Mail Chimp.)
Here are some ways to entice readers to sign up for your email list:
- Offer email subscriptions as entries into my giveaways
- Offer a free ebook with email subscription
- Make subscribing super easy with multiple areas to sign up displayed throughout your blog
Stop trusting your traffic to outside sources and take control of your mailing list today!
Check out all of my other articles on blogging today!
I love all of your blogging hints and helps, Heather!
I use Feedburner, but I’ve been considering an eBook. I’m wondering if there is any way to deliver an eBook via Feedburner? I guess I’ll have to do some searching!!
Hey Stacie!
You know, I tried. I really did. I just couldn’t find a way to make it work, except for putting it in the footer. I wanted it to be delivered upon confirmation, so that didn’t work for me. Let me see if I can find the tutorial for it. It was on problogger I think…
Heather, this is so perfect timing because just today I was doing all of this trying to set up another blog, and its been so long I couldn’t even remember. I did everything you said here, but in blogger it said I had to copy and paste the web address for the feed into a box, and I could not for the life of me figure out where I found that last time. Do you have any clue what I’m talking about?
Thanks so much for the tips, Heather! You are the best! You answered all those questions I had about my follower list.