With all the talk about my blog nearing 10,000 subscribers I wanted to give you a quick update on how I'm building the subscribers to my blog. It's really easy, I do it two ways:
1) StartXchange - I run a traffic exchange, so when users join at some point they'll get a "one time offer" that is really just an opt in form to subscribe to my blog.
2) Traffic Exchanges - Run of the mill standard squeeze page that I advertise in as many exchanges as I can handle. It gets hard keeping track of them all. Periodically I'll basically just start assigning credits in exchanges and stop once I'm totally bored.
It's as simple as that. Now I wouldn't suggest starting an exchange yourself to get the traffic from #1. It's great, don't get me wrong, but getting traffic from traffic exchanges is way easier.
There is this misconception that owning an exchange is easy and cheap. It's actually difficult and costly to get it to the point where you can leverage it to build your blog. You'd do far better to just stick with traffic exchanges and be able to have your page in every exchange all the time. Something I'm not even able to do because I'm too busy running mine!
There is something you should notice: It's all about the list. Both methods have the subscribe form. I'm not asking people to play RSS reader games. I'm asking them for their email address. Something the majority of people understand. Simple and effective!
After you get it setup, it's really all about consistency. The days I get more subscribers to my blog are the days I remember to have credits assigned to my site.
{ 16 comments }
Tim how do you intergrate your Autoresponder to your blog subscription? I have a blog and use Traffic Wave and have not found a way to intergrate the 2.
I’m also trying to find a way to that! Hes using aWeber btw.
You’re correct, Traffic Wave doesn’t have a direct integration. You can do what Austin & Jon Olson do.. They send out an email when it’s updated. I use Aweber to do it automatically: http://www.trker.com/go/21434/blog
All the way for Tim! We know you are the BEST Exchange owner out there! No one can ever compete with you!
You are the best TIM LINDEN!
thanks for the comments, building the list is always a number one priority if you want to grow your business
I’m using TrafficWave on my blog and haven’t found the way to integrate it so that it would automatically send an email to my blog subscribers each time I post. Don’t think that it’s possible right now with TW. So I have to manually log in to TW in order to send an email announcing my new posts. But that’s ok too. :-)
How do I get to show my picture?
It’s based off Gravatar.com, which uses your email address to pull your photo. Go to that site to upload your photo ;-)
Great tips for adding subscribers to your blog.
All list building efforts require a good ground work of integration and automation – not to mention hard work.
Thanks for sharing
If you are using Feedburner you can put is subscription into you leadcapture pages there and goes into your feedburner acount. I have not tried it yet but it shows that you can do it.
Yeah their RSS to email subscriptions are free too ;-) Only problem is it’s not an “auto-responder” as well so there are limitations..
If your using traffic wave, you have to login. Aweber has a RSS reader that will shoot out an email for you. Feedburn has it’s own email rss reader that you could use.
In Aweber use the “Blog Broadcast” feature which is under the “Messages” tab.
Thanks for the tips, Tim! Guess I need to get my capture page built for my blog then and get to advertising.
That’s nice that you have credits just waiting for you to login at the traffic exchanges. Do the auto assign features not handle certain credits that are earned in different ways? Also are there any other ways besides traffic exchanges where you are gaining subscribes, obviously maybe some from twitter and facebook. I suppose this question is to everybody what are you doing to get subscribers, are there some other good low cost mediums that are being overlook that you could really build a following from?
Traffic exchanges seem good in a concept, but wow do I hate surfing them, it feels kind of like sitting and watching infomercials with all the get rich quick junk. Maybe if they were setup more like TV with a more of a in depth story line and then the sponsors spaced in between they would be more entertaining and more people would want to surf more. I know some of them have themes, some chat, and little games here and there, but the bulk of it seems like this mindless clicking effort.
Auto-Assign on most exchanges (not StartXchange) only assigns traffic as you surf. So credits from your upgrades (most give X/month) or referrals aren’t assigned for you.
Currently I’m only targeting traffic exchanges. I do get some SEO traffic and subscribers that way, but majority is direct from exchanges.
Comments on this entry are closed.