How a Subscriber Incentive Affected My Blog - DailyBlogTips |
| How a Subscriber Incentive Affected My Blog Posted: 10 Aug 2010 09:18 PM PDT  This is a guest post by Dave. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here. My site traffic has been growing surely and steadily since I launched it online. I use Google analytics for stats, with Feedburner for RSS and email updates. I update my travel blog on average twice a week. However, about 8 months ago I noticed a trend. Although my daily visitors were increasing, sign ups to my RSS and email list had stagnated. Choices to Make Being an avid reader of Daily Blog Tips, I knew that a popular incentive to increase subscribers was to offer a freebie. A little offering like an ebook or a report that will entice both regular readers and casual visitors to sign up. What to give away? Well, as a photographer it made sense to do something with my photographs. So, I went to work on an ebook called "5 Top Places to Travel & Photograph" to give a way to all my email subscribers. Why Email Subscribers Only? Email works, that's why. RSS just doesn't seem to break into the main stream’s way of browsing. On top of that you have the following benefits:
The Results It was a flurry of activity the first few weeks of the incentive. New email subscribers, on average, grew 15-20% I saw the potential and increased the size of my sign up form. I also placed it on my homepage, (it was only on the blog before). Email subscribers continued to grow, while RSS subscribers leveled off. I thought it had worked perfectly. The Downfall An unexpected thing happened. Although my email subscribers were up by 15-20% per week, my traffic took a nose dive of 25-30%. Where had they all gone? Why were people not going to my site anymore? Was I too spammy looking now? The Reason Well, the reason was quite logical really. The incentive, along with better subscriber placement forms, meant that my regular readers were now getting my updates delivered to them. Rather than going to the site directly. The Rise After about two months of lower weekly traffic, it slowly began to go up again. Now, it's overshot it's previous margin and continues to grow. What's more, my email subscriber sign ups have leveled off at around 15% higher than the pre-incentive period. Which is good. Conclusion I put a lot of time and effort into putting together the photo ebook. I thought for the first few weeks it was great, then for two months as if it had done irrevocable harm. Now, things have sorted themselves out. If you launch a subscriber incentive, such as a free ebook, don't be surprised to see a quick increase and then a period of lower traffic. In my experience it's just your regular readers signing up, and not visiting as much. Give it some time, I think you'll find your traffic will boost up again along with new subscribers as word of mouth passes through forwarded emails. Which is another bonus to email subscribers. Of course, for any of this to work, you'll need to have content worth talking about. About the Author: Dave has been traveling the world for the past 5 and a half years in search of a place to live. He writes and publishes travel photographs on his website The Longest Way Home. Original Post: How a Subscriber Incentive Affected My Blog  |
| How To Build A Successful Blog Business, For Real Posted: 10 Aug 2010 07:37 AM PDT 
I suspected Collis would rock the blogosphere for a couple of reasons. He knew how to choose his niches wisely, his content was outstanding, and other aspects like design or monetization were perfectly integrated. Fast forward to today, that one blog grew into a blogging empire called Envato. Collis is the CEO, and he leads a team of over 50 full-time people. All the online properties combined generate over 20 million monthly page views, yielding a seven figure yearly revenue. Crazy huh? But why am I telling you all this stuff? Because Collis recently launched his book, titled How To Build A Successful Blog Business, and I just wanted to show that he is the real deal. I am not an affiliate for the book, so I won’t earn anything whether you buy it or not. Collis sent me a review copy a while ago, however, and I felt like the book would be useful to many of you guys, hence the review. So what is inside? Everything you need to build a blog business, and I mean it. Just consider that the book has 327 pages…. Here is the table of contents: Chapter 1: Blogging as a Business
Chapter 2: Planning and Researching
Chapter 3: Creating a Brand
Chapter 4: Staff
Chapter 5: Planning Content
Chapter 6: Generating Traffic
Chapter 7: Monetization
Chapter 8: Long Term Strategies
The Case Studies
I think this book is really solid for one main reason: while there are dozens of books about how to make money blogging (i.e., how to build, promote and monetize a blog), this book is pretty much the only one about how to build a business with blogs (e.g., how to choose niches to enter, hire people, manage writers, scale everything and so on). One part I liked were the case studies. Collis has written the complete story behind his most successful blogs, including screenshots of his traffic levels, income sources and so on. As I told him via email, I think the case studies alone are worth the price of the book. If you are planning to build an online business with blogs, this book is a must read. You can get a free sample with the first chapter in the sales page too, so check it out. Original Post: How To Build A Successful Blog Business, For Real |
I started following the work of Collis Ta’eed around three years ago, when he launched a blog called Freelance Switch. | You are subscribed to email updates from Daily Blog Tips To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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