In the past few weeks I’ve been talking about warming up your readers and making them enthusiastic fans. So far I’ve talked about getting your new blog out there and getting the first-time visitors interested in your blog and comments.
This week I want to talk about how to connect with them. That means they should subscribe to your blog, connect with you, follow you, and give you permission to contact them again. Because let’s face it, seeing how many people leave your blog as soon as they arrive without doing anything can be a little depressing.
What is the best way to get in touch with you?
The first thing to consider is how your visitors should connect with you. With so many options available, you may find it difficult to choose one over the other. I still believe (and many of the bloggers I’ve spoken to) that email is the best option. For my two blogs, it is the main driver of traffic and sales. This is how our most loyal readers come to us.
Yes, social media is important. But for me it is secondary. I think it’s risky to build your primary connection point on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. They can surely help you deal with your readers. But everyone has a big problem: you have no control over them.
So ask for the email address wherever and whenever you can. And you can ask in different ways.
Get these important email addresses
To begin with, you should have a subscription form (or a call to action asking you to sign in) in your navigation or sidebar. This isn’t the best way to get someone’s email address, but it’s a good place to start to work out other methods.
And what other methods can you use to get someone’s email address? By far the most effective for me were pop-ups and welcome mats.
When I first used a popup in the Digital Photography School, our subscriber numbers increased tenfold. It was equally important that this did not result in a reduction in engagement or an increase in our bounce rates.
Of course, this can annoy some of your readers, especially if they are bombarded with pop-ups every time they visit your website. However, if you set it up so that your readers see it only once, they can be very effective.
We also use a greeting mat where the entire content of the screen slides down and is effectively replaced by a full screen popup. This may seem a little over the top, but our subscriber numbers doubled when we started.
Offer a reward for subscribing
Another option is to use a lead magnet: “Give me your email address and I’ll give you this free e-book / checklist / exclusive content.” You could even have lead magnets on multiple pages of your blog, each with a different offer. Think about whether you want to create a library of lead magnets that relate to the main categories of your blog so that you can offer them relevant rewards for subscribing depending on where they are. You can also create “content upgrades,” which are magnets for specific items or posts on your blog.
The best places to set these incentives are, of course, the pages / posts that get the most visits. Look at your Google Analytics data and see which pages / posts have the most traffic. Could you create a relevant lead magnet or content upgrade based on this page or post?
Be inspiring
I once did some analysis of the traffic we received for the Digital Photography School. In particular, I looked at the pages that people were viewing shortly before subscribing to our blog. And I discovered something fascinating.
Many of these sites had no prominent calls for action. But what they did They were images based on a photographic technique (e.g. using converging or guiding lines) to inspire and encourage our readers to take their own photos using the same technique.
It made me realize that inspiring readers with pictures of what could want to be achieved in photography, put them in a state of learning. And when they were in that state, they were much more likely to subscribe to our Digital Photography School website, which is about helping people improve their photography.
I went to these pages and called for more action. And our subscriber numbers have continued to grow.
Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track when people sign in. Then look at the pages they visited before subscribing and add stronger calls to action on those pages – especially pages with inspiring content.
Create your own series
I also noticed that more people subscribe to our content when we do a series.
When I did the 31 Days to Build a Better blog post series in 2005, our subscriber numbers really increased. It happened again when I did it in 2007 and 2009. This series of blog posts really helped us increase our subscriber numbers, not just for our email list, but also for our RSS feeds and social media channels.
Think about how you might be able to create a series based on your content. It could be a new post every day for a week or a month. Or you choose a specific day or week or month that you write about a specific topic, or interview another blogger or influencer.
Your series doesn’t have to be long. But made it clear is a series, and if you subscribe to your readers, you won’t miss any of it.
Don’t forget these other connection points
I said earlier that email is the best way for people to connect with me and my blogs. But that doesn’t mean I ignore these other connection points. And you shouldn’t either.
When I personally meet people who are fans of ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, they often tell me that not only do they subscribe to our email list, they also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other places where we are present.
How do you build these secondary connection points? You can fund them in:
- your emails
- Your blog navigation
- Your sidebar
- Your hello bar (if you have one)
- these other connection points (e.g. posting the message “I’m making a Facebook live here here” on Twitter and including the link to Facebook).
Make these connections
These are just a few of the ways you can connect to these first-time visitors before they go away – possibly forever. Which one are you going to try? Let us know in the comments.
Credit: William White