If you read all of this post I guarantee you will increase your blog subscribers! A bold statement to be sure, but one I stand by 100%, no BS theory, just stuff that works!

Ok, let us get right into this with the stuff that works. I assume you have a blog online, if you don’t then take a look here, but before you do please finish this article as it will help you during your blog creation.

Generating subscribers to your blog is essential, not only for building business but for your own sanity! There is nothing more disheartening than seeing no traffic and no interaction on that personal space you so dearly care about. So let’s change that and start with – 8 tips to build subscribers!

These tips are applicable to anyone at any level and most of them are free or very low cost.

1. Opt-in – First of all when it comes to gathering subscribers to your blog, you need a process in place to gather those readers with. By process I mean an opt-in form. This type of opt-in form can be seen here on John’s blog, my blog and many others like it. So your first step is to get an opt-in and position these opt-in’s to maximise exposure.

Maximum exposure from an opt-in can be achieved by positioning your opt-in on one or all of 5 positions:

a. Sidebar – The most popular place to opt-in. Keep the opt-in high on the sidebar and above the page fold.

b. Below the post – After the post is a great place to have an opt-in, providing you give great readable content so the reader gets that far :-D. This opt-in can however be overlooked by those who would rather comment, so don’t rely on just this opt-in.

c. Pop-ups – Popups can be very annoying, but also very effective. Probably the most effective of all popups is to have a good looking pop-up with a great call to action. Some opt-in software such as Aweber can be set to show only new people the opt-in, this helps to prevent old and already subscribed readers from seeing the popup every time.

d. Feature Box – A feature box is not available on all blogs, but this is one of the best places to put an opt-in. Just below the title (same as John’s blog) is prime real estate to place your opt-in and call to action. This gets seen almost immediately when a visitor lands on the site.

e. About me page – Surprisingly, having an about page on your blog gets visited a lot. People are naturally curious to see who is writing and what they do. On your about me page, place a description, images and also your opt-in. It is very important to connect with people and by creating an about page, you can do just that.

2. Facebook – Facebook has 3 avenues which you can effectively distribute content to others:

a. Groups
b. Fan Pages
c. Personal Timeline

a. Groups – By joining groups of like minded people, you will find the space to share your information with the people in those groups. By providing good information on related content and inserting your blog post hyperlink to the group post, you can link direct to your post. This is gold if the group you are in enjoys your content.

The same goes for your own groups. If you own a group of related content to your our blog, then you have a gateway to share your online content with the people who are interested in what you have to say. Sharing your content with your own group will allow your readers to interact with you on another platform i.e. Your own blog.

b. Fan pages – Fan pages are a little different to groups where the content of the page is more about the owner of the page. The principals are the same as a group however. Just remember to ask permission of the page owner to share your content on their timeline.

c. Timeline – Simple, share your content on your own timeline. If you have a single Facebook account, you can group your friends together into internal groups so you can share content with these specific groups. Syndicating your groups like this allows you to share valuable content on your timeline with people who want to read it. Once more, the link back will provide an access to your blog and allow you to build subscribers from your opt-in’s.

3. Blog Hopping – Yes, you may have heard of this before and may have tried it, but did you stick with it? Blog hopping can be very time consuming, but it works. Take your time and spend it commenting on around 5 blogs per day to generate links back to your own blog. I guarantee, if you engage the readers and authors on the blogs you visit, you will see results.

Rules:

a. Always leave value when commenting. This is essential to gain interest from fellow bloggers and the blog author.

b. Share content on social networks. By using the share links on the blogs you visit, especially if they have them setup right, you attract the attention of the blog owner. Reciprocation is not always returned but quite often is. If your posts are shared by others, this creates a viral effect and generates traffic back to your posts. Let your opt-in do the rest!

4. Guest posting – Simple but very effective! By providing value on other people’s blogs you can set yourself as an authority in your niche. The guest blog will always give you a link back to your own blog, which will generate traffic and new readers.

Rules:

a. Provide massive value when writing guest posts

b. Always have a great posts on your own blog for people to connect with

c. Be on hand to return comments to every commenter on the post with a valued and respectful message. This allows interaction as well as relationship building with new readers. Remember, just because you landed a guest post doesn’t mean your traffic will explode. You need to work with your new readers. Earn their respect!

5. Product development – A little trickier than the sharing methods above due to the fact you need to create a product before you actually can share it, but the end benefits are huge.

a. Free Guides – By creating a free guide you can share this in many places and also allow it to be shared. This then creates a viral effect which, yes you guessed it links back to your blog. You can give these away on many platforms including social media, ad swaps, giveaways, Kindle amazon, eBay (paid for) to name a few.

b. Paid for products – Something I remain constant about is creating a link back to my blog from every product I create. No matter what happens to that product when it is sold or after it has run it’s course, my blog link is always there and my blog is always constant. Having a blog link in your products provides extra value for the product buyer and also provides a place to become part of your own community. Always give value to retain customers.

6. Paid traffic – I’m sure I could hear the groan when you read that! Ok, forget Google, and look toward Faceboook and Just Retweet.

a. Facebook – Did you know your can target your ads to pretty much anyone and any location. The demographics are awesome, so don’t discount a Facebook ad offering free information. This will guarantee you some new readers and customers. Just remember to provide value.

b. Just Retweet – Ok, Just Retweet (JR) has a paid and a free option, but the free option is very time consuming, so I suggest spending $10 on some targeted tweet traffic. JR allows you to buy tweets from real people, from which the real people earn points so they can in-turn spend their points on retweets.

By placing your link and short description on JR for people to retweet, the people who retweet your post gain points and you gain visitors from twitter. Good enough posts can go viral! I have had in excess of 150 tweets and the same in subscribers from just $10. JR is worth looking into for some of your more informative posts.

7. Tribes – Admittedly, not something I have spent a ton of time involved with but works very well. Sites like triberr.com allow you to join a tribe of bloggers who actively share each others content over the blogosphere. Joining a tribe allows you to become part of a blogging community, to share your content and also learn a thing or two about blogging on the way. Remember adding value and sharing each others content is the key here.

8. Content sharing – Ok, lets say you have written a very good article on something in your chosen niche. You have exhausted all your avenues of social media sharing and are looking for the next place to gain more exposure? Have you considered asking people on similar blogs to share your content? Some bloggers or websites will gladly share your content with their readers. They may even ask you to write a small article and then link back to your article, but this small task is nothing to what you will get back from it.

Remember, we live in a content hungry age and people/businesses are more than willing to share important information with their readers if it makes the reader happy. Don’t be afraid to ask people to link to one of your articles in their own articles if it’s related. Sharing is fun!

What are you waiting for? Get to it!

I hope you enjoyed these 8 tips today and do take something away with you and put them to work. You will see improvements to traffic by doing so I guarantee it.

If you have any questions related to this post, please let me know in the comments section below or if you have any additional value to add, please let me know I would love to hear what you have to say.

If you liked this post and would like to read more from Dan, you can check out his blog here at DanSumner.com. Dan writes about online marketing, focus methods and business tips.

However, choosing WordPress could be one of the smartest decisions you make. WordPress is a great tool you can use to build incredible websites. In comparison to other solutions it will save you both time and money. You should seriously consider using WordPress even if you already have a website.

What is WordPress?

In a nutshell WordPress is a flexible platform for building blogs and websites. Anyone can use WordPress to create high quality sites, without needing any technical knowledge of web programming languages.

Why Use WordPress?

1. It’s 100% Free to Use!
The WordPress software will cost you nothing. Simply download and install it on your server. You can then immediately start building your site.

2. Quick and Easy Installation.
WordPress is very user friendly and can take just 5 minutes to install. You will be adding content to your site in no time.

3. Powerful Content Management System.
Using the admin Dashboard you can add/edit/delete the content of your site, including images, audio and video.

4. Abundance of Themes.
There are thousands of themes available, both free and paid versions. Themes allow you to completely change your sites design and can be further customized.

5. Enable New Features with Plugins.
Easily add new functionality such as in built Google translate, search engine optimization (SEO), image galleries, contact forms, social networking features etc.

6. Supported by an Active Community.
With millions of users, any questions or problems you have won’t go unanswered. It is likely your questions have already been asked and answered. The WordPress forums and online manual are indispensable resources.

7. Keeps your site Safe and Secure.
With every new release of WordPress, the security of your site is improved. In addition there are many tools to help backup your website data, so you can easily restore your site if something ever does go wrong.

How Do I Get Started?

Good question. To start off, download the latest version of WordPress from WordPress.org. Then watch this video:

Customizing WordPress

After you have successfully installed WordPress on your server, you can change the default theme. Choose from the thousands of free and paid-for themes, find the theme that has a look and feel appropriate to your site. You can even edit a theme, if you are not completely happy with the existing ones. To apply a new theme, go to your WordPress Dashboard. Click appearance, then Themes. You can preview a theme before installing it.

You can customize your WordPress site further by using plugins. The one plugin you will want to use is Akismet. Comment spam is a big problem and without this plugin you would waste a lot of your time trying to separate the genuine comments from the spam.

One last tip. The default URLs for your WordPress blog posts and pages, are not optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Watch this video to learn how to change the permalink appearance, to fix this issue.

For more WordPress tutorial videos check out:

WordPressBlogHowToVideos.com

Erfan @ TheInfoMarket.co.uk

This is a guest post written by Erfan Shahedi, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.

You can listen to the audio by clicking the play button below.

If you would like to download the audio version to listen to on your mp3 player simply right click here and save as.

As always I welcome your comments and if you have any questions regarding the audio or any blogging related questions simply leave them below and myself and Dan will answer them.

However, there is a problem? Not everyone knows how to start a blog that is going to bring these sort of results. You see so many people starting blogs, posting a few articles and then giving up due to lack of traffic, content, comments etc. This happens because those people are doing it wrong.

So when I found out that blogging expert, Daniel Sumner had put together a comprehensive guide called The Bloggers Roadmap I had to find out more. After reading The Bloggers Roadmap from cover to cover here are my thoughts.

First of all let’s look at the product.

The Bloggers Roadmap is a complete guide to setting up and profiting from your very own blog. It’s a 22,000 word, 68 page eBook and Daniel has poured everything he knows about blogs and blogging into a single guide. It’s very well written and covers everything you need to know. Here’s a sneak peek inside.

Throughout the guide Dan has added tons of ‘blog tips’ to give you more ideas and I must say these are great little additions. There is also an upsell priced at $19.99 that is a collection of video tutorials created by Dan. Again, these are well presented and walk you through the actual physical process of setting up your own blog, although the videos are not a requirement, if you feel you are a beginner in the blogging world they would probably help you get more from the product.

Who is this product for?

This product is for anyone that owns their own blog or wants to learn how to create and profit from their own blog. As this product only focuses on blogging if you don’t own a blog or never intend to then this product would be no good to you as it only covers blogging techniques. However, anyone who owns a blog or wants to learn how to create one can’t fail to benefit from this content as it covers everything you need to know in a step by step manner.

Does it work?

The fact Daniel has built a considerable blog following would make me say yes, after all if you create a product about blogging you better have a successful blog yourself, Daniel has and should you need to find out more you can check out Daniels Blog here.

Negatives.

The only real negative I can find is you have to pay more for the video training, however I feel this is actually done with the customers interests at heart as the eBook is so reasonably priced on it’s own at $5.95. Daniel has considered this and understands not everyone will want the extra training and those that do will only have to pay a small premium.

All in all is The Bloggers Roadmap is all you need for blogging success? The answer is yes, as long as you are prepared to work at your blog, this is not a magic bullet and it does take work, but if you are prepared to work I believe this is the finest blogging product you will ever find. Blogging products are few and far between and this product is something you can refer to time and again to help you succeed in the blogging world and it comes with my highest recommendation.

Find out more about The Bloggers Roadmap here.

www.thebloggersroadmap.com