Crystal Clear Communications Blog

To gain blog subscribers, you can:

• Maximize content value.
• Minimize user effort.
• Increase currency and urgency.
• Create anticipation.

Here’s how:

1. Maximize content value

To gather blog subscribers, your target audience must see your content as valuable. The greater the perceived value, the more subscribers you gain.

What’s the best way to assure value? Find out which content your audience is searching for and where they go to find it.

Buyer persona research shows which content people want and where they go. With buyer persona research, you learn:

• What are the audience’s needs, pain points, and obstacles?
• Which topics your audience wants to know more about.
• What questions do people have?
• Where people go for answers.

Learn people’s content habits

Work with people’s habits rather than against them. Ask: Where is your audience’s watering hole?

To gain blog interest, place valuable content where your audience naturally gathers. That might be guest blogs on others’ websites, social media in communities, or industry events.

Google Analytics can tell you when people are likeliest to look for your content.

Make a small ask first: ask people who read a blog to read another one. Follow up with a big ask: To gain blog subscribers, point readers to an easy way to subscribe.

The most valuable content you can create is:

• Your content base: the single piece of content that delivers what the audience needs in a bigger or more unique way than competitors’ content. Examples: the Michelin Guide, Guinness Book of World Records, and The Red Bulletin.
• Mega-content: Heidi Cohen encourages marketers to create an e-book, guide, or another mega-content quarterly. As you build your 2019 content calendar, start with mega-content. To gain blog subscribers, I offer an e-book, Fast-Forward Your Content Marketing.
• Consistent content: A daily or weekly blog delivers your subject-matter expertise with regularity. Over time, you build a library of content that will help you gain blog subscribers. For example, Seth Godin blogs every day.

2. Minimize effort

To gain blog subscribers, make sure subscribing takes minimum effort. The easier it is to find your content, and the easier it is to subscribe, the better.

Invite readers to do something small first:

• Take a quiz
• Answer a survey
• Make a comment
• Contribute a quote.

Then you ask them to do something bigger:

• Share your blog on social media
• Comment on your blog
• Subscribe to your blog.

A small ask that precedes the big ask paves the way for you to gain blog subscribers.

That’s because of the human consistency principle. Once people say yes, they are inclined to say yes again.

Wilbur Schramm’s fraction of selection formula encapsulates these first two points:

Expectation of reward

Effort required 

The greater the expectation of reward, and the less effort required, the likelier you are to gain blog subscribers.

Make it easier to subscribe to your blog with:

• Text messages at events
• Subscription reminders in your blog
• Pop-ups
• Sign-ups at live events in exchange for a lead magnet.

Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media advises bloggers to make sure their subscription form has prominence, promise, and proof. Here’s his blog on how to start a blog.

To gain blog subscribers, maximize rewards. Minimize effort.

3. Increase content currency and urgency

To increase blog subscriptions, increase the currency of your content by tapping into the news stream.

Looking through the eyes of your audience, which news stories matter most today? How can you tie in your content to today’s news?

• Monitor news and post relevant content on social streams.
• Curate the week’s news for your industry in a weekly blog.
• Refresh evergreen content with a newsy lead that logically leads to your topic.

You can increase urgency as you:

• Post on social media from live events.
• Tie content into coming events, such as the holidays: Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and New Year’s. See’s Candies does a brilliant job of turning all holidays into content hooks.
• Make a limited-time offer: to gain blog subscribers, offer bonus content to readers who subscribe by a deadline.

4. Create anticipation

When you want to increase blog subscribers, Andy Crestodina asks a great question: who is looking forward to your next blog?

Most likely, it’s the people who are quoted or named in your blog.

For example, the Content Marketing Institute asked 85+ content marketing influencers to forecast the future of content marketing in 2019. There is a lot to learn here from Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose, Ann Handley, and other gurus.

I’m proud to be among them. You can bet I’ll share this CMI blog with my social media followers:

Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath observed that local newspapers that include names, names, and names prosper, even as big-city newspapers struggle and fold. Why?

Because people look in the local paper to see their own names. And they look for the names of people they know or recognize.

You can’t put too many people’s names in your next blog.

Ask: Who’s looking forward to your next blog?

In short, to gain blog subscribers:

1. Maximize content value.
2. Minimize user effort.
3. Increase currency and urgency.
4. Create anticipation.

“How can you gain blog subscribers through your content?” is one of marketers’ Top 100 questions about content marketing. Here are the answers.