I know a lot of you are involved with Blogging Idol, and I did promise I’d try and get you content that would help. Whether you are involved in Blogging Idol or not, all of you (probably) are interested in boosting your online income, and one of the easiest ways to make some income is by flipping blogs with active visitors. Apart from say… writing a guest post, one of the biggest things a visitor can do to become active is subscribe to your blog – with this, they are opting in to receive your content every single day (or how often you post).

The more subscribers you have, the more valuable your blog is – that is something that is pretty simple. How do you increase subscribers? Below, I’m going to list a few ways – ranked by how useful they have been for me.

My own contests - by far the best way to boost metrics. Some say it is ‘bribing’ your readers to follow you, but I’ve got to disagree – if they do not like your content, they will unsubscribe. A contest is a great way to get people to know about your blog, people that wouldn’t have prior as they see posts on other websites and the best thing is, all you have to do is ask around and you’ll get plenty of sponsored prizes. Don’t forget to promote your contest after you start it!

Great posts – funnily enough, this comes second in the list – the reason for this is that great content alone will not get you subscribers, marketing it will. There are plenty of bigger blogs with content that is to put it lightly… utter rubbish, and the main reason they are big is because of the marketing they have done (which includes weekly, or sometimes even daily contests). As is the common speak in sales, a mediocre product with great marketing will do far better than a great product with mediocre marketing.

Guest posts – guest posts allow you to expose yourself to a whole new audience and they don’t cost you anything except time. Time that plenty of us have too much of – seriously though, it’s one of the best ways to promote a blog and I will be doing a few of these over the next month, so watch out for them – if you’re interested on seeing a guest post on your blog, send me an email

Others contests - sponsoring someone else’s contest is a great way to get the word out, especially the ones that require people linking to a list of sponsors etc. You don’t even have to sponsor much – I’ve sponsored 1,000 copies of an eBook that is about 3,000 words long and took me a couple of hours to write for quite a few contests; in return, it’s built me more than 1,000 backlinks to the blog over the last month or two. How’s that for return on time?

Paid advertising – paid advertising is at the bottom of the pile because it is in my eyes worthless; you should only pay for advertising if you like the blogger and are not doing it for the exposure, as there are plenty of ways to get the word out, free (top commentators, guest posts… etc).

Mini Contest

I’m competing in Blogging Idol and want to boost subscriber count – now, I’m not offering cash as you can’t sponsor your own contest with money, however I am offering links for everyone that subscribes.

Here’s the deal – subscribe to my feed via email, and once you’re done send me an email with the one you used and your link with anchor text. I’ll confirm and add your link to my Links page, which gets a few hundred uniques monthly. This is only applicable to new subscribers, but if you are already subscribed you can always do so again – by email.

Edit: Idea taken from Tom @ Stand Out Blogger. You can subscribe to his blog at his site to help him out too

If you want more exposure, write a post mentioning three reasons people should subscribe to my RSS feed and link to my RSS page and you’ll get a one month link under ‘Blogging Friends‘ in the sidebar, with the best post getting a 125 x 125 ad for one month. You’ll also get an (extra) entry into a sponsored contest I’ll be running later this month with (hopefully) decent prizes. For inspiration, you can check out my ‘Why Subscribe‘ page.

I’ve been making updates to the blog – added the above page and updated my ‘About’ page, will be reworking other things too. I rewrote my about page because there was a bit too much slang used, wanted it to seem more professional; I added my Skype contact as well as a mailing address (I get a couple requests a week for it so why not). If anyone wants to mail me something, feel free

Two bits of news that I have for you guys;

a) I’ll start the article marketing case study soon, thanks for all those that reminded me; I’ve been busy with offline stuff so not really had time for it.

b) The winner of the Creative Vado has been chosen, without me knowing – anyways, you can check out the post on Derek’s website. For all those that ask – I had no input into selecting the winner, nor was i asked – so I do not know how it was chosen. Just had to update as a few people were asking about it.

Over and out!

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