9 Steps to Get Your First 1,000 Blog Readers

You’ve got a great blog going, but you just aren’t getting any readers or you need to get a blog started all together. You know you need to build your audience fast, but how do you do it? Sure, you can hit the first hundred readers by hitting up your friends and family, but those guys aren’t necessarily going to keep reading your blog, so you need a strategy to get that first thousands readers. Here are the 9 Steps to Get Your First 1,000 Blog Readers:

1. The Welcome Gate: This is a go-between, a page that requires the readers to enter their name and email to see the content behind the gate. This technique can result in converting as much as 65% of emails into subscribers.
2. Add an Email Subscribers Comment Check Box: If you add a check box to your comment box, you can get more subscribers! There is a WordPress plugin just for this, so search for the subscribe to comments plugin. Using this method, you might see as many as 200 new subscribers in just a few weeks time!
3. Use Qualaroo to Build Your Subscriber List: This is a survey tool that lets you collect email addresses instead of surveying your audience. When the University of Alberta tried this, they saw their daily new subscriber rate jump from 1-2 new subscribers each day to 12-15 new subscribers a day.
4. Popup: With Bounce Exchange or Opt In Monster, you can quickly and easily collect popups that collect email addresses for you. Page-specific popups can help you increase your email conversion rate by as much as 65%, netting you many more subscribers than you would have had otherwise.
5. Convert Your “About” Page Into a Squeeze Page: This type of page just has a single goal: collect an email address. This is the “give up the email or get out” page. You can see your opt-in rate jump by as much as 6% using this method.
6. The Quick Win: These are posts with content that help your readers accomplish something essential to them. For example, this post tells you how you can get a thousands visitors to your blog—a quick win for you! Some bloggers have seen their email opt-in rate increase by as much as 315% using quick win posts.
7. Optimize Your Confirmation Page: With a double opt-in, you will lose about 25% of your potential subscribers. Make sure to tell your subscribers to check their inbox and click the confirmation link to reduce this effect.
8. Throw a Contest: Test your readers’ knowledge with a contest, and you can see a dramatic increase in both your email conversion ate and your new email subscribers metrics.
9. Give Something Away: Everybody loves freebies, so give something away to your thousandth new subscriber. This is a great way to increase your email conversion rate as well as your emails collected in 30 days.

Maybe you don’t realize how important those first thousand subscribers are, or how important it is to gather those email addresses. However, unless you are a news site, you’ll find it next to impossible to build up your core audience without using some sort of email marketing. It’s the email marketing that gets people back to your site to view and share your content, so make the most out of these tips to boost your site membership. Lastly, once you have 1k readers you can then begin to use re-marketing or retargeting.

If you have any questions or additional ideas, please comment below or feel free to schedule a call directly with me by clicking here.