JohnTP.com » Blogging

Increase Your Blog Subscribers By Not Using The Word ‘Subscribe’

JohnTP — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:22:26 +0000

Every blogger wants to get more readers for their blog and do it by asking their readers to ‘subscribe‘. But did you know that you could lose readers by using this word?

I never thought about it until I read this post on CopyBlogger that made me realize that ‘Subscriptions generally cost money’.

By asking your readers to subscribe, some might get the feeling that you are asking for money.

To know if its true, I asked a few people (who did not know much about blogging) what they understood by the words ‘Subscribe via RSS’ and ‘Subscribe via Email’.

Their responses were:

for ‘Subscribe via RSS’ – “what is RSS?”, “RSS? what’s that?”, “I don’t know what RSS is”

for ‘Subscribe via Email’ – “you are asking me money for sending something via Email?”, “What are you asking money for?”, “I am not sure.The site visitors have to pay?”

They had no idea what RSS was (which I already knew), but the interesting response was to ‘Subscribe via Email’ – all of them thought that I was asking my visitors money for sending something via Email!

Another interesting thing was when I asked one of them to click the ‘subscribe via email’ button at DigitGeek. He was taken to the FeedBurner Email Subscription Request page and had no idea what to do next. He looked confused and said that if he ever landed on such a page, he would just close it and visit another site!

Make it clear to your site visitors

So how do we make it clear to our visitors that we don’t charge money for subscribing? By removing the word ‘subscribe’ ofcourse!

At DigitGeek I replaced the ‘subscribe via RSS’ button with a small RSS icon linking to the FeedBurner feed as the people who know about RSS will only need this.

I also replaced the ‘Subscribe via Email’ button with ‘Get FREE daily updates via Email’ and put an email form below to subscribe via email. The email form should reduce a bit of confusion.

It depends on your niche

The number of readers who misunderstand what you mean when you ask them to subscribe depends on your niche. Like for example, blogs on ‘blogging and make money online’ will have readers who are bloggers themselves and so most will not be confused with the word ‘subscribe’.

Educate your readers about RSS

Also it is a good idea to educate your readers about RSS by putting up a page explaining about it and then linking to it next to your ‘subscribe via RSS’ link. You may have already seen this on Problogger and other blogs.

Are you using the word ‘subscribe‘ on your blog? If so, what will you replace it with?

Get Your Blog More Readers By Answering Questions

JohnTP — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:58:44 +0000

Over at DigitGeek we recently started an ‘Ask us‘ section where people could ask us hardware related questions and get it answered by us. So far we have been continuously getting questions and answering them as soon as possible in a new post. Answering questions helped us get more readers, comments and make the site more active.

In the beginning I was afraid whether anyone would ask questions on a new blog, so to get things started I asked my brother and some friends to leave a question. I also wrote about the ‘Ask us’ section on this blog and let a few StumbleUpon friends know about it which brought in some traffic to the page (the page is now daily getting some traffic to it from StumbleUpon after the stumbles it got from a few users).

After a question is answered, I edit the comment and link to the post where we had answered them. I believe that people get encouraged to ask questions when they find that the previous questions have already been answered.

Over time the blog will have answers to many questions and should drive in traffic from Search Engines and other sources and help new visitors with similar problems. It will also help the blog get more page views and make more money.

I think starting a Q & A section on a blog is a great idea and I will mostly be doing it for my new blogs too. Some bloggers like Darren Rowse, Daniel Scocco and Shoemoney have already been doing this for a while and I suggest that you give it a try too. Let me know if it helps.

FeedBlitz Bug Gets JohnTP.com 2540 Extra Readers!

JohnTP — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:15:27 +0000

Just noticed that this blog has 5484 readers today! Now I know something has to be wrong as I had only 2944 readers yesterday. I checked a few other blogs to see if they had a similar increase in their feed count and found that Problogger.net has 100k readers today! Yesterday I think the blog had only around 44k readers.

I thought that it was caused by a bug in FeedBurner, but actually its a bug in FeedBlitz.

Some readers are reporting a spike in reported subscribers that don’t match the actual count in FeedBlitz. We’re trying to get to the bottom of the issue right now. It isn’t a spam attack or anything unpleasant like that, probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code. Updates will follow as and when.

I guess the bug is now fixed and tomorrow we may see the actual feed count. Was your blog hit by the FeedBlitz bug?

50 Blogging and Online Money Making Tips of 2007

JohnTP — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 07:11:47 +0000

My favorite blogging and online money making tips that I wrote in 2007:

Blogging Tips

Online Money Making Tips

Increase Web Traffic using StumbleUpon

JohnTP — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:22:30 +0000

I have been a bit more active on StumbleUpon this month and it has helped me to get to know a lot of other bloggers, increase comments, increase traffic and promote my new hardware review blog.

Send pages to your friends via SU toolbar

To increase your site or blog traffic using StumbleUpon, all you have to do is to find your friends and others having similar interests to that of yours and add them as friends in SU. Once you have enough mutual friends in StumbleUpon, you can easily increase your site’s traffic by sending the page to all your friends via the SU toolbar and kindly asking them to stumble it.

I currently have 147 mutual friends in StumbleUpon all of which are bloggers (SU has a 200 friend limit). I found some of them via the post I put up to exchange social media contacts and some had already added me as a friend. Having many mutual SU friends makes it easy to get many stumbles for any page or comments for a post.

Make sure to thank your SU friends for stumbling and to return the favor by stumbling the pages your friends want.

Also remember to not frequently send pages to your friends for stumbling as that can be irritating and your friends may start to ignore your stumble requests. If you wish to do it frequently, send it to just your close friends.

Increasing comments

Earlier this month I had put up a post here to know people’s opinion towards faking feed count as I had a chat with a blogger who said he was actually benefiting from faking his feed count. I had send the post via SU toolbar to all my SU mutual friends and got good number of comments from many bloggers including Darren Rowse, Liz Strauss and Chris Garrett. All were good comments and not ones like "I agree" or "I disagree".

Increasing Web Traffic

Recently I had introduced my new hardware review blog here and asked my SU friends to stumble the blog and most of them did. The blog also got 15 positive reviews. I even messaged around 10-15 SU users with the computer hardware interest of which many stumbled the blog (I thanked most of them too) except for one person who got pissed off and left a negative review for the blog.

The blog received around 500 unique traffic that day and still continues to receive traffic from StumbleUpon. Some SU users were even kind enough to stumble other pages of the blog and even commented on some of the posts.

As you can see StumbleUpon is a good way to promote your blog, increase comments and to connect with other bloggers. If you use StumbleUpon, don’t forget to add me as your friend and feel free to request stumbles

Write Posts In Advance

JohnTP — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:25:32 +0000

Skellie has written an excellent post over at Problogger on how to develop the habit of writing posts in advance which is a good thing to do as once we have developed the habit we will be able to keep our blog updated even on days when we have lack of time to write, face writers block or when we want to take a break from blogging.

I have tried writing posts in advance before, but often get tempted to publish the posts as soon as I write them.

Publishing posts on a particular time each day also lets your readers know when to expect a new post and so you increase blog traffic during that time.

If you would like to write posts in advance using WordPress or Windows Live Writer, here is how you do it:

How to set the publish date in WordPress

On your ‘Write post’ page, you will find a Post Timestamp box on the lower right side. Check the box for "Edit timestamp" after expanding it and then change the date and time to when you want your post published.

Now just publish the post as usual and it will only be shown on the date and time you specify.

How to set the publish date in Windows Live Writer

To set the publish date in Windows Live Writer, just click on the button with the the calendar icon and select the day you want the post published. To change the time, just type it.

And to change from Am to PM or vice versa, highlight it and then use the up and down arrow keys to change between them.

If you can’t find the button with the calendar icon, it’s near the drop-down button that lets you set the categories for the post.

Let’s Exchange Social Media Contacts

JohnTP — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:26:01 +0000

Daniel recently exchanged Social Media contacts with his readers, and I would like to do the same here.

I had registered on Digg and StumbleUpon a long time back but never was active on any of them until recently. I would like to make more friends on these sites, and so would like you to add me as a friend.

Here’s my Digg profile and StumbleUpon profile. Also if you are interested, here are my profiles on Orkut, FaceBook and Twitter.

Feel free to share your social media contacts on the comment section below, so that other readers and I will be able to add you as a friend as well.

Once we are mutual friends on StumbleUpon, feel free to let me know when you need a stumble or digg via the SU toolbar

Note: Comments with 2 or more links will be put in moderation. I will accept your comments as soon as possible.

Do You Fake Your FeedCount?

JohnTP — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:24:17 +0000

There are a few people who fake their blog’s FeedCount. They do it either because they don’t want their visitors to know that their blog is a new one or because they want to make their visitors feel that their blog is popular.

Faking your FeedCount may help you increase your RSS readers as some people prefer to subscribe to a blog only after they find that it is already being read by many people.

My personal opinion was to not display the FeedCount until the blog reaches about 100-500 readers, but I have been thinking recently whether to fake my new blog’s FeedCount or to not display it until it has a few hundred readers.

What is your opinion? Do you fake your FeedCount?

How To Quickly Find Your Reader Emails

JohnTP — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:24:37 +0000

Here’s a quick tip to prevent your reader emails from getting lost among your other emails – Use Labels in Gmail.

It’s a very simple tip and one that some may have not thought about but very useful to read through all your reader emails at once instead of searching for them.

I use the PXS-Mail WordPress Plugin to create the contact form on this blog and have set the default subject for the email send by the reader as ‘From JohnTP.com’.

I then created a filter in Gmail so that all emails with subject ‘From JohnTP.com’ will have the ‘JohnTP.com’ label applied. This way most of the reader emails can be read via the label (some change the subject, but I have found that many don’t).

Gmail started allowing its users to apply a color to the labels recently which can also be helpful to quickly find your reader emails among other emails.

You may also create a separate Gmail account for just receiving reader emails.

Use A Desktop Blog Editor To Save Your Blog Post Ideas

JohnTP — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:28:53 +0000

What do you do when you don’t remember an idea you had for a post or when you face blogger’s block? In a recent post I had suggested to write a To-Post list for your blog but an easier way than that is to write and save a post as a draft with a rough title and points on what you want to cover on the post using a desktop blog editor like Windows Live Writer.

You can always open the draft later and continue writing the post when you have more ideas. This is also a good way to overcome blogger’s block as writing a post roughly itself may give you more ideas and may keep you writing.

The reason I do this in Windows Live Writer instead of WordPress writer is because it allows me to write offline and save and preview posts fast too. Here are the 12 reasons why I like Windows Live Writer incase you missed it.