Do you want to get more blog followers?
A blog can increase traffic to your site and help convert visitors into customers and subscribers.
But attracting loyal readers is easier said than done. Luckily, there are tried and tested methods you can use to start building your blog subscriber base right away.
In this post, we’ll show you proven ways to increase your blog followers and expand your reach.
1. Encourage Visitors To Sign Up
A great place to start growing your blog followers is by using lead generation campaigns that ask visitors to sign up for blog updates and newsletters.
If you persuade your visitors to give you their email addresses, you can let them know whenever you publish a new piece of content.
So, how do you convert site visitors into subscribers and engaged readers?
This is where OptinMonster comes in.
OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool that makes it easy for you to exponentially grow your email list.
With its drag and drop builder, you can create eye-catching popups and other lead generation forms that are optimized to deliver the highest conversion rates.
OptinMonster comes with 50+ stunning prebuilt optin form templates and 9 campaign types including popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and fullscreen mats.
OptinMonster lets you control exactly where, when, and to whom your popup appears.
Here is a snapshot of the rules you can use to determine when your optin form is displayed:
OptinMonster is proven to drive results. Check out how blogger Adam Enfroy used OptinMonster’s popups to add 11,000 email subscribers in 1 year!
Ready to grow your blog followers?
2. Offer a Lead Magnet
While you may gain subscribers by simply asking them, sometimes it doesn’t result in much growth. If you really want to explode your email list, you need a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is an incentive such as a freebie, discount, or exclusive access in exchange for someone’s email address.
You could offer downloadable content like an eBook, white paper guide, or checklist. And if you run an online store, you could use discounts and free shipping too!
Reliablesoft.net used lead magnets like the one below to increase its email optin conversion rate by 300%.
By adding value or solving problems, visitors will be happy to give you their email address because you’ve made it worth their while.
3. Create Content Upgrades
A proven way to get more subscribers from your site visitors is to add content upgrades to your most popular posts.
You can lock in-demand content and make it accessible only to subscribers or members.
Bloomberg does this really well by showing you a preview of the content before asking you to sign up.
You can use OptinMonster’s Content Locker to control who can see your restricted content.
You simply have to set up an inline form that asks people to sign up and then enable content locking to hide the content that follows it.
By providing content that adds value, you can increase your followers and conversions exponentially.
4. Highlight Popular Content
Another way to increase your blog following is by making it easy for visitors to find interesting content.
By showcasing popular posts, you can increase time spent on your site as readers continue to be engaged with your content.
Highlighting your best content will also encourage new visitors to come back to your site and join your mailing list.
To set this up, you can use MonsterInsights. It helps you identify popular posts and showcase them anywhere on your website.
5. Publish Relevant Content Regularly
To successfully drive traffic to your blog and increase engagement, you need to publish content that your readers like and that’s relevant to your domain.
You also need to be consistent. So try to publish around the same number of posts every week or every month.
You can use a content calendar or task manager to set a schedule and plan your posts ahead of time.
Asana and Trello are great task management apps you can use.
Consistent and relevant content greatly helps your site’s SEO and improves ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages).
Your blog followers will also know that they can expect a new post every week or every day.
If you’re not sure what topics to write on, you can start by learning who your audience is. MonsterInsights gives you all the information you need to know what your audience likes and where they are coming from.
You can access these reports on the MonsterInsights dashboard and then tailor your content accordingly.
Here are a few other ideas for generating relevant content ideas:
- Internal discussions: if you’re part of a large team, chat with your sales or customer support colleagues because they speak to your target audience regularly
- Use Google: Study Google’s People Also Ask and related searches tabs to find out what your readers are actually searching for
- Check blog comments: Blog or social media comments can provide insight into your readers’ minds
6. Find the Right Keywords
An important part of blogging is making sure your target readers can find your content online.
To do that, you need to optimize your content’s SEO so you show up in search results on Google and other search engines.
But with so much competition online, it can be tough to optimize your blogs and meet SEO requirements.
Here’s where an SEO plugin like All in One SEO can help. All in One SEO is a powerful, beginner-friendly SEO tool.
Using All in One SEO, you can:
- Identify keywords
- Optimize blog posts before publishing
- Audit your site’s SEO and fix issues
- Submit a sitemap to Google for better indexing
It’s incredibly easy to set up and use. And you’ll have all the tools you need to rank on search engines and drive more traffic to your blog.
7. Greet Visitors From Social Media
Do you have traffic coming to your blog from social media channels like Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube?
Adding a personalized greeting to your website can grab your visitor’s attention.
This is the kind of targeting that helps your blog stand out.
OptinMonster lets you create these messages in under 5 minutes. And you can use its display rules to show the message only to visitors coming in from a specific website or social media platform.
8. Make It Easy to Share Your Content
When your readers like your post, they may want to share it with friends and followers.
Adding social share buttons lets your visitors quickly share your content to social media. In turn, this expands the reach of your posts.
You can also promote how many shares your content has already received. This shows your content is popular and also encourages more people to share it.
9. Publish Guest Posts
Guest posting is a powerful way to increase your search ranking and reach new readers.
You simply need to publish your content on a third-party website to promote your own brand. These sites let you add links to your site or a message at the end of the post.
Here are a few steps for effective guest posting:
- Identify the sites you want to contribute to
- Build a relationship with the site owners
- Find the right topic
- Promote your content
Once your guest post is published, it will start driving readers to your blog. Here is where you need a plan to add these visitors to your email list.
Using OptinMonster’s Referrer Detection, you can greet these readers with a specific welcome popup.
These visitors have already shown interest in your content by following your link in the guest post. So they’re more likely to join your mailing list.
You can display a personalized welcome message asking them join your mailing list to capture these leads as soon as they land on your site.
10. Make Data-Driven Decisions
With so much site data and analytics readily available in Google Analytics and other webmaster tools, you can make sound decisions that will drive results.
You can set up Google Analytics for free but it requires a fair amount of technical skills. To make it easier to access your website data, MonsterInsights lets you connect your site to Google Analytics in a single click.
Then, it takes complex data and turns it into easy-to-read reports. So you can quickly find out what works best for your site and what’s failing. From this data, you can make decisions about what to focus on and what to let go of, so you won’t waste time on writing content that doesn’t bring results.
From MonsterInsights reports, you can also see which posts drive the most traffic, so you can add optin forms where readers are most likely to convert.
Making the most of your top pages will give you a better chance of turning those site visitors into subscribers. And once they’re on your email list, you have the opportunity to bring them back to your blog.
11. Use Social Proof
Showing your site visitors that people love your content is a great way to get more blog followers.
One way to do that is with real-time notifications.
These small popups showcase people taking action on your site such as signing up for your newsletter.
This adds a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) to your site. So when visitors see others signing up for your newsletter, they’re more likely to do the same.
A quick, easy way to add these social proof notifications to your website is with TrustPulse.
TrustPulse is proven to lift conversions instantly by up to 15%. It’s easy to use and you can set up automated social proof notifications in under 3 minutes.
12. Run a Giveaway Contest
Online contests can help you grow your blog followers rapidly in a short span of time.
People love to take a chance at winning, and will be happy to share their email to enter your contest. Plus, you can ask visitors to share your brand or engage with you on social media to participate in the giveaway.
You can set up high-converting contests in minutes with RafflePress.
It has readymade templates to create contests and you can easily enable participation rules in just a few clicks.
So people will need to follow you on social media or sign up for your newsletter to stand a chance at winning.
This helps drive more traffic to your blog and grow your subscriber list all at the same time.
13. Create Dedicated Sign Up Pages
A dedicated landing page for email signups is one of the best ways to capture emails. You can use it to showcase your top-performing content, product, or service and give them a good reason to join your email list.
Setting up stunning landing pages only takes 5 minutes with SeedProd. It has 100+ templates and a drag and drop builder to customize the page.
Using SeedProd, you can display coming soon optin pages to collect leads before your site is launched.
Or you can use maintenance mode to engage with visitors and build your list even when your website is offline.
Learn how to create your own signup landing page to grow your subscriber list.
14. Answer Questions on Quora
Quora is one of the best traffic sources to bring more readers to your site.
This question and answer site is a great source of backlinks for blogs. You can find questions that are relevant to your domain and post answers.
If you add a link to your site in your answer, you can drive Quora users to visit your blog.
Check out this article for more: 15 Ways to Get More Backlinks and Boost Your Search Engine Ranking.
And that’s our list of the best ways to grow your blog followers.
If you want get started right away, join OptinMonster now. It’s the best tool loaded with features to turn your casual visitors into engaged blog followers.
We hope you enjoyed this article. And if your looking for more resources to grow your blog and keep readers engaged, check out:
- Ultimate Guide to Getting (FREE) Traffic From Facebook – Step by Step
- 25 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 1064%
- 10 Proven Tips to Create Blog Posts That Convert Like Crazy
These posts are packed with tips and strategies to make your blog a success!
Ready to turn your site traffic into blog followers? Get started with OptinMonster today.
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