Blogging can be a good way to achieve a number of goals for your business, but without a significant number of subscribers paying attention to your blog, achieving these goals is a lot more difficult. It can also be difficult to attract more blog subscribers! 1,000 subscribers means you have achieved critical mass. It’s enough to prove your blog’s success and also provide enough traction to keep it growing and improving.
How do you go from 1 subscriber to 1,000? This article provides constructive strategies to help you achieve that number. It also outlines questions to ask yourself to clarify what type of audience you are trying to attract to your blog and why.
Know who you’re trying to reach
You cannot build an audience of 1,000 if you don’t know who you want that audience to be. If you’re starting a juice cart, the target audience will likely be very different from the target audience of a meatball sandwich cart. Where do people who love juice shop? What blogs do they read? What social media outlets do they use? It has been said that good marketing offers solutions to problems that people may not have even known they had. think about how you will solve the problems for your audience and find them where they are.
Prioritize good navigation and search.
Evaluate your blog from the perspective of someone who has never seen it before. In fact, consider asking someone who has never seen it before to go over everything. What does a first-time visitor to your blog see first? Do your blog title and tag lines instantly communicate what your blog is about? Do your theme and colors reflect your brand identity?
Pay attention to navigation. If a reader clicks the search bar the results should immediately take them to something that matches what they were searching for. If nothing matches, consider implementing a “suggested” item. If a reader clicks on an article, it should be easy for them to get back to the main page, or continue on to another article.
Position yourself as the expert.
The visitors to your blog must be convinced that your blog is worth their time. Put your qualifications and testimonials up front. Your About Page should be thorough and personal. Link to places where you have guest posted, or to others who have been mentors to you along the way. Show off your client list.
Make it worth their while.
Once you have identified your target audience, go after them with an offer they can’t refuse. Offer a freebie, or solve a problem. Maybe a BOGO coupon for your juice cart, or a free download of juice cocktails.
Give your content purpose.
Have a plan and only publish top-notch content. We’ve written before about how a blog post does not have to be the typical three paragraphs and a photo. If photography is your place to shine, tie your Instagram account to your website (you may need a custom plug-in to do this), but then every time you post a beautiful photo it will be right there on your blog. Add more text to describe the photo on your blog when you’re in between customers.
Embrace social media.
You do not have to have a productive presence on every social media platform that’s out there. In fact, that’s not recommended. Pick one and do it well, based on the identity of the people you want to attract. Facebook is an obvious choice, because its paid posting options let you target people in certain demographics and geographic regions.
But beyond that, connect with other leaders in your industry and promote their work. They may respond and promote yours. Build relationships with other leaders in your industry through commenting on their blogs, responding to their tweets, and engaging on their Facebook pages.
Make your content easily shareable by including social media buttons everywhere you can. Posts with images automatically get more attention than those without, so choose good quality stock photos if you’re not taking your own. Work to produce content that people actually want to read.
The deeper your understanding of your target audience, the easier this becomes, as you can know where to find your readers online, know how they interact with other blogs and other online presences, and know what their problems and concerns are and what they need to solve those issues.
Once you know your target audience to the greatest level you can, the type of content that you need to produce becomes more obvious, as do the methods that you can use to promote that content.