How to Get More Blog Subscribers From Your Staff, Clients and Website Visitors

We often get asked from our clients how they can get more blog subscribers. They have spent time, money, and resources in a blogging strategy and are hoping for a wider audience. We always tell our clients that the blogging strategy is a marathon, not a sprint, but there are ways to help energize the effort to getting their content read more and shared more frequently.

The best way to approach the different ideas your company can get more blog subscribers can be separated into three different paths: Your staff, your clients, your website visitors.

How to Get More of Your Staff to Subscribe from the Company Blog

Although the marketing department may be working their tails off to create and publish great and interesting blog articles, many employees of the company may see the blog as irrelevant to themselves and their clients. A change in perception is most likely needed, here are different ideas to get that ball rolling.

• Lunch & Learn — Have the company buy lunch for all attendees and the marketing department present a seminar about the importance of the blog and its purpose.
• “Subs for SUBscriptions” — Send an email out to the staff and ask if they have not yet subscribed to the company blog, to do so. Every person who subscribes gets entered into a drawing for a gift card to the best local sub shop.
• Create a Staff Competition — Create a competition where the staff members would each create a 30-second video of why someone should subscribe to their company blog (ex: it has great guidance and tips, there’s lota of advice, the articles are super interesting, etc). The winner will be placed on the company’s YouTube channel and also get a Visa Card or other gift card… You could then Tweet the winning video and place the video on your website for people to share. The video can be funny or informational or buzz-worthy.

How to Get More of Your Clients to Subscribe to Your Company Blog

Maybe one of the more obvious places to start getting more subscribers is with your very own clients! These people should be your business evangelists and sign your praises from the roof-tops because they have experienced your talents, services or products. It’s a really great untapped resource because while so many people are trying to get blog subscribers from complete strangers, this approach is much easier because you’ve already established a relationship with this client. The biggest problem here is that many of your own clients probably don’t even know you had a blog. Here are some ways to call attention and get those clients to love you even more.

• Auto-Subscribe — As part of the onboarding process with all new clients, let them know in an email or letter that they are auto-subscribed to your company blog and will have the option to unsubscribe if they choose. Make sure to outline all of the great tidbits of information that they can keep up to date on and is a great resource for continued thought leadership to help their business.
• Blog Marathon — Send out an email to your clients that simply asks them to “subscribe to our blog” and give benefits of the type of information they will receive if they subscribe. You can even give them hyperlinks to the most popular blog posts to get them interested and some insight to what your blog is all about.
• Best of Blogs Email Template — Create an email template for separate topics that you have blogged about and give them to your account managers to use when delighting the clients. If the client calls in with questions on a certain topic, and you know your company has blogged around this topic, having an easy to use template with pre-linked blog titles that the account managers can use as a follow up is a great way to get them to subscribe.
• Win a Vacation Day! — Send out an email blast to your staff saying that if they get 5 clients to subscribe to your blog, they will “win a paid vacation day.” Sit back and watch the subscribers roll in!

How to Get More of Your Website Visitors to Subscribe to Your Company Blog

A key way to make sure that when you have the attention of a website visitor, aka, a total stranger, is make sure that your company blog is accessible and visible. Don’t make the visitor work too hard trying to find your blog on the website. If it’s too difficult to navigate to, the likelihood of page abandonment is pretty high and they will go else where to search for the answer to their pain point. Try some of these ideas to get more strangers to subscribe to your blog.

• If You Build It, They Will Come — Make it easier for visitors to subscribe by adding subscriptions to your footer and through our website. Make sure that one of the actions that someone can take while ON the blog page is to also subscribe. If you don’t have an offer or CTA button to add at the end of a given blog post, you can always use “Subscribe to the Blog” for your offer.
• Spend Ample Time On Your Headlines — Make them sexier and more appealing. The more interesting your blog titles are, the more likely the blog posts will get viewed, which then increases your blog level subscription rate. Using this method works with higher numbers.
• Use Lead Flows — Also known as pop-ups, and sometimes despised if overused, but the pop-up asking someone to subscribe to the blog can actually increase your blog subscription conversion rate. Blogs that include some type of blog subscription pop-up, tend to have more readers.
• Use Your Social — Don’t be afraid to use your social media channels to ask for more blog subscribers. Most people just don’t know what you are publishing, and by reminding them that you have a blog and asking for their following will likely increase.  

You can get pretty creative when it comes to getting more blog subscribers. You also don’t have to try everything, take baby steps to execute a promotional plan to get more readers to increase the subscriptions. And, if you liked this article, guess what? You can subscribe to our blog here!