Blog Success: Subscription Numbers Count Over Visitors

Brian Clark of Copyblogger makes a good point about measuring the success of your blog. He says it's not number of visitors that counts, but number of subscribers. Here's an excerpt of his post:

Blog Commitment

Due to the principles of commitment and consistency, the most important blog metric to track is not raw traffic, page views, or unique monthly visitors. The most important thing to build and track is your subscriber base.

A subscriber has made a commitment to you that a mere site visitor hasn’t. Something magical happens when someone raises their hand and says “please communicate with me on a regular basis.” This small commitment is the heart of permission marketing, a very powerful concept that seems to be getting lost in all the Web 2.0 hoopla.

A subscription not only increases the frequency and regularity of contacts with a prospect, it also changes the frame through which that prospect will view your eventual offer. The prospect’s world view may now be such that a purchase is more likely thanks to the subscription relationship.

Thanks, Brian. Denise and I have always insisted on our blog clients inserting a subscription form from Feedblitz up at the top so readers can get regular updates through email.

If you're not using this free and easy service, you should. Here is a previous post, a Feedblitz tutorial from Denise.

And here's is a post about adding a hit counter to your blog. Measuring traffic is important, but more importantly, is getting the right kind of traffic: your targeted readers who will become clients.

Comments

[Laura Lind-Blum]

OK - I'm convinced -- subscribers are absolute gold, and I definitely want to invite people to subscribe to my blog...what I'm curious about are the benefits of Feedblitz over a standard, and perhaps more flexible, ezine/autoresponder sign up list (like something through 1shoppingcart.com). Wouldn't there be an advantage to feeding your standard list with folks who love your blog? Does it make more sense to have two lists which live in separate places?

[The Blog Squad(tm)]

Good questions, Laura. Here's my take on this issue.

Feedblitz is designed to focus solely on delivering blog updates. It is automatic and helps drive consistent traffic to your site from the people who WANT to be kept up to date. You don't have to spend time writing up a blog update announcement every time you post new content.

With an ezine/email/autoresponder delivery system, you have to manually create a message, select your list, and then broadcast your message. This is better for delivering an ezine, special report or e-course.

However there is nothing to stop you from having more than one subscription form or link on your blog and website. As long as they are clearly defined about what the subscriber is getting. Your ezine subscribers may not want blog updates every time you post, and adding a link to your blog in your ezine may be enough for them. Conversely, people who get blog updates may not want to get an ezine from you and are happy to get the blog updates.

Give people what they want. Survey your readers: blog, ezine or both? Give them the choice and you'll have lots of happy subscribers getting what they want.

Denise a.k.a The Blog Squad(tm)

[Kamara Alleyne]

I've recently added subscription form to my blog.(Feedblitz) I was just thinking about something though. When my entire post is sent via email, the reader does not have to visit my blog again. This could be a problem for me because I've added Google Adsense to my blog and no visitors means no clicks on these ads hence no earnings.
What I'd really like to do is to have about the first paragraph of each post in that email with a "read more" link that sends the reader directly to my blog. How can I accomplish this?