Wouldn’t you know it. The day after I wrote a post about increasing subscriptions with the Aweber Lightbox, the blog sets a new subscription record and broke 38,000 for the first time. It was only a month ago when I wrote the post on how I broke 33,000 RSS subscribers. That’s a growth rate of 5,000 subscribers per month. The amazing thing is it took this blog 18 months to get its first 5,000 subscribers.
Your Subscription Base Is Your Blog Foundation
Building the blog subscription base is my number one priority and it should be your number one priority as well. A blog subscriber is far more important than a reader who drops by from a search engine or a link from another site. Your subscription base is your blog foundation and the only thing that you can control. As hard as I’ve tried, I can’t control Google (if anything, Google controls you) so I don’t worry about it. However, RSS is something within my control. I know that if my RSS base is big enough, then nothing can take me down. Not even Google.
Much of my recent growth in RSS stems from newsletter sign ups. Aweber reports subscription count to FeedBurner if you turn on the Blog Broadcast feature. Offering a free eBook or free incentive to get people to sign up to your Aweber account is the most effective way to increase your RSS subscription base.
At this rate of growth, it won’t be long before I break 40,000 RSS readers. Anyone want to take a guess on what date I’ll reach it?