I have the goal of getting around 50-100 subscribers. I haven’t got a single one yet…
I was hoping someone had some tips on how to get started and how I can increase my views (which are around 10 a week, and are probably all me). I really just want to spread my ideas, I don’t intend on making money.
A great place to start is
You don’t have any subscribers because you don’t have any views. It’s possible to get views without subscribers. (For instance, maybe people enjoy your content that’s free and doesn’t require membership and see no need to sign up.) But if you aren’t getting views, then no one is visiting your site, and so no one is subscribing.
What are you doing to bring traffic to your site? How do your potential readers (whether they’re reading on your site on your newsletter) find out about you and decide to visit?
Try submitting your site to the “explore” category. Also, use your social media to promote as well. Might be good places to start
I don’t have any way to do this. I don’t have social media. Is there any other way to increase views?
I’ll try submitting it to the explore category!
If you wanted to learn about your topic, what would you do? Where might you look? Think about your ideal users. Where can they be found?
The first 10 subscribers might come from friends family.
The is the political equivalent of going door to door to asking voters one by one to vote you. My wife got elected, beating an incumbent. She did that in part by knocking on over 1,000 doors.
Have some great content, email people directly who you think might like it and say “I think you might like this” and ask them to subscribe.
If you are writing about a topic that your friends and family aren’t interested, go to where those people might be: Reddit, Mastodon, wherever, and try sharing your content there.
I use Matomo to carefully understand where my audience comes from and what they are interested in.
One thing I tried was writing about several rather different topics. Turns out what my visitors are most interested in aren’t necessarily what I wanted to write about all the time. So you may have choices to make about whether to write about what gets the most viewers or to write for smaller audience about a topic you are more passionate about.
I still only grown my personal blog to less than 50 subscribers, while my Mastodon following has grown to over 600. So right now I manually post links to new posts there, and that drives some traffic.
When Ghost finishes implementing ActivityPub, Those Mastodon users will be able to subscribe directly to new blog posts from the same app, and I suspect I’ll see my subscriber count jump a lot at that point.
Some other ideas:
Unless you have run ads on social media or some medium, really the only way is to be active in Social media groups. Don’t spam the groups, but share your content to Facebook groups that allow it when you can provide valuable content, or if your content provides value to a post someone has already made, share it in the comments section and just make sure they can see your sign up form really easily when they are done reading your content. Make sure they know they can subscribe at the bottom of your content. Just relying on the default subscription form will not get the job done. You need to had some razzle dazzle above it to entice them.
Lastly, write, write, write and write and use the best SEO practices and once your stuff starts to rank on SERPS, you will get subscribers. That’s the hardest part, is the patients to do that. But its the true key to having a massively successful website, as one can not rely solely on constantly sharing their website online, nor can one rely on ad spend if their website is not making any money.
Once I just said I am going to ignore data and write write write, a few months latter the traffic started rolling in. You really have to focus on creating tons of “VALUABLE” content, be sure to do great internal linking to try and get them to view more than one page. Focus on that and getting backlinks, and you will get them.
To anyone new reading this, just be sure you aren’t cold emailing from your Ghost account or you will blow up your account and none of your newsletters will arrive to their inbox once you are flagged as a spammer. So only email people you know, or if you are going to cold email you need to use someone like Gmass.
I know you know that Markstos, but someone new might read that and get the wrong idea.
Without social media, your only options is to just write and wait for things to rank. You can’t even run ads other than on SERPS without social media. If your goal is to really get subscribers, work smarter instead of harder and get social media. Every single on that exist and share your content on every platform.
Not just any social media … they are not equal. Focus on the one that has the largest group interested in your topic (sometimes they give a clue based upon the number of posts tagged with a particular word). For my topic, Facebook, X and Insta are the most popular (presumably as the most well established), but even they are not equal … paying subscribers (from social media) almost always come from FB.
But social media sign-ups are comfortably outnumbered by those that arrive from Google and/or word-of-mouth, both of which essentially depend upon content being read and relevant.
This is my favorite piece of advice:
I may sound like any other answer. Where are your readers hanging out? That is a good place to start looking for them. Are there other sites talking about the same topics as you do? Go visit them, leave comments.
Put a link on your profile on eventual forums etc. That way people may find you. Writing and waiting to be found can be a long wait.
Share your stuff with friends and family. I personally find it horrible to ask people to like and share my posts but it can be totally worth it.