How to get 1000+ Subscribers in 3 Months

Skellie at Skelliewag.org gave out the tips to get 1050 subscribers in just 3 months of blogging from scratch. She did it despite being the sole author of the blog and spent zero $$$ on marketing and promotion. And she said that it doesn’t matter what niche or audience you’re targeting; she did it although the niche has already matured and crowded with other blogs targeting the same audience. The gists of her tips are summarized here.

Know Your Target Audience
Most important of all is that you have to know who your audience is. You must write for your target readers and not just about the topics (because you may diverge away from the readers’ needs if you centered your content around topics to write).

Your target audience must be convinced that your content is written for their needs and unmissable. What they want is a 100% relevant content so that their times are not wasted. Even if your content is just 70% relevant, there’s a big chance that they won’t subscribe to it – because some of your content can be missed!

It’s a good trick to write clearly at the top of your blog to whom is it for so that they know right away without even reading the content yet.

Write Good Stuff, But How?
Content is the heart of your blog, so make it a great one. Write posts that give values to the readers, not just for the sake of making more posts. One post packed with values is worth so much more than many posts with little or no values.

If time is hard to come by, it’s okay to post less but make sure each piece have great values to offer. Make your readers’ time worthwhile. Readers will subscribe if they learn a lot from your content.

Expose Your Blog - To Your Target Audience!
There are two ways for people to get to your blogs – links or social media. These are the place to put your effort to build your blog’s exposure.

Links: There are two types of links:

1. Links you make in other blogs:

• Links from your comments in other blogs.
• Your forum or social media signature.
• Your by-line as guest-posts.

2. Links you get from other blogs:

• Write great articles that people will link to.
• Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.

The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal - some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.

Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.

Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.

Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.

Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won't work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras

• Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
• Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
• Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.

Tips to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

Susan Gunelius at About.com shared 15 tips to increase your blog’s traffic. If your purpose in blogging is making money online, getting large traffic is a must. The problem with the blogosphere is that it has more than 100 million blogs. So, how can you make your blog visible? The essence of her tips is summarized here.

1. Write often and write well with quality and meaningful content to keep readers interested.
2. Submit blogs to search engines to make sure it is listed (it may take time for it to go up the list).
3. Link to others using Blogroll. Owners of the blogs you link to will most likely link to you back and have their visitors use the links to go to your blog.
4. Use comments efficiently. Increase your readers' loyalty by responding and interacting with your commenters. Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on other blogs to draw others to visit your blog.
5. Syndicate your blog using a feed so that others can get updates to your blog easily. (Read more on how to increase your subscribers.)
6. Use links and trackbacks. Links to your blogs are powerful 'vote of confidences' that are counted in ranking your blog. You can create internal links from your posts to your other posts too (works best when you use the right keywords to link). Trackbacks are links in other blogs’ comments that link back to your blog. They’re created when you link to these blogs' posts in your posts. Some blogs either don't have or don’t allow trackbacks to appear.
7. Add tags to your posts. Tags increase the chance of others finding your content in search engines.
8. Submit your posts to Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc). If your posts are excellent, others will vote for them as well and make them more visible to other millions of readers.
9. Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use the right and relevant keywords relevant that can draw large number of readers to your posts. Using keywords that’s not searched often will decrease visibility of your blogs in search engines.
10. Use images with the right keywords. Other people don't just search for contents, they search for images too!
11. Try to write posts in other blogs as a guest blogger. The more popular those blogs are, the more traffic they’ll send to your blog.
12. Participate in forums and social networking with people of relevant interest.
13. Promote your blog outside the blogosphere. Add your blog URL in your email signature or business cards. Basically, tell others about it.
14. Nominate yourself (or other blogs) for blog awards to get more attention to your blog.
15. Don't be shy to do all of the above.

My Comments
These tips are not explained in detail to give you the bigger picture of the overall strategy. It's important to understand them as a whole before going deep into details. You can dig(g) into each of these tips by Googling or Yahoo!ing more about them.