Last month I wrote an article on focus and how I intended to reach 10,000 subscribers by December 31st 2009. That was when I had around 3480 subscribers. As you can see the subscriber numbers have gone up to around 4200 which is an increase of around 700 in a little over 1 month. This is terrific considering I was previously adding 100 subscribers per month. However I need to get around 1500 subscribers per month from now until the end of the year to reach that goal.
Why focus on subscriber count?
It's not really the subscriber count per se, it the fact that the subscriber count is measurable and it adds an element of social proof. At the moment I am converting at around 1 – 1.5%, so for every 100 visitors I am getting between 1-1.5 subscribers, which is around 15-25 subscribers per day as I receive on average 2000 visitors per day. The key is not on the visitor numbers the key is to get new visitors to the site, people who have never read Change Your thoughts before. A lot of subscribers come back and read Change your Thoughts but the more new people that come the more subscribers there should be.
The key to winning new readers
I attended a blogging bootcamp run by Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net which gave me a lot of ideas to make the site a better place for readers to visit. One of the key things was to write guest posts for blogs in the same niche as me.
I have now written and published 6 guest and freelance posts at
The post from zenhabits brought in an extra 6000 visitors and an extra 270-350 subscribers which was fantastic. The other sites have not brought much traffic however has got my face and name out there in my field. So I will be popping up all over the place and hopefully this will help to reach my goal.
The key to get readers to return
The design
Making the design as reader friendly as possible was one of the keys at Change Your Thoughts and I duly changed it a few weeks ago and received a lot of positive comments about it. I am still tweaking and when I see something I think is useful from another blog I will add it to the CYT blog.
Making the content as useful as possible.
I have always tried to do this and I think the content has always been of a high standard by myself and all my guest authors who have done great with helping CYT and obviously helping themselves in the process.
I have added Ask The Coachwhich myself and Ayo Olaniyan run, I am still not sure about this but will keep it for now.
Videos– I tried this and then abandoned it as I didn't feel it was working, I may revisit this if I work on my presentation skills.
Sunday Siesta– Will be kept for the moment as I feel it is good practice to read and learn from other blogs.
Book reviews– I have not done many of these yet but will look at this and see if i can use it.
Writing every day– My original strategy was to publish one post every day. Although I write every day I have decided against publishing every day as I feel it can be overwhelming for readers and subscribers and can actually harm the subscriber numbers. In light of this I will be publishing once every two days.
Advertising
The advertising I had on the other theme was overkill and I have now cut back on them drastically. I have also removed Google ads to give the reader a better experience. I will still advertise text links and one image ad for $350 per month which works out at $5.83 per thousand views, the click through rate on the ad I have just now is around 0.6 – 0.8%, which is good since the ad is well below the fold. The new ad will be placed higher up the fold and hopefully command a better click through rate. So in all I will be earning around $500 – $700 per month from advertising on CYT.
Keeping in touch with the readers
One of my goals is to reply to every reader who leaves a comment on CYT. This is something I didn't make a habit of before and will concentrate on this for the future.
I will also be offering more to the readers who sign up via email. This was one of my goals in the past but I didn't do anything with it, now I see it as a way of giving readers a better experience.
You will have seen a lot of guest bloggers at CYT recently but to keep readers of CYT, I have decided to offer 1 guest post slot per week.
New writing
I currently have penned two ebooks as part of the CYT guide series: CYT Guide to Lucid Dreaming and CYT Guide to making true friends . I will be writing more ebooks in the future as a way of boosting my income and hopefully become a professional blogger (How long have I been saying that :)).
Your ideas
I am always open to new ideas and it was reader feedback that prompted me to give CYT a facelift. What do you do in your blogging practice that, you feel, gives your readers a better experience.
Some Amazing Comments
Comments
