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Getting Blog Readers to Subscribe, Follow and Connect

Welcome to episode 115. Today we are continuing our series on warming up your readers.

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This series began in episode 112 where I presented 4 stages of warming your readers up. Taking them from being completely unaware of you and your blog to taking them to becoming highly engaged readers.

In episode 113, I talk about getting the first eyeball on your blog. Getting the visitor to your blog for the first time, and I talk about some practical techniques to do that.

In episode 114, I talk about how to get people to take a second look and become interested in your blog. I gave some techniques for getting readers to pause and take that second look.

Today I am talking about building a connection with your readers. Even when you get that first eyeball or a second look, chances are, they will leave your site and never return. Today I am giving some practical tips on how to get them to subscribe or give you permission to connect with them again.

In Today’s Episode: How to Get More Subscribers, Follows and Connections From Your Blog Readers

  • Think carefully about where you want them to connect with you
  • For me, the best place to connect with blog readers is email
  • Social media is important too, but it is secondary and there is more risk
  • Have prominent calls to action on your blog to get the reader’s email
  • Have at least a subscribe form in the sidebar or in the navigation somewhere
  • Find other ways to get the reader’s email (some of these may be controversial)
  • Use popups or welcome mats
  • Lead Magnets, content upgrades, or op-tins
  • Cutting edge bloggers are moving away from having one lead magnet or op-tin and are creating multiple op-tins depending on the content the reader is browsing
  • Get an ongoing opt-in like our 6 months of blog post ideas
  • Create inspirational posts, like image posts – these seem to get more subscribers – add stronger calls to action if they are getting higher subscriber numbers
  • Create a series like this we are doing now – daily, weekly, even yearly to keep readers wanting to subscribe for the future content series
  • Promote your secondary connection points – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Where ever you and your readers are most active.
  • Secondary connection points can be promoted in your emails, put links in welcome email
  • Promote secondary points in blog navigation, sidebar or blog posts
  • Promote from other social networks, use a tool like SumoMe or Hellobar, cross promote
  • Opportunity to get the connection even when someone has left your blog – retargeting – Facebook Advertising using a facebook pixel on your blog which enables you to retarget with an ad that goes back to your blog

Examples of Content Upgrades and Lead Magnets

Further Resources on How to Get More Subscribers, Follows and Connections From Your Blog Readers

How did you go with today’s episode?

We love to learn from you. Let us know what you have done to connect with your readers and get them to subscribe.

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Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
Hi, there. My name is Darren Rowse and I’d like to welcome you to episode 115 of the ProBlogger podcast. Well today, I want to continue our series on warming up your readers. This series began back in episode 112 where I presented four stages of warming your readers up—taking them from being completely unaware of you and your brand, your blog, and taking them right through to becoming highly-engaged readers.

In episode 113, I talked about getting your first eyeball; getting that visitor to your blog for the first time, and I gave you some practical techniques to get that first eyeball. In the last episode, 114, I talked about how to get people to not just give you their eyeball but to have a second look, to become interested in what you’re on about, to take that second look to pause, and really look at what you’re on about. Again, I gave you some techniques on that.

Today, I want to talk about building connection with your readers. This is so important because even when people do give you that first eyeball and they even take a second look and become interested in what you do, the chances are that they’re going to leave your blog and never return. Today, I want to give you some really practical tips on how to get them to come back again, to subscribe, to connect with you, and give you permission to contact them again, to get them back to your blog.

Today’s podcast episode is brought to you by the ProBlogger Event. You can find more information on this particular event which we’re holding on the 9th and 10th of September at probloggerevents.com. We put together two days of amazing training for bloggers, both Australian bloggers where we’re holding event, but also bloggers who are willing to fly in from around the world, and those who want to attend virtually. We’ll have more information on that virtual ticket in the months ahead. Let’s get into today’s show where you can find today show notes at problogger.com/podcast/115.

Today is all about getting a connection with your readers. To this point in our series, we’ve talked about getting the eyeball, getting people to your blog for the first time, getting people surfing around and looking a little deeper into your blog, getting the right content in front of them to make them think, “Yeah. This is relevant for me.” Now, that all is really important and it can happen pretty quickly but the reality is—as I look at my blog stats and as I look at the stats of other bloggers—that most people who come to our blog for the first time don’t ever come back again.

I don’t know about your Google Analytics but sometimes that stats of how many people bounce away from my blog without actually doing anything else, gets a little bit depressing. Many bloggers come to me with that particular feeling of being stressed out that so many people come but no one ever comes back again. We don’t get the subscriber; we don’t get the follower in our social media accounts.

Today, I want to talk to you about how to actually take your reader to that next level. Not only get their eyeball, not only how do you get their interest, but how do you get them to actually connect with you? How do you get that subscribe? There’s a number of things that I can say and I’m going to give you some further reading in today’s show notes as well because this is a massive topic.

The number one thing I would say is that, you need to think really carefully about where you want them to connect with you. There’s no one answer to this question, but I do believe in most cases, the best place to get the connection, to get the subscribe to your readers is email. I know some people are going to probably disagree on that one, but for me, it’s been the case in both of my blogs. Getting the email address is certainly being the most effective for us and most bloggers that I talked to, it’s also the case.

For us, email drives most of our traffic to our blog and also drives most of the sales to our products. It is the place where our most loyal readers come to us from. Getting the email is just so important. Social media is definitely important but for me, it’s secondary. It’s too risky in my mind to build my primary point of connection with my readers on a Facebook page, or on a Instagram page, or on an Pinterest account, or on a LinkedIn account. Those places can be useful, you can certainly build engagement with your readers there but the problem with all of those places is that you don’t control them.

Even in the last couple of weeks on Facebook, we’re seeing Facebook changing the rules again for pages, influences. I’ve seen a whole heap of bloggers over the couple of weeks realize that the Facebook changing the rules really has decreased the effectiveness of them reaching their readers. Use those places but use them as a secondary point of connection. Grab the email address, if you can, of those first-time readers on your blog. That’s what I’m going to put most of my attention to today—in talking about how to build this connection with your readers—email is just so important.

There’s a whole hip of techniques that we can use to get people’s email addresses. I’m going to go over a few and then give you some further reading so you can dig into each of these. The most obvious way to get the email address of your reader is to have prominent calls to action on your blog. You can do this in a variety of ways and at the very least you want to have in your side bar some kind of subscribe form or a call to action to subscribe. At the very least, that’s what you want. That’s the bare minimum. It’s not the best way to get an email address but it should be there, at least in your navigation somewhere or in your sidebar, very important to do that. That’s the bare minimum.

On top of that, I highly recommend that you think about some other ways to get your reader’s email address. Some of the ways I’m going to suggest may cause a little bit of controversy because I know some people do not like anything that interrupts the experience of a reader. Some of the ways that you can increase the chances of getting the subscribe are a little bit more aggressive, they do interrupt the experience of your readers, but I want to put them out there anyway because they’ve worked very well for us. I think you can do them in some fairly elegant ways, some ways that, hopefully, don’t put your readers off too much.

Certainly, the most effective ways for me have been about using pop ups or welcome mats. I’m going to give you some further listening to do on this in episode 68 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes, but you can go back and listen to episode 68. I talk about the importance of email, but I also talk about how we view pop ups and welcome mats on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

The first time I started using a pop up on Digital Photography School, it increased our subscriber numbers tenfold, tenfold. You heard me correctly. We went from, I think, 40 or 50 email subscribers a day to well over 500. It just blew my mind. As I share in that episode, it didn’t decrease the engagement we got from our readers, we didn’t see a whole heap of our readers abandoning our site, we didn’t see our bounce rate go up, those things did not change as we added the pop ups.

Yes, you’re probably going to annoy some of your readers by using these techniques but the vast majority will either shut that pop up window and never see it again unless you continue to bombard them with it—and I don’t encourage you to do that—or they’ll subscribe and a significant proportion of them will subscribe and then you’ve got the email address.

As I just mentioned there, I would encourage you not to show that pop up over and over and over again on every page load. We ask our readers once, you see the pop up once and then, unless you’re blocking cookies which most people don’t, you don’t see that call to action again. Most people do subscribe in that first one anyway. So, don’t bombard them over and over again but that helped a lot.

We use Aweber to deliver our pop ups. When I first started using them, there are some more elegant solutions today. One of the ones that we use, and I do talk about it in episode 68 is SumoMe’s welcome mat. We also see a great solution from OptinMonster who have a welcome mat as well. The welcome mat is where you see the whole screen slides down and that the whole screen is taken over by the pop up. That may seem a little over the top, but it actually is a more elegant solution, I think.

It doubled our email subscribers again. You’re looking twentyfold, pretty much improvements there. But you can dig into episode 68 in a lot more depth, I talked a little bit more about the type of welcome mats that we use as well. They definitely are the best way that I have ever seen to get a subscriber to your list. The other thing I would encourage you to think about to add on top of your pop ups already use, even if you just need to add in your sidebar.

If you don’t like the pop ups, you don’t like the welcome mats, that’s totally fine. But even in your sidebar, another way that you can increase your subscriber numbers is to use a lead magnet or other people might call this a content upgrade or an opt-in. This is something that you will be very familiar with, I know many readers already have these, but I want to suggest some ways that you can increase the chances of your lead magnet converting.

The first thing I’ll say is I talked in more depth about lead magnets in episode 69. This is part of a series I did—episode 68 introduced email and talk about the welcome mats; episode 69, talk about lead magnets. I’m not going into great depth on that except to say that one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years with the lead magnets is a real move amongst some of the cutting-edge bloggers away from just having one opt-in or one lead magnet on your side.

Most bloggers, this is what they do. They create an opt-in, so the opt-in might be, “Give us your email address and we’ll give you this free ebook,” or, “Give you this list of resources. We’ll give you this checklist. We’ll give you…” whatever it is that you’re giving away and that works. You put it on your sidebar, you might put it in your pop up, you might link to it on your About page and that will work, it will increase the subscriber numbers that you have.

What we’ve seen over the last few years, a lot of bloggers are moving away from just having one opt-in that appears on every page on their site to having multiple opt-ins. People are showing a different invitation depending upon where they are on your site. The easiest way to do this is to create an opt-in or a lead magnet for each of the main categories of your blog.

Let’s take ProBlogger for instance. ProBlogger has a number of categories. I introduced to you our eight new portals in the last episode. We have these eight main areas on ProBlogger. We have one on starting a blog, we have one on finding readers for your blog, we have one for creating great content on your blog. These three topics was there, all are to do with having a profitable blog, they’re quite diverse. Someone on our blog looking for information on finding new readers for the blog has a different set of things on their mind than those on the blog looking to start a blog or looking to learn about creating great content. It’s hard to find that opt-in or a lead magnet that relates all of those different categories.

What I would encourage you to think about is to move towards developing a little library of opt-ins that relate to each of your main categories on the blog. That way you can have an opt-in that relates to all the content on your blog depending on where readers are. It’s pretty easy using WordPress to show a different opt-in to people depending on what category of content they are viewing at the time on your blog.

The bloggers that I’ve seen introduce this type of approach—and this is what we’re rolling at the moment on ProBlogger—tell me that they are seeing significantly increased subscriber numbers using opt-ins. Again, you would be on a blog viewing a piece of content that relates to an opt-in, you’re much more likely to subscribe to that call to action, one that’s just a generic one on your blog. So, this does take more work; this is going to take you time to implement, it’s going to take you perhaps a little bit more technological know-how to get those different opt-ins showing different paths of the site, but it’s worth it because you’re going to increase the chance of someone subscribing.

You can take this to the next level as well. A lot of bloggers are now starting to do in creating content upgrade. This is where you create an opt-in or a lead magnet for a specific piece of content on your blog. Instead of having a different maybe eight opt-ins for eight categories, you begin to develop a whole heap more of opt-ins that relate to specific pieces of content on your blog.

Again, this really takes things to the next level in terms of showing people on opt-in that’s highly relevant for a piece of content that they’re viewing but it also means a lot more work for you as the blogger. You may not want to go down this track for all of your content, but certainly, I think, it’s a very well worth doing if you have a hot post in your archives. I’ll touch on that in a minute.

Let me give you a few examples of what you can do to create content specific opt-ins. I’ll give you a few examples and I’ll link to this in today’s show notes. The first example is from Amy Porterfield. Amy is going to be familiar to many listeners of this podcast. She runs a great blog on Facebook, also other aspects of Internet marketing. She has an amazing podcast as well which you should check out. I’ll link to a specific episode in her podcast series where she interviewed me.

I’m not going to link to it because I think it’s a great episode although I really did enjoyed her chat; I want to link to her show notes for that particular episode because in those show notes, she has a content specific upgrade. She actually asked me before she interviewed me whether she can pull together some of my best articles from ProBlogger into a PDF and then add some of her own thoughts into that.

You can download, from that show note, a whole heap of articles that I’ve written, as well as some of her thoughts that relate to the interview that she did with me. That is behind an opt-in form, to get that PDF, you need to subscribe to her list, which I encourage you to do, she’s got a great list. The thing I really want you to see here is that little opt-in that she created for that episode of the podcast is not available anywhere else, that’s the only place. This is one example of an opt-in that you could do if you’re interviewing someone, for example, on your blog or on your podcast.

Another example of a content specific upgrade that is perhaps a little easier to do in some ways is to do what Ian Cleary from RazorSocial does over on his blog. He’s got a great blog about social media tools, Razor Social. Again, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. You’ll notice that every blog posts that Ian writes, he has this little call to action that read something like, “Don’t have time to read these posts now? Download a PDF version of it to read later.”

He has created for every blog post that he writes a PDF version of that exact same blog post. In fact, I think, his wife actually creates all these little PDFs for him and then he puts those PDFs behind an opt-in form. If you want to get a downloadable version of any blog post that he writes, you can add your email address and he’ll send it to you and then you’re added to his email list, you’re on his list. There is a good way to do it because you don’t have to come up with a new something to give away from every blog post. You just build in to your workflow of creating a blog post the additional work of creating a PDF version of it and then you can upload it and you can give that away. That’s another alternative.

Last example that I’ll give you is Jill from Screw the Nine to Five. It’s a blog site about quitting your corporate job then building your own business. Great blog, amazing community. I’ll give you a couple of links in today’s show notes to blog post that Jill has published. The first one is a blog post called How to Start and Grow a Facebook Group for your Business. It’s a great post about using Facebook groups, so if nothing else, you’re getting a good basic content there, but you’ll see in that post that Jill has an opt-in there.

She’s giving away a checklist for people who want to start a Facebook group. The blog post is about starting a Facebook group and then she gives away a checklist. It’s not the longest piece of content. That checklist is almost like a summary of the content that she’s giving away in the blog, but it’s specifically relates to the blog post there.

Another example I’ll give you from Jill’s blog is that she wrote a great post about how to create to the blog post there about How to Create A Dangerously Effective Automated Sales Funnel. A bit of a mouthful there but a really great post about sales funnels, and then in the post, she offers a swipe file of all her own emails that she uses as part of her sales funnel. She’s talking about sales funnels and then she gives away all the emails and talks about that in the post, but also has graphics, Steal My Emails, that she has there.

These opt-ins are probably also on other parts of her blog that relate to those pieces of content, but she’s created opt-ins specifically for pieces of content there. I hope you can see what I’m saying there is that you create a piece of content, a blog post, a podcast, whatever it might be and then you think about, “What could I add to these that I could put behind an opt-in form?”

Again, this takes a lot of work, you can see there. You’re not only creating a blog post but you’ve got to create something else to give away so you may not want to do this with every post you write. If you post daily, that’s a lot of work. I have seen a number of blogs recently decrease the amount of postings they’re doing a week so that they can create opt-ins for every single post.

The other thing you might want to consider doing is just creating opt-ins for certain posts. If you’re writing a mega post like an ultimately guide to a particular topic, you might want to create an opt-in for those type of posts that you think will get more traction or you might want to actually look at what post in your archives are already performing that you could be adding an opt-in to. This is where I would probably be starting if I was you.

Most bloggers that I talk to have at least one post in their archives that’s getting a whole heap of traffic either from search engine optimization or long-term search traffic from another big blog might be linking to or you might be getting a whole heap of traffic coming in from a social network. For example, Pinterest often sends a lot of traffic to a certain post. It’s not just for one day, it often lasts for quite some time or you might even be linking to a certain piece of content from one of your own social profiles and it’s just generating a lot of traffic over time.

If you’ve got a hot post in your archives, ask yourself the question, “Could I add a content upgrade to that particular post?” That’s probably going to pay off in the long term more than doing it on of your new post. Unless that new post that you’re writing about is something that you just know is going to generate a lot of traffic. That’s where I’d be starting with my content upgrades and we’re doing this at the moment with our own blogs. We’re identifying some of those really hot posts and trying to build a little bit of a library of opt-ins around some of those messages.

The good thing is that if you create an opt-in for that particular post, you may find that there are other posts in your archives or other new posts that you write that you could use that same opt-in for as well. It does take a lot of work in the short term but as you build that library of opt-ins, the work that you’re doing can be rolled out in different places.

The other place that I would encourage to think about putting these opt-ins is on any other key pages on your blog where first time viewers are landing. One thing that I really would encourage you to do is look into Google analytics data and do a bit of a search for the content that people who are first time visitors are landing on. You will see there that pages like your ‘Start Here’ page or your ‘About’ page are places that people are going to to find out information when they’re first time visitors to your blog.

There also maybe other key pages on your site that you’ve got in your navigation area or a hot post that maybe you highlight in your sidebar. That type of post is going to get more eyeballs on it, they’re great places to have opt-ins particularly if they relate specifically to why people are on that particular page.

The last thing I want to say about opt-ins and lead magnets—I have talked about these briefly in another podcast—is that I think if you can create an opt-in that has ongoing […] to it that will increase the chances, not only getting the initial subscribe, but it also increases the chances that people are going to stay subscribed. The example that we’re using on ProBlogger at the moment is an opt-in that we created to give bloggers ideas for content for their blog, so I created a six-month series of emails that we sent out. Once a month, you get 30 different ideas of content that you could be writing about on your particular blog. We’ve seen already that people are staying subscribed to our newsletter a little longer than they were when we didn’t have that ongoing series as part of our opt-in.

Again, I will give you a link to that particular example (one) you might be interested in subscribing to it if you do want ideas for blog post but (two) it’s just a good example of creating an opt-in that’s not just a one off opt-in. Go to problogger.net/ideas. You’ll see there that six months series of emails that we we’re willing to send to people as well.

That’s how I want to talk about in terms of opt-ins but there’s a number of other things that you can do to increase the chances of getting subscribers on your blog. One of the other things that I’ve noticed recently is that I did a little bit of analysis on Digital Photography School. We contract on our site which pages our readers view before they subscribe to our blog. I was really interested that one of the types of pages that seems to get a lot of subscribers for us doesn’t have really prominent calls to action on it. I was a bit intrigued by this.

The type of post that works really well for us is where we do what we call out image collections. I’ll give you, in today’s show notes, some examples of this but we have a post, 11 Great Examples of Using Converging or Leading Lines in Photography. That’s going to be mumbo jumbo for those of you who don’t know about photography but it’s a photographic technique, composition technique. I noticed that when people are on that page, they ended up subscribing at a much higher rate than a lot of other pages on our site.

When I look at the post, I was a bit confused about that because the post itself was just 11 Great Images, it didn’t really have much texts at all, it’s just 11 inspirational images. Then I noticed that some of the other pages on our site that were also image collections, more inspirational posts seem to be generating subscribers as well. We have another one, I’ll give it to you as an example today, 21 Surreal Levitation Images. They’re just these fun, inspirational images that illustrate a technique that we previously talked about.

These inspirational posts seem to be driving subscribers. What I realized is that when you inspire people, when you show something that perhaps they can’t do yet, but they aspire to doing, you put them in the state where they want to learn how to do something. Even though we didn’t have strong calls to action on those posts originally, people where then seeking out ways to take those photos and they’re in a much better state to want to subscribe to our Digital Photography School site, a site that promises, I guess, to help people to improve their photography.

One of the things I started to do is to go back to some of those image collection posts as inspirational posts, those posts where I could see people already subscribing at a higher rate. I’ve put stronger calls to action in those posts. In the first paragraph or two now you’ll find calls to action to subscribe. Again, it even increased the subscriber numbers even more.

You may want to do some analysis; you may want to set up a goal in Google Analytics. The goal would be to track when people subscribe and then look at the history and look at the top pages that they go through to get to that and add stronger calls to action to those places but particularly pay attention to any content that you do that’s more inspirational. Maybe it’s a storytelling post or maybe it’s a case study, that type of thing, can really give people more incentive to want to find more information.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that people subscribe to our content more when we are doing a series of content. You will have heard, even at the start of this particular podcast that I did a fairly strong call to action to subscribe. In every podcast that I’ve done in this series of content, I’ve had a strong call to action to subscribe to us in iTunes so that you don’t miss the rest of this series. What I’ve noticed is that when you have a series of posts, people want to get the rest. You’re building anticipation, you’re signaling to people that you are creating something tomorrow, or next week, or next month that’s going to continue the series of content that you are creating that they’re listening to or they’re reading right now.

I’ll say again now this is episode 115. In the next episode, 116, you’re going to get some techniques on how to get people to engage with your content. If you want to get that, you need to subscribe. You need to get with us in some ways so we can let you know when that episode is out there. This is just a really simple example of how to build desire, how to build anticipation in your readers, in your listeners, and this will increase the chances of them subscribing.

The first time I realized that this was a thing was the first time I did the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog blogpost series back in 2007, I think maybe it was 2005. I did 31 days in a row of blog posts that built upon each other. I noticed our subscriber numbers really went up the first time I did that series. The same when I did it again in 2007, then I did it again in 2009. These series of blog posts really helped us to increase our subscriber numbers, not only to our email list but also to our RSS feed and on social media as well. When I launched 31 Days to Build a Better Blog as a podcast series, the same thing happened as the first episodes of this particular podcast.

If you can think about, “How could I create a series of content?” That might be a daily series of blog post, for a week, for a month. Or you might say, ‘For the next year, every first Tuesday of every month, I’m going to do a post on this.” Or, “Every Thursday, I’m going to interviewer another blogger, another influencer on this particular topic.” Anything that signals to your readers that you are doing something tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year is going to increase the chances of them subscribing.

Build anticipation with your content, think about series of content. The series need not be long. It might be, “I’m just going to do a second post on this topic tomorrow,” and that’s the end of your series but that signals to your readers that there’s a reason for them to subscribe. Even if you just say that, “Tomorrow’s post is on this topic that will help.” But if you can also mention that there’s a way that they cannot miss that post by calling them to subscribe in that will work even more.

The last thing I want to talk about today in terms of getting the connection point—actually, it’s the second last thing—is to promote your secondary connection point as well. The start of this episode, I talked about how email is king for me. Email is, in most cases, the place that you should probably be trying to get your primary point of connection because getting a connection on Facebook or Twitter whilst it’s useful, they can change the rules. It’s like building your house on rented land as many people talk about. I think it’s definitely is useful to have more than one point of connection.

I found that our most avid fans on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, when I meet them in person, they tell me that they’re subscribed to our email, yes, but they’re also following us on Facebook, Twitter, connected on LinkedIn, and all of these other places as well. Certainly, email, number one. You may have another number and that’s totally fine, it’s up to you but think about what other points of connection you might have. Really, this will depend upon where you’re most active and the type of place where most of your readers are active as well. For us on ProBlogger, it’s Facebook and Twitter, they’ll be a secondary point of connection.

Digital Photography School, again, it’s Facebook, Twitter, but also Instagram is a big run of us, and Pinterest is another one. We’re cross promoting those particular social networks and there’s a number of ways that you can build up those secondary points of connection. First, promote them in your emails. I’ll give you an example in the next episode in this particular series. I would highly encourage you in the first emails that you send people, set up an autoresponder and one of those emails should mention your other places of connection. Send out an email, a welcome email and say, “Hey, we’re also on Facebook. We’re also on Twitter,” wherever it is that you’re most active. Promote those secondary points of connection in your emails. That will certainly help you to get the second point of connection.

Number two, promote those things in your blog navigation, in your sidebar. Have the icons there that are most relevant to your particular audience, promote them in your blog post. From time to time, not in every post but from time to time, you might want to weave into your blog post something about your Facebook page or something about your Twitter account. I do this on ProBlogger all the time, I’ll say, “I got this question on my Twitter account,” or “I got this from our Facebook page.” That’s a relevant way. Just mention, “By the way, we’ve got this Facebook page.” It also shows that you’re willing to engage with people then you get those ideas from those places as well.

You might want to promote your Facebook page to people arriving from Facebook and there’s some really great tools that will help you to do this. If people are coming from a particular social network to your blog, it signals to you that they have an account in that place and so they’re more likely to subscribe to you there. Use a tool like SumoMe, which is what we drive a lot of the things on ProBlogger. If you go to ProBlogger, you’ll see the top of all of our pages at problogger.net, on the blog, we have a hello bar, it’s just a thin strip.

What we’ve done is that we’ve said to SumoMe, the tool we use, that if someone arrives on ProBlogger from Facebook, in the hello bar, we want them to be shown a call to action to subscribe to us on Facebook. You could do the same thing with your welcome mat. If someone arrives from Facebook, instead of showing them an email subscribe call to action, you could have a welcome mat that says, “Hey, we’re on Facebook. Like us here.” You could do the same with Pinterest or any of the social network. SumoMe enables you to do these types of things, OptinMonster, again, will enable you to do that. I’ll link to both of those tools in today’s show notes. Definitely, it will increase the chances of you getting the subscribe.

The last thing I’ll encourage you to think about doing to get the secondary points of connection is, if you’re active on more than one social network, you can promote other social networks on those places as well. If I’m about to do a Facebook live update on the ProBlogger Facebook page, I’ll often tweet a link to the Facebook page saying, “I’m about to do a Facebook live here.” If there’s a good discussion going on on one of my tweets, sometimes I will link to that from my Facebook page. You can cross promote your social networks in this way and this gets you that secondary point of connection as well.

I’ve talked a lot about getting the connection today. The last thing I just want to briefly touch on is that there’s an opportunity now to get connection even when someone has already left your blog. It’s going to cost you a little bit of money to do it, but you can retarget. You can do some advertising about retargeting and this is probably a topic for another episode. I might find an expert who can come in and talk to us about this but it’s relatively simple to do Facebook advertising and relatively cheap to do it as well if you do have a little bit of a budget.

You can set up a Facebook pixel on your blog that enables you to target someone who’s been on your blog, who didn’t subscribe with an ad to get them back to your blog. Just a really simple way to get people who’ve bounced off your blog, who’ve come for the first time but haven’t subscribed, you can retarget them. You can serve them up with an ad on Facebook that shows them another piece of content or a call to action to subscribe.

Do a bit of exploring around that if that’s something you have a bit of budget to do. I’d love to hear your results on that. That’s something that we’re playing around with at the moment on our Facebook pages. I’ll certainly do another episode in the future on how to do that particularly if a lot of people leave a lot of questions on today’s show notes.

I feel like I’ve just created a surface in terms of how to get the connection with your readers. I know there’s a lot more techniques that we could talk about. I will give you some further reading in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/115. You can also leave a comment there, leave a question, leave a tip that you have used to get the subscribe as well. Love to learn from you what you are learning as well.

As always, I’d love it if you would subscribe to us over at iTunes or your other favorite podcast network. You will be notified if you do, of course, of the next episode which is episode 116 where I’m going to continue this series and talk about how to take people beyond connecting with you and to get them out of passively lurking on your site. This is another massive frustration that so many bloggers have is that people come, they subscribe even, but they never comment, they never retweet, they never share, or they never actually do anything on your site. I want to give you some techniques in the next episode on how to do that in a couple of days’ time, so do subscribe to us on iTunes, over on Stitcher, or your other favorite podcast network.

Thanks so much for listening in today. Look forward to interacting with you in the comments of today’s show notes.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you like to comment on any of today’s topics or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast, tweet us @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/problogger, or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

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