AdesBlog.com

This is a guest post by Alex Atti of www.blogarish.com

After spending some time working on his website, every blogger will eventually realize that the success of a blog cannot be measured in daily visitors, but in subscribers; not in casual readers, but in readers that are willing to be notified whenever an interesting article is published.

In order to be clearly understood, please let me detail this a little more. Let’s say you are lucky enough to get one of your articles submitted and driven to the front page of Digg.com. You get a massive amount of traffic in a short period of time and, if you are lucky (or cautious) enough and your server does not crash, you will have thousands of page views by the end of the day. But this magical period will soon pass and you will suddenly realize that the most valuable Digg users that have visited your blog are those who are willing to read more of your articles. Those who subscribed.

But the first time visitors do not usually turn into subscribers, unless your blog creates a really good first impression. Here are a few tips you may want to consider if you are willing to get more subscribers to your blog.

1. Write good content.

Of course, this is the first and most important rule you have to follow in order to make people subscribe to your blog. Even if you are lucky enough to make a few visitors subscribe, they will soon remove your blog from their feed reader if your articles are not appreciated. I’m sure that, by now, you are totally aware of the fact that you have to do your best when writing a post. Stick to this rule and you will soon be satisfied with the results.

2. Make it visible.

When landing on a website for the first time, almost no one will be willing to search for the place where the new visitors can subscribe. Make sure that the link to your RSS feed can be easily seen by everyone who visits your blog. In order to do this, you can use a nice, attracting picture, instead of just using the boring “Subscribe in a reader” model. Another good idea to drive attention towards your feed is to add a polite reminder at the end of every post.

3. Ask your readers to subscribe.

As I’ve just said, you have to make your readers aware of the fact that they can easily subscribe to your feed. Don’t just think that if you have put a nice image that’s linking to your RSS feed in the corner of your blog, the visitors will start subscribing. You have to make them feel like they are really wanted and really important for you. Explain to your readers that their subscriptions represent an important part of your blog and of your work and this is how they can help your blog. This way, any subscriber will feel like he is a mini-contributor to the success of your blog.

4. Offer privileges to subscribers only.

Everyone likes getting free stuff, that is for sure. So why wouldn’t you offer this privilege to your subscribers? The most common prizes for subscribers are eBooks or newsletters. You can try writing a nice eBook based on the topic of your blog and just give it for free to everyone who chooses to stay in touch with your blog. Don’t forget to add links to your blog in the eBook, so that your readers will know where to come back to.

5. Offer email subscription.

There are some blog readers out there that, for certain reasons, have not installed a feed reader on their computers. Some of them are not yet familiar with the concept of “feed reader”, some of them do not have the right to install certain programs on their work or school computers. No matter what the reason may be, you can help them by allowing email subscription. Actually, about 10% of the subscriptions of a regular blog are through email.

6. Offer full RSS feed.

You may think that if you offer your subscribers just the first paragraph of your post, they will become curious and visit your blog. Well, while this is the correct thinking in some situations, many of your subscribers will choose to unsubscribe from your blog, just because of this choice of yours. Therefore, make sure you offer your subscribers full RSS feed.

Maybe most of your subscribers will not get you any material benefit, because they will not visit your blog so often, but they are certainly as important as your regular readers. Make sure you treat them properly and offer them all the privileges they deserve.

This is a guest-post by Rajaie AlKorani of www.rajaietalks.com. In this post Rajaie discusses how to get private advertisements to your newly launched blog.

Unless your blog brings in thousands of visitors its first day of launching, you’re going to have a pretty tough time attracting new advertisers and filling all those ad spots on your blog. And having eight of them (i.e 125×125 buttons) with “Advertise Here” in bold definitely will not make your life any easier.

To start pumping in the money, you need to provide your sponsors with reasons as to why they should pick your blog from the millions of others. No, they don’t care about your mission or about helping pay your bills. The only thing on their mind is getting the best bang for their buck, and if you can’t help with that, than you’re out of luck.

What if your blog has been bringing in some impressive results for a while which happen to be sky high, and yet the image ads are still empty?

That’s it! When advertisers see all those empty spots, their brains will automatically tell them that - something is wrong with your site! What can you do to get out of this everlasting cycle?

1 - Testimonials
Ask your existing customers for a testimonial. To make your testimonials more credible; include person’s name, the name of the company he/she works for, and the position he/she holds at the company. Also provide a link to their company website and if possible get a picture of them. I’d say that this is the best way to boost your chance of selling anything since it’s real proof given by other people.

2 - Hold A Contest
Everybody likes free stuff, so hold a contest where readers can win free ad spots, this will help fill up the empty spaces. And hopefully they will turn into regular advertisers.

3 - Do A Banner Exchange
Do a banner exchange with someone in your niche, you link to their blog and they link to yours. It is a win-win situation if both of you have empty slots available.

4 - Become An Affiliate
Most websites that sell products have an affiliate program where you earn a percentage of every sale you make. Usually they will provide you with the banners so you’ll have nothing to worry about. So instead of having 8 buttons with “advertise here” word on them, display affiliate banners and make some money at the same time.

5 - Start Exploring
If you have the idea that your sponsors are going to search for you, then think again. It’s your job to hunt down potential sponsors, not theirs. Special promotions and discounts are always welcome ;-)

6 - Be A Nice Guy
Why not just email a friend telling him that you’ve added his site to your “blogroll” or that you’ve given him a free ad spot for the month. This usually pays off in the long run where it helps develop a relationship between you and him.

7 - Don’t Be Irrational
If you just started your blog a couple of days ago, then asking for $500 a paid review isn’t very reasonable. If you want to be taken seriously, then present yourself seriously!

I believe that those are the best ways to start selling private advertisements on your blog. What are some ways you used to sell private advertisements when you first started your blog?