Who Cares about How Many Subscribers You Got?

I get questions through email about different topics, but one of the questions that I often get is how do I increase my subscribers. Like every other blog about blogging, I will tell you to work hard and write good content. Sounds like a simple solution right.

Knowing that you will get tens of thousands of subscribers by doing this gives hope to alot of new bloggers. But that doesn’t always happen. As a matter of fact most blogs have an average of 300 subscribers. Reasons for this is maybe you are in a less popular niche, or maybe you just was not lucky. You got in at the wrong time and you just wasn’t doing it for people.

The truth is this is the downfall of most bloggers. They might be self-proclaimed experts, but they have no idea how to get more traffic to their blogs. They are disappointed because they have more traffic then they started with, but they don’t have the massive number of subscribers which makes them think that the big bloggers are never linking to them and it is like an elite group and they want to keep it that way. Just stop and listen to me.

Why Subscribers?

Why do we value subscribers? Reason is because it is easy to measure just like our pageviews and traffic. But is that what really matters?

Think of your blog as a business. A business is judged upon their profits not by how many people they attract. I am not saying ignore your traffic because that often contributes toward the profit. Profit is an outcome of everything that goes into your website and traffic is one of them.

Lets take a breif overlook on what you should try to influence and work to improve in order to increase your blog’s profit because that is what you should judge your blog on, the outcome. I am also going to share what are somethings you should just ignore because you can’t control it.

Aside from profit the two things that can contribute which you should try to figure is Engagement between readers, and the blogosphere love for your post.

Things You should Influence

Worry about your content quality. Because this is something that you can influence, and you can definitely make it better. Community interaction is another thing that you can possibly influence by leaving space for argument in your post. Don’t have the perfect posts. Ask your audience questions and so on. SEO, is one of the things that you must read my tips on in my SEO Category.

Things you can’t control

The things that I am going to menion, you can’t control directly. You can do what I told you that you can control and you won’t have to stress yourself about this part.

You can’t control how many comments you get because if you write good content you will get more otherwise you won’t.

You can’t control your subscribers.

You can’t control search results unless you are in Google DC and changing your ranks.

You can’t control inbound links because you can’t force other people to link to you.

So don’t and don’t waste you time with the stats. Focus on one thing and one thing if you are judging your blog. That is the income. I can have 20,000 subscribers and only make $500 or have 2000 subscribers and make $4500 a month. I would take 2000 subscribers for sure. Remember that little feedburner chicklet does not mean anything. No one really cares except for you because you are doing that to make yourself happy.

Like most bloggers, I am a self-centered person also. I look at my stats every time I leave the computer hoping that I will achieve something. But the truth is, I am trying to leave this habit and instead spend that time on writing better articles, and I have already seen the improvement.