In yesterday’s post Why do I need an email subscription list, we talked about how people’s levels of engagement increases when they subscribe first to your RSS feed, and then to the holy grail, your email subscriber list. Today we’re going to talk about how we encourage people to subscribe to your blog.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

Content

What you actually write on your blog is the single most important thing that results in people subscribing to it. If you can’t write compelling stuff and write it well, you may as well forget it now, or move into a niche where you can.

We need to consider the levels of engagement of our readers to answer the question.

Occasional Readers

These are people who stop by from time to time – when they think to do so, or if they see a Tweet about our blogs. They aren’t really engaged and they certainly aren’t part of our community.

RSS Readers

I need your help, fellow social media enthusiasts! I’ve spent the last few weeks working with some well known companies and pitching them to create and maintain a social media presence on their behalf, using corporate blogs, Twitter and forums. The thing that has amazed me is that the senior management of most companies have not got a clue about how social media can benefit them. These folks are focused on how effective their web 1.0 site is, and really don’t know what social media can do for them.

I was reading Chris Hinton’s post on Geek Speak the other day about Feedburner now including Friendfeed followers as subscribers. He asked whether subscribers, visits or page views were the best metric to measure the health of a blog, and he also suggested that one good measure might be comments. That got me thinking, and I’ve put together a short list below of ways to increase the number of comments to each post. Maybe the community of Mike’s Life readers can help to add to this list…..in comments!

The Lexus GS450h has just re written the rules in the luxury / performance sector. In my four day test of the car, I was staggered by the performance time and time again. The headline figures are a 0-60 MPH time of under six seconds and an (electronically limited) top speed of 155MPH. But what those numbers  cannot demonstrate is the wave of torque this car rides and which enables it to accelerate from cruising speed to overtake a line of traffic in the blink of an eye. 50MPH to 100MPH is so effortless, there is a  feeling that you are being pulled along by a huge elastic band which is intoxicating. I found myself doing it time and time again, and yet despite that the Lexus stubbornly refused to consume more than a gallon of fuel every 32 miles.  Yes you did read that correctly, this two tonne luxury saloon, with almost supercar performance, managed more than 32 MPG during my time with it! That’s because the “h” stands for hybrid.

I was dreading the flight. I hate the whole Easyjet “thing”, I like my flights to be comfortable, to have a bit of space, to choose my seat and to be served food and drink. So I really wasn’t looking forward to flying home from London with the orange clad boys and girls.

And if I summarize the flight for you by telling you that:

1/ I was barged out of the way during the ridiculous seat free for all that takes place at the start

2/ The flight was delayed by an hour (late incoming aircraft and then a toilet problem!)

3/ We suffered a “go around” as we approached our landing, which frankly scared me to death

Plenty of readers ask me about the place I live – I guess that’s because I tweet and post about it quite a lot. So I decided to write a post about it for you.

Lanzarote is one of the Islas Canarias (Canary Islands), and has been Spanish since the 1400’s – in fact Columbus stopped here en route to the new world. Contrary to popular opinion, we are nowhere near Spain! We’re as far from Madrid as Madrid is from London! We’re actually just off the coast of Africa, and from where I am typing this to The Saharan coast is just 72 nautical miles.

Although we are a province of Spain, we have a great deal of autonomy, with our own regional government, The Cabildo. We are duty free and have much lower general taxation than the mainland, and we’re also one hour behind them.

The Island

I covered why you need a brand and how to use your branding some time ago. What I didn’t talk about was the elements that make up a brand, and I deliberately left doing so, as people often spend ages over those elements, without first thinking through in detail what their brand actually means. To so many people, brand is about a logo or a style, and they spend many hours perfecting those things, without first establishing what their brand is in understandable terms.

So, let’s talk about some of those elements now:

Logo

Every brand should have a logo – a kind of instantly recognizable object that people will associate with you or your blog over time. It doesn’t have to be a graphic, it can be a photo – mine is, and it appears on this blog and everywhere you see stuff I do on the net. But you also need that brand to be reflected in any offline promotional materials, like business cards and stationery.

Adam Ostrow posted an interesting piece on Mashable this afternoon asking the question Will Pay Per Tweet Ruin Twitter? The post is about Izea moving into the pay per tweet market.

I really struggle with all this. Why do people get in such a frenzy about advertising on Twitter, or sponsored blog posts? I won’t be offering my Twitter account to Izea for paid Tweets, but I have no problem with people who do, do you? If so, why?