Different Type of Blog Subscribers & How to use them - Question

[rogercbryan]

So I've been able to get about 50 people a day to subscribe to my blog. The problem is trying to figure out what is the best thing to get them to subscribe to.

Example:
General User
Newsletter
RSS Feed

When I started my blog I only used general users. This seemed to work well after the fact meaning that if I could get them to subscribe I had a high reader rate when I posted a new article. The problem was I could not get anyone to register.

I then started using a new tool to get people to subscribe to my newsletter. This has worked great and has gotten me a lot of new subscribers. The problem here is that I only want my users to get notified one time when I post a new article so I've had to group general users with newsletter users and now my read rates are crap. I used to get 50-80 reads in the first 60 min of a new post. Now I'm lucky to get 10. I'm not sure what is causing this drop.

Lastly I have RSS subscribers. I ran one campaign to get RSS subscribers that worked well. So far no one has cancelled an RSS Feed Subscription. I also like the way this looks the best when it is delivered.

I can code my subscription tool to add anyone to any list. The problem is duplicity and read rates. I never knew user subscription were so complicated until I started getting a lot of them.

I'm about to launch my largest subscription drive ever for my site and I would like to be more confident in how I'm doing this. The good thing is that if I get them to subscribe now to any of the three I can change up which it is. I'm just trying to figure out which is best.

Has anyone every given thought to this?

[petewilliams]

Hi, Roger. Great question.

The thing I’ll be pushing for absolutely is e-mail newsletter subscribers. Because once you have a person’s e-mail address, you have a database; you have a community to market to beyond your website and your blog.

The problem with RSS feeds and things like that is that the only way you can communicate to that person now is via the blog posts on RSS feed. So, if you want to do a marketing pitch, an offline or a non-blog-related pitch, or a promotional communication to your list, you can’t do it unless you have their e-mail address.

With a bunch of e-mail addresses, you have a little bit more control of what you can do with that particular community member. So, I’d be very much pushing towards getting subscribers through an e-mail newsletter because that way, you can do a lot of different things with it, whether it might be affiliate promotions or selling your own product—those communications to them beyond just the blog.

RSS feeds are way too limited. It’s good to have an RSS feed and get subscribers on that, that’s just your first step. Once you have that RSS subscriber, you want to really push them to provide you their e-mail address.


Cheers,
Pete
p.s. This response was actually transcribed and posted by my virtual assistant.