Talking all things motivational, entrepreneurial, blogging & travel. Pretty much anything other than "How to Make Money Online"! (Because when I blogged MMO I felt like a clone of the other 12 million people doing it)

Readers and Subscribers. Prospects and Customers?

4 April, 2008 - Blogging - No Comments

Photo by Miskan

In the Internet marketing niche of the blogosphere, do the terms ‘reader’ and ’subscriber’ refer to the same set of people as they once did? I don’t believe they do. Not because those people are different, but because we’re referring to most of those people using different terms.

My Blog Is A Business

In a niche where most bloggers are writing for their riches, we’re seeing more bloggers treat their visitors like prospects and their subscribers like customers.

Whether or not you like the term “business” being applied to a blog, if you’re in it for your purse or wallet then your blog is a business and it needs to be treated like one. A business plan. A marketing plan. A financial budget. An accounting spreadsheet. Business cards. Letter heads. And most important of all, a mindset to treat your visitors like prospects and your subscribers like customers.

But a Business Means Bad Things for a Blog

Last year when the Internet marketing niche went through a phase of “Blog as a business or blog as a blog?” questioning, there were plenty of people who got slightly flustered at the thought of their blog being anything other than their personal space. They stereotyped the word “business” as a focus on income and a lack of focus on content, readers and subscribers. They assumed that being a business meant the specific values of blogging would be forgotten, and to some extent they were right to assume these things. But done well, treating your blog as a business doesn’t have to mean focusing on nothing but dollar signs. Having just re-launched my blog after an extended break, I would like to share some of the things I’ve done that stem from my mindset of prospects and customers, as opposed to readers and subscribers.

For My Prospects…

Welcome Video - In the header of every page on my blog I have a large image that links to a video. In that video I welcome all my new visitors and I give them four minutes of background information about me and my blog. If we’re going to continue with the business phrases, this video is my sales pitch to my prospective customers. Now, this video is not high quality. In fact, it’s about as low in quality as is possible in this age of technology. But I’ve found with video blogs that the quality doesn’t have as much of an effect as some people may think. From feedback gained from my visitors, they prefer a low quality video as opposed to no video at all. For my welcome video, I got home from a meeting, fired up the laptop with built in web cam, sat at my desk and spoke. No script. No editing. No $1,000 camera and microphone. If visitors can hear you and see your face, they’re relatively happy. Sure, I’m not 110% happy with the result, but it works and that’s all that counts. So no more delaying that video blog because you don’t have the right equipment. Just use what you have, even if the quality isn’t great.

Upcoming Articles - This was an idea I picked up from a commentator on Darren’s series about building anticipation. On each page, I list the next four upcoming posts on the blog and I link each post title to its own page with a one or two paragraph description of what the post will talk about. Again, this is a sales pitch. Of course, I have a call to action (a call to subscribe) at the bottom of the list and at the bottom of each brief post description.

Promotion of RSS Only Area - All my subscribers have access to an exclusive area of my blog that is just for them. I promote this area heavily throughout my site. I guess this would be the “up-sell”. A prospect (or average visitor) has access to lots of good content, but a subscriber has access to even more good content. I’ve given prospects an incentive to become a customer. The beauty of a traditional blog is that it doesn’t cost anything for a prospect to become a customer, so unlike most businesses, it requires much less effort on the business owners part to get those conversions.

In this age of boom within the Internet marketing niche of blogging, just having good content isn’t going to be enough to convert visitors to subscribers. Incentives and prompts such as a welcome video, list of upcoming posts and an RSS reader only area all act as extra sales pitches that other bloggers don’t have. They help me stand out, which is becoming ever more important in this niche.

Those three things take care of converting prospects to customers, but what about the process of keeping customers happy and retaining them? This is just as important as gaining new customers.

For My Customers…

Subscriber Zone - As discussed above, I’ve setup an area of my blog for the exclusive use of my subscribers. In this area I have a list of related conferences and competitions as well as articles just like I have in the public area of the blog. They also have the chance to get some free promotion for their blog. This is all about making my subscribers feel special. It’s about retaining those subscribers and keeping them happy. Happy customers will spread the word. When there are chances of free promotion as well as useful content, people are not going to want to leave, nor are they going to be disappointed. I’ll be updating this section of the blog each week, so there will always be new content to keep my subscribers happy.

How Does The RSS Only Area Work?

Courtney Tuttle has an excellent article that shows you how to setup an RSS Only Area. I’ve followed Court’s instructions and added a couple of extras.

1. I use the Feed Footer plugin to add a link at the bottom of each post when read inside a feed reader that leads to the RSS only content. This link doesn’t appear on the blog. It only appears to those users reading via their feed.
2. I use a combination of the Advanced Category Excluder plugin (the plugin that Court discusses in his article) and the WP-Sticky plugin to create a sticky post that only appears in the RSS feed. This post always appears when a new visitor subscribes and it shares the URL with the subscriber so they can access the RSS only content. By using the sticky plugin to create a sticky post, and then placing that in a category that is only visible in the RSS feed (this is setup in the advanced category excluder plugin) you can create a sticky post that doesn’t appear on your blog, but does appear in your feed.

Summary

If you’re looking to make money from your blog, or if you’re remotely concerned with converting visitors to subscribers, you need to treat your blog like you would treat a business. You must give your prospects an incentive to subscribe. An up-sell, such as my RSS Only area, is a good incentive.

Like the customers of any business, they should not be forgotten once they are secured. They should be maintained, retained and kept happy. Giving your subscribers something extra is a good way to do this.

Treating your blog like a business doesn’t mean you have to forget about prospects and subscribers and only focus on dollar signs. In fact, it means you should focus even more on your prospects and subscribers.

Do you treat your blog as a business? Do you treat your subscribers like customers? I look forward to your comments.

Others You May Enjoy

• The Flight - What’s Your Story?
• A Stumbling Amount of Traffic!
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• Book Review - Tricks Of The Mind
• Know Your Prospects Shoe Size!

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Posted on 4 April, 2008 by Jamie Harrop
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