Increasing Subscribers: Part 2

April 11, 2007 | Comments (0) | Filed under: Traffic

Last month, I felt that the area Bookmark Bliss could use the most work in was subscribers. We had about 100 at the end of the month and my goal was to increase that number to at least double before the end of this month (April 2007). My first improvement was to add an easy subscription method to the bottom of each post. Already, this has resulted in a decent increase in subscribers.

For this installment, I want to work on the visibility and usability of the subscription sidebar widget. Previously, we simply put up the standard orange button, with no description at all as to what it did. I showed this to a few people I know and surprisingly, many of them didn’t even realize that the orange button meant RSS Feed. As a result, the first thing I did was replace that entire section with something a little more intuitive.

At first, I tried out the subscribe me plugin for wordpress. I wanted to give it a shot for two reasons. First, it was more graphically attractive, in my opinion. I thought it would generate more eye focus from new visitors, and ultimately generate more clicks. Secondly, on the advice of Bookmark Bliss reader Sunny, I wanted to try out a 1-click link to several common feed reading applications. You might have seen this in action over the last couple of days.

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t really like the Subscribe Me plugin. It was powerful and did the job, but for some reason I just didn’t like the way it looked with the rest of the site. What I decided to do instead was take it back another step and go even simpler. Instead of fancy graphics and multiple links, I thought I would write a couple of friendly sentence with links to the appropriate feeds. You can see this version in action right now, at the top of the green sidebar. I think I really like this version. It’s much cleaner then the first version and I think much more friendly then the Subscribe Me version. I also think it is eye catching enough to draw some attention from new users. I will give this one a try and see how it works out from a subscriber perspective.

If any of you know of some good examples of eye catching subscription notices on other sites, I would love to see some links. Sadly, most people just post their big orange button, and nothing more. If you know of a site that grabbed your attention immediately, I would love to check it out. I will summarize the effects of these changes in the coming weeks so you guys can get a feel on what is working and what’s not. At the end of the month, I’ll once again analyze our subscription numbers and hopefully we meet and exceed our previous months goals. At least that’s the hope anyway

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