10 Ways to Transform Blog Readers into Paid Subscribers

11 min readOct 20, 2016

If you’ve been writing a blog in hopes of keeping your website up to date so Google’s spiders that crawl the web every day looking for relevant, authoritative, fresh content reward you with good search engine results, then good for you. But if you’ve been writing your blog expecting the people who read it will magically become customers who buy things from you…that’s probably not going to work out so well.

You see, readers, even those who comment on your blog content from time to time, may never become your customers. Just because you write sparkling, fresh content that provokes thought and enthusiastic response doesn’t mean people are ready to hand over their money. Consider this: How many blogs filled with incredible prose do you read regularly, and for how many of those do you polish up your credit or debit card and buy something? I’d bet for the vast majority of people reading this article the answer is…“None.”

Most bloggers don’t know how to transform their regular audience into paying subscribers. So we’re going to solve that mystery in the paragraphs that follow.

1. Solve People’s Problems with Your Blog via Content Marketing

If you’re going to spend the time and effort to write blog articles on a regular basis, solving people’s problems will get you more respect, authority and love than most anything else you can do. Not to mention, it will give you a much larger following. Even though “Content Marketing” dates all the way back to the nineteenth century, in the last few years it has become the go-to strategy for winning customers.

Imagine, for instance, that your company makes solder. It’s that metal alloy that has a low melting point and is used to bond wires and electronic components together so electricity can flow through them. A pretty boring product, you might say. How can I write a blog about solder, you might ask.

Take this quick test. Do a web search for “solder blog.” Or if you don’t want to leave this article, just click here on Indium’s blogwhich is certain to come up near the top of the first page on any search engine results page. Yes, Google, Bing, Edge, Yahoo and even HotBot and DuckDuckGo all agree. Indium is the place to go to learn about solder and everything related to soldering. The blog has hundreds of articles which solve problems that have stumped manufacturing engineers and others who use solder to manufacture their products. It’s a virtual cornucopia of helpful, useful information that may not be available anywhere else. The people at Indium have built value into their blog that goes far beyond a “free report” or some other trivial give-away.

Another example you can study comes from the John Deere Corporation. It’s a magazine for farmers titled The Furrow. It’s been published since 1895 and is a textbook example that illustrates why content marketing is so incredibly effective.

According to one commentary, “The Furrow didn’t just push advertisements of John Deere products — it provided valuable information and stories for consumers to enjoy. The magazine forged a relationship of trust and dependence between the John Deere brand and its audience through the expert advice the magazine published.” [2] You may want to read a few articles at JohnDeereFurrow.com. Then, to find resources that will help you create problem-solving content without the marketing hype, spend some time at the Content Marketing Institute. It’s the portal that explains how a time-honored style of writing has come with sprightly steps into the digital age, and how it’s becoming the “must do” method of engaging customers.

2. Publish Your Blog on Your Company Website

Search engines look for high quality content that’s fresh and relevant to the overall website. When they find such content they reward the website with better rankings in search engine results pages. You may want to learn more about freshness at Moz.com, 10 Illustrations of How Fresh Content May Influence Google Rankings (Updated). [1]

A blog by its very nature is bound to be fresh if you add new content on a regular basis. However, a blog that stands alone under Blogger.com or WordPress (wp.com), separated from your company website, doesn’t help your website ranking.

Note: I’m making an assumption here.

If you sell products or services on your website, this advice is accurate. You should publish your blog under your company’s website. It might be a subdomain (such as blog.yourdomain.com) or it may be part of the mainstream website (yourdomain.com/blog). Either way, it’s part of your company’s site.
However, if you are a blogger without any products or services to sell, you may well choose to publish your blog underWordPress or another blogging service.

3. Promote Your Blog via Email

Shane Parrish writes a blog. He says it’s “an online intellectual hub that helps you get an edge, avoid problems, and live a smarter life.” You can find it at Farnamstreetblog.com. He’s been writing it for some time, and has now accumulated (as of the moment I’m writing this) 82,475 subscribers. Wouldn’t it be nice if each one gave him just one dollar per year for his efforts?

Shane built his following by sending out a weekly email. It hits my inbox every Sunday like clockwork. In it he recaps the most popular articles of the week, the most read, those that received the most comments. He provides links to each of them so I can easily drill down into anything that catches my attention. He includes a “Still Curious” section with more links that always convince me to click a couple more articles.

Do I go to his blog and read it daily? Not at all. But I do read his Sunday recaps every week and, ultimately, am led back to the articles on his blog. If Shane didn’t promote his blog though email it’s not likely he’d have amassed the following of more than 80,000 people.

The message here? Promote you blog through email. Make sure your audience members give you permission to email them by opting in. Emma, Constant Contact and Mailchimp all provide robust email marketing platforms. Mailchimp is free for mailing lists with 2,000 subscribers or less, and for up to 12,000 emails sent per year.

How to encourage people to subscribe? Here are a few tips.

Make the “Subscribe” link an interactive button that changes when the users hovers over it with the mouse, or, when a mobile user touches it.
Put the sign-up button on the sidebar of your site so it appears on every page. That way, no matter where people enter your blog site, they’ll have a subscribe box.
Show value by telling potential subscribers why they should join. Rather than “Join Our Email List,” your pitch might be “Sign up for our weekly email and we’ll send you [something of value] that will help you [accomplish an important objective].”
Get more advice at Blog Tyrant [8] or Hubspot. [9]

4. Curate Great Content from the Web

J.K. Rowling, Ernest Hemingway, even William Shakespeare — eminent authors all — struggled with the same problem you have. Lack of time. If they’d found more time to write we could all have been blessed with even more great literature. I’m sure it’s no different for you. Creating great content takes time and energy, both of which often seem to be in short supply.

Yet curating what’s already written by others gives you a quicker and easier way to produce a regular stream of top notch content. Here’s how the Content Marketing Institute defines curation: [3]

Content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on, and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject. Content curation adds editorial value through a personal perspective and commentary that integrate your 360-degree brand.

In other words, curation is a process of finding things online that support your perspectives, beliefs, brands and the ideas you want to convey…then providing your commentary on them to add value. Learn more about curation. [3]

Finally, contact other bloggers and seek permission to repost relevant articles from their blog on yours. Making connections with others could even lead to opportunities to guest-post your content on their blogs.

The Nitty Gritty Starts Here

If your blog followed the advice given to this point, you’d be well on your way to attracting readers and converting them to customers. But to be more complete, let’s look at additional steps you need to take. These are some of the nitty gritty details; they all play a part in producing a successful, money-generating blog.

5. Consider Adding Premium Content

But be careful! As soon as you ask readers to enter their debit or credit card, you risk losing the respect they’ve built for what you do. To mitigate that unwanted effect, explain why there’s a charge for certain material. Help the reader understand why you’re asking her to pay.

For example, if you’re offering an ebook, show why it’s worth spending money. How many pages does it have? Show the Contents page. Show the reader why it will help him solve a problem. Don’t call it a “special report.” That term is too hackneyed and over-used.

Examples of premium content include:

Professionally written white papers that provide comprehensive analysis; that discuss topics in depth and provide hard-to-find answers. For example, the Gartner company sells research papers covering many aspects of information technology both as single copies and on a subscription basis. [7]
Exclusive long-form interviews that may range to 5,000 words or more.
Admission to a webinar can be monetized if the content is valuable. Once the webinar is done, it can be sold many more times as archived content.
Ebooks or audiobooks.
Local or international research that provides unique data and analysis not available elsewhere.
Premium content can also include videos, images and any other downloadable content. As always, be sure to observe copyright laws to avoid trouble down the road.

To give your premium content more visibility outside your blog, make articles that discuss your your premium content shareable in social networks so your readers can inform others.

6. Experiment with Soft Paywalls and Pay-per-content

Pay-per-content payments (sometimes referred to as micropayments) are becoming popular among news publishers and bloggers as they help to deliver revenue without causing the reader any real pain. They’re one-time payments that can be as small as 20¢. Paying a few cents gives the reader full access to a given article, video or other asset.

Drizzle offers a turnkey paywall application that makes it easy to monetize your blog content. You can add a paywall to your website in a couple minutes with no technical knowledge needed. It gives you the option of turning on pay-per-content payments, selling subscriptions or both.

7. Build a “Web Professional” Blog Site

Spend the time and money to hire a graphic designer, or use a professionally-designed template or theme for your blog site.Wix.com and Weebly.com are website design tools that stand out for the quality of their templates. Both of them have starter packages that let you build your blog site, publish it and begin using it — all at no cost. Then later, if you wish to republish it under your personal URL, you pay a modest amount that gives you further design options.

WordPress.org, too, offers many professionally-designed themes which you can view at their Theme Directory.

With so many high quality templates and themes available at little or no cost, creating a high quality site has become straightforward. For instance, each theme is designed with compatible fonts; with properly balanced color schemes; with suitable buttons and link styles; with headers and footers, sidebars, choices of menu placement, and more — all designed by professionals.

If you use images as part of your blog, be sure they do more than adorn the page with color. For example, if an infographicsupports the point you’re making in a given article, search for “infographics” to see if the content you need is available. Many sites encourage you to embed their infographics on your pages. Tools like Zoom.it give you even more control overinfographics your readers will enjoy.

8. Write for Online Readers

Online readers don’t read online articles. They scan them. Researchers have studied how people read web content. They found users prefer articles that are scannable, concise and objective. The guidelines for bloggers derived from such research advises that you…

Keep your paragraphs short.
Use headings, sub-headings, numbered and bulleted lists.
Be concise and to the point.
Avoid marketing hype.

You can learn more from research conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group. [11]

9. Use Your Blog as a Platform to Offer Professional Services

Your blog can become a platform, a springboard for launching professional services. Use your expertise to educate others, to provide consulting services, to offer a class. Translate your writing skill into speaking skills and offer a seminar. For example, if your blog is about cooking and food, offer a cooking workshop either in-person or online. Once you’ve built an online following, bring your knowledge and expertise into the real world.

Hannah Hart, aka Harto, did just that. She began a YouTube video blog a few years ago, My Drunk Kitchen. Fans flocked around her which led to a live comedy tour, followed by a book. She’s earned an entry in Wikipedia [12] that explains how she leveraged her video blog to earn more than $50,000 in a few hours. From vlogger to stand-up comedian on tour, to published author — a perfect case in point.

10. Polish Your Blog; Don’t Forget the Details

Yes, these and many other details are important too:

The title of every blog article should sizzle and be intriguing. Sometimes a title that pulls people in takes more time to write than the entire blog article. Magazine publishers understand this. They often pay more to the headline writers who create those catchy headlines on the magazine cover than they do for the articles inside. The headlines sell the magazine off the grocery store stand, not the articles inside. Give serious thought to your blog titles.
Understand who is in your target audience, and make sure your blog articles talk to them. Marketers often createpersonas that describe who their customers are, then craft their messaging around those personas. Learn how to make personas for your audience from the experts at the Content Marketing Institute. [13]
Write for your personas that represent real people without stuffing the article with key words. SEO is important, but writing for a search engine misses the point. The spiders that crawl your site are more sophisticated than ever. This article at Search Engine Land [14] explains semantic search as it is implemented today, and how it may eventually move us closer to the Star Trek computer that seemed almost human.
Proofread before your post your articles. Nothing rings of “amateur” louder than poorly edited content filled with illogic, poor grammar and typos.

Naturally there’s a lot more one could add to this list. For another roundup of ideas on how to earn money through blogging, check out advice from Amy Lynn Andrews [6] who makes six figures blogging. Writer’s Digest [5] also offers good counsel about online writing in general.

Are you a blogger or publisher? Learn more about content monetization: http://blog.getdrizzle.com

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