Secret Ingredients to Blog Subscriber Growth: Persistence & Promotion

We all know that starting a blog can feel daunting.  Most of us aren’t professional writers or communications majors and the combined effort of brainstorming great topics and delivering them in an engaging way can feel pretty overwhelming.  Worse yet, starting a blog from zero subscribers can mean a slow onramp and potentially losing the motivation to keep blogging.  That seems so depressing, why would anyone even bother starting a blog?

Enough with the downers.   There are compelling reasons to blog and while it’s sometimes a slow ramp, data shows that bloggers who are persistent and increase their blog frequency can yield leads and sales from their efforts. 

The chart above is proof that bloggers shouldn’t lose faith – in fact they should have a little patience and be persistent in their blogging effort.  More evidence is the progress that the team at PrimePay, a national provider of payroll, tax and HR services, has made over the last year using HubSpot to blog consistently.  Because they appeal to a very specific target market, Nancy and her team didn’t set out with a goal of extensive readership – rather, they wanted to share valuable content that would enable them to become thought leaders in the payroll services space.  Starting with a blank slate, PrimePay’s blog hit 550 subscribers after about 6 months.  Since then PrimePay has continued to blog gaining steam along the way.  Recently, they topped 1,300 subscribers, driving increased traffic and leads to their business.

Patience wasn’t the only tactic Nancy applied at PrimePay to increase blog readership.  Here are a two specific tactics that PrimePay executed to drive their success:

Create Remarkable Content with Cross Departmental Bloggers

Promote the Blog with Small but Consistent Messages

In the early days of the PrimePay blog it didn’t make sense to do large scale promotion.  Nancy created email signatures for the whole company to include a very low-cost and easy to execute promotional tactic.  Only once the blog had started to gain readers and had a great base of content did Nancy decide to incorporate her blog into specific email marketing campaigns.  The goal of these campaigns was to increase readership, and in turn, get those readers to pass the blog along.

To date, PrimePay’s persistence and simple but powerful promotional tactics have paid off.  Readership and lead generation have seen great results and Nancy has more buy in for the blog than ever. 

Considering your own business blog?   Make a plan to create great content on a consistent schedule and figure out which promotional tactics are the right ones to scale your readership – generating leads and sales at a lower than average cost.