The Curvy Coach

A common question I get from many plus size bloggers is how can they increase their subscribers. Most of the bloggers I’ve talked to or read regularly tend to focus more on the RSS feed. The truth of the matter is though that not everyone knows what that is. And as much as we like to think that email is becoming more and more ineffective, surveys have shown that people check their emails more often than they do RSS feeds.

There are many different techniques you can try to increase your subscribers; if you plan to have a large list of subscribers and continue to grow that over the long-terms then you do need to have an auto-responder or email marketing system that will allow you to connect with your readers in a more dynamic way than RSS feeds does.

My favorite happens to be Aweber. Aweber allows you to easily personalize emails to subscribers. If you look to the right you’ll see that I ask for your name and email using an opt-in form or web forms as they are often called. Aweber recently unleashed new fancy looking templates for web forms that you can customize without needing to know any HTML code at all.

One of the great things about those forms is that you have the choice of posting them to your website like I have done here but you can literally send a link via twitter, facebook, email, etc. with just the web form. *No need to create a new web page to get susbcribers on yourlist! *How cool is that right? Here’s a video that demonstrates how it works:

Now back to helping your grow your list of subscribers…

Really one of the best ways is to increase your subscribers is to offer something valuable for FREE. I know you probably give tons of great information for free already in your blog posts. But let’s face it, don’t we all like free stuff especially when they’re valuable? For example, one of the things that have really worked for me is  offering free teleseminars and online workshops where people who are interested to sign up provide their name an email address. You can do the same or offer things like coupons, special offers, free reports, audio recordings, etc. for your website or blog. It’s really up to you and what your audience is interested in.

You can do all of this with Aweber. In fact, it’s a great system to have as part ofyour marketing strategy because it helps you to stay in contact regularly with your subscribers; you can send out customized newsletters, broadcast messages, links to your blog, and even RSS feeds to your readers. You can use this same system for an endless amount of email lists for any number of websites. What I especially like about it is the analytics, you can see what the open rate it, click-through rate, etc. and even conduct testing to see what images, headlines, etc. works best.

The Aweber team is also very resourceful and they teach you a lot about email marketing, they’re one of the best if not THE best in the industry. While setting up RSS feeds are free, Aweber will cost you, $19/month but in my opinion it’s worth the investment. What do you think?

P.S. To try Aweber out for $1, go to http://www.thecurvycoach.com/aweber scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the special offer.