One of the most common questions I hear from bloggers and businesses that blog, is 'How can I grow my blog's traffic?'  This is a valid question, but bloggers shouldn't forget to focus on their blog's subscribers as well.  Over the last year, I have seen first-hand what can happen when you focus on growing your blog's subscriber count.

Like most bloggers, I keep a close eye on my blog's traffic.  I launched my blog The Viral Garden back in March of 2006.  In the first few months, traffic quickly grew from 0 to around 150 visitors a day on average.  But in the fall and late 2006, I noticed that the growth began to slow, and by Feb. of 2007, I was only averaging around 175-200 visitors a day.

But I also noticed something else, my number of daily feed readers had caught up with my daily traffic, and by Feb. of last year, I was actually having more daily feed readers than daily visitors to my blog.  This really got my attention, because I had been doing everything possible to grow my blog's visitors, but had spent almost no time trying to grow my subscriber base.  So I quickly switched gears, and over the last 11 months, I have concentrated on growing my number of subscribers.  Here's how the growth has tracked over the life of The Viral Garden:


Notice that there's very slow and steady growth up till just after Jan. of 2007.  Then around mid-Feb., growth accelerates.  A couple of things happened here.  First, this was when I decided to focus more on subscribers.  Up till now, I had only a couple of subscriber buttons available on my blog's sidebar, one for subscribing to my blog's Feedburner feed, and one for subscribing via Bloglines.  Both were buried about halfway down my sidebar.  I moved both buttons up to the top of my sidebar, right under my pic and contact info.  Then in Feb., Feedburner started tracking Google Reader in the subscriber counts, and I saw about a 30% jump from this.

Then in April, I noticed that Feedburner offered a form for your blog that would let visitors subscriber via email.  I thought this was a great idea, and added this form to my blog's sidebar under my subscriber buttons.  In the last 9 months, I've gone from 0 email subscribers, to almost 100 now.  Not a huge amount, but every little bit helps.

By mid 2007, I was helping a close eye on the behavior of my subscribers.  I noticed that many were accessing my feed with Google Reader, NewsGator, and NetVibes.  So I added subscriber buttons for these services, and also added a feed count widget that showed how many feed subscribers had accessed my blog from the previous day.  The pic to the right shows what my sidebar subscriber section looks like now.

Now notice the huge spike around July of 2007.  In spending time with Feedburner, I noticed that they offered a service for Blogspot blogs that would redirect all your blogs feed to the Feedburner version of your blog's feed.  Feedburner claimed that this would allow you to accurately track how many times your feed was accessed.  I decided 'Why not?' and made the switch.  I was stunned to see my subscriber count double immediately from around 600 to 1,200 daily subscribers!  If you have a Blogger or Blogspot blog, you MUST do this, here's the link that explains how.

Since then, I've continued to enjoy steady subscriber growth.  Last July I had around 1,200 daily subscribers, yesterday my count was 2,352, which means it's almost doubled in the last six months. 

Now I should note that during this same time, my daily traffic to the blog has increased by about 75%.  From what I can tell, around 5% of my visitors subscribe to my blog, so the growth of subscribers is cannibalizing blog traffic growth a bit.  Since I don't have any ads on my blog, I am ok with this.  My thinking is that I want my blog's readers to have as many options as possible for receiving my content.  If they want to visit manually, they can.  If they want to subscribe and access the blog's feed via a feed reader, they can.  If they want to receive email updates once a day, that option is also available. 

But the bottom line is that you constantly have to monitor your blog to understand what is working well for you.   I advise companies on how to improve their blogging efforts, but individuals can also benefit from not only analyzing their blogging efforts, but from also viewing their blog visitors as customers.   By paying close attention to my subscribers, I discovered how and why visitors were becoming subscribers, and catered to these people.  And subscriber growth of over 1000% in less than a year is the result.