The Reasons People Aren't Subscribing to Your Blog

Here are a few reasons people might not be subscribing to your blog…

You post sporadically
You blogged twice last week, once the week before, skipped the week before that. Choose specific days of the week you’re going to post and stick to it. If someone visits your blog for the first time and you haven’t written in a few days or a WEEK they’re going to assume you’re not dedicated enough to produce content on a regular basis.

You have no focus
Last month you posted about your day at work, a muffin recipe, your skiing trip, how to knit socks, what you ate for lunch, a cute video of your kid, how to build a window box, your thrifting finds, and 20 other random things. Now, if your blog is about your life and you just want to write about what you did and what’s on your mind every morning that may be fine, but if you have any intention of building a readership/brand/business, may I suggest you narrow your focus.

All your posts are guest blogs, advertisements and giveaways
You know why people subscribe to my blog? Because they want to hear from ME. Weird, right? Unless your blog is a group project or you’re going on vacation then YOU should be writing the content. Use guest bloggers sparingly and only when the information will truly benefit your readers, not to fill your calendar when you have nothing to write about.

Same goes with advertisers – I become a little concerned about whether a blog is genuine when I get half-way through every post and see it’s actually for a product/service and not really about their getaway to New York. Bummer every time.

And giveaways – they’re fun on occasion, but when it becomes a weekly parade of useless crap through my reader I end up hitting unsubscribe.

They did subscribe, but…
When your post showed up in their reader it was only an excerpt or even worse, just a title. I know people do this because they want to drive traffic to their website to generate clicks and comments, but it’s just annoying. If you want to generate clicks write comment-worthy content & include a list of related posts.

They can’t find the subscribe button or you don’t have one at all
I’m going to pretend none of you are reading this are going ‘uhoh…’ because I know you’ve all earned enough nerd points that if I checked your blog right now I’d find a subscribe button immediately…right? RIGHT?? Also – not everyone likes a pile of blog posts showing up in their inbox, so email subscription is not enough.

Blogger users can find their RSS feed at the bottom of their site where it says Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) and WordPress users will have a feed URL that is something like SillyGrrl.com/feed. But, if you click the subscribe link in my sidebar (go ahead, subscribe away :) you’ll see that it’s a Feedburner link. This way I can keep track of how many people subscribe and how many people actually read & click into my posts.