Struggling With Your Blog? Try These Three Simple Tips

It’s hard building a successful blog! You can have great content and post often–follow all the rules of the top bloggers–and still not get the traffic, visitors, and sales you deserve.

There are three big rules to a successful blog that many up-and-coming bloggers miss. In this post, I will share them with you…and show you how to implement them quickly!

Rule #1: Get a real email autoresponder service before it’s too late.

Many bloggers make a critical mistake: They only put RSS subscription icons and/or Feedburner email subscriptions on their blogs. Let’s break down each of these and look at why these will severely hamper your money-making abilities with your blog:

RSS icons: Most blog readers still don’t know what RSS is or how to use it. Unfortunately, even with the advent of Google Reader, RSS still isn’t mainstream.

Even for technical blogs, I still don’t recommend RSS as the primary option. Why? If you’re offering products to your audience, you want to create urgency. Email does that–people consider email that shows up in their inboxes more urgent, and often take action immediately. RSS is a more passive method; many blog readers don’t read their RSS subscriptions every day. If you’re selling products or doing a limited-time sale, an email subscriber is worth far more than an RSS subscriber.Feedburner email subscriptions: It seems like a great idea, doesn’t it? You can just plop a piece of code onto your site and Feedburner will automatically email your subscribers your latest blog posts.

Unfortunately, Feedburner suffers from many of the same issues as RSS. It can take up to 24 hours to send the email, which means if you’re holding a 1-day sale, your Feedburner email subscribers may miss out. Also, you can’t send separate emails (other than the automated ones) to your list. If you want to remind your list that a sale is ending, or to get in on a product before it’s too late, you have to write a blog post instead…and then wait up to 24 hours for Feedburner to mail it. It’s a bad solution, and one I regret ever offering on my blog. (I still have hundreds of Feedburner subscribers “stuck” on my list, who aren’t on my Aweber list.)

I recommend Aweber for any serious blogger. Sure, their solution costs money. But you will make plenty more money with it…so much more than you pay for the solution. I pay Aweber about $66/month for my 5,500

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