The good thing is that it just makes more room for quality marketers to reach their target audience with more compelling messages.  But growing your subscriber list can be a long and frustrating process if you’re just relying on passive methods to generate optins.

Get Active and Boost your Subscribers

Essentially, if you want to boost your subscriber rates, you have to be willing to make some changes.

1. The first step in increasing your subscriber rate is to take a good hard look at your own blog or website from a reader or visitor standpoint.  Do you have an eye catching optin form on it?  If so and you’ve been using the same form, the same set up for months, then it’s time for a change.  This can be an easy fix – If you use Aweber, one of the more popular autoresponders, then try out some different fonts, different forms, different submit buttons.  Sometimes just a simple change can make all the difference.
2. The next thing to look at is add some in-content optin forms to your blog.  Do you have the typical sidebar optin?  Try adding an optin form at the end of your blog posts or on the About page of your blog.  If the thought of creating all these forms yourself is unsettling, try an optin plugin.  Some good ones to check out are Optin Skin and WP Subscribers.  They are highly customizable and can add a much needed pick up to a blog.  Plus it saves you from having to do all the coding yourself!
3. If you don’t have a page dedicated to your optin, then create one.  Adding a tab on the top of your blog, in the header menu is a great way to generate some additional subscribers.  Readers can see at a glance what all your optin offer includes.  This way, when you give out a link, instead of sending traffic back to your blog’s general address, send them to this page.
4. Once you’ve changed up your optin forms, then you can take your message out to the masses.  Twitter and Facebook are not the only places to hang out.  What about forums?  What about other niche groups?  Most forums allow you to have a signature show up every time you add a response.  Craft a compelling signature and you can add some highly targeted subscribers to your list.
5. Have you ever been a guest blogger?  If so, you know the mountain of potential that comes with it.  But while guest blogging is great for exposure, credibility and a host of other pluses, there is one other crucial thing that often gets overlooked.  Your author bio.  Instead of sending readers to your blog’s general address, send them to a page dedicated to them.  An example of this is below.  This tells the readers that you created this page just for them and you have goodies for them!

Test Often

These are just a few ways of boosting your subscriber rate.  Sometimes just changing a few things every now and then can have a huge impact on your subscriber numbers.  Whereas you may see that number slowly rise, a change as small as a new optin form can garner a dozen subscribers in one day.

The key to a consistently rising subscriber rate is to test out many different options – find one that works and then later on, test out another.  Something as small as border or font can mean the difference in readers opting in or not.

What about you?  Do you have an optin form on your blog?