Boost Blog Subscribers Numbers By Reusing Your Old Posts

If you’ve been blogging for awhile, you’re sitting on a little (or big) gold mine of blog content. But what happens to that amazing content that’s hiding way back in the archives of your site?

Not much.

Someone may happen upon it via search or if you link to it in a  related post (<– do that more!) it might get discovered but it’s likely not getting found by a new reader.

Here’s a simple way to use that already written content to increase your blog subscriber numbers and get more followers.

*These instructions are for self-hosted wordpress blogs although you can use the templates given for any site using feedburner.com*

Boost Your Blog Subscriber Numbers with Old Content

People are really stingy with their email these days. With good reason too, there’s processed meat flying at us from every angle.

Our inboxes are crowded already, so you have to give people a reason to subscribe – a good reason. You may be awesome, I know that,  you know that but your newly landed visitor does not.

One of the most tried and true ways to grow an email list is a simple exchange program. You give me your email and I’ll give you something free. It helps lower our resistance, the conversation changes from no way and I giving you my email to hmmm, free stuff, just my email you say….that sounds like a bargain. (You will notice this very strategy in action in our own sidebar here – email in exchange for free facebook cover templates)

Many of you already know this and may be thinking, but what can I exchange without spending hours and hours writing something new? That’s where your old content comes in. You can simply rebundle (and maybe edit a bit) some of your best posts about a single or related topic.

For example, you could use a blog post about a killer workout you do (polish it up by removing any mentions of your holiday to Italy) and make it your brand new email subscription bonus!

To do this is fairly straight forward but you’ll need a text editor, like Notepad, (not a word processor) that is available standard on most operating systems.

1. Edit your article and save it as a pdf. You can always add your blog header or something like that to pretty it up a bit.
2. Upload your new subscription bonus to your website via Media–>Add New making sure to note the file path after upload:
3. Now the sort of tricky part. You’re going to work with CODE!! Ok, not a lot, and it’s written for you so really you’re working with cut and paste.  Download this zip file with the feedburner template and upzip it.
4. Open the .xml file in a text editor. You’ll see something like this:
5. Change the “Title”, “Description”, “Text” and “Link” fields to reflect your file. The file link is the one you took note of in #2 above. Save your file and be sure to save it as an .xml file.
6. Upload the .xml file to your blog’s root directoy via FTP or your cPanel’s file manager (you can access this through your webhost). You want the file path to be http://yourdomain.com/feedflare.xml
7. Login to your Feedburner account and head over to the Optimize tab.
8. About half way down the page is the Personal FeedFlare Section:
9. Just enter in the http://yourblogdomain.com/feedflare.xml link you created earlier. Make sure to activate the feedflare at the bottom of the page and check off the boxes to include your custom link.

And last but not least, don’t forget to mention your awesome subscription bonus right above where the reader needs to enter their email. Put the notice in a highly visible spot: upper left sidebar, upper right sidebar or in the header if you don’t have a full width banner.

Subscriptions don’t happen by accident, growing your numbers takes time but you have to give people a reason to sign up. Experiment with different bonuses , different subscription box placement and see what works best for your blog and your readers.

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