Category: Online Marketing

When you’re building a blog, one critical component is having a plan to grow your newsletter subscribers. Allowing readers to subscribe gives you a direct line of communication with your audience. Think of your blog as a megaphone to reach people, while your newsletter lets those interested individuals connect with you on a deeper level. The goal is to turn casual readers into devoted fans. Here’s how to make that happen and grow your newsletter subscribers along the way.

Write About What Your Audience Cares About

Before you can start converting readers into subscribers, you need to attract the right audience by creating content they genuinely care about. This starts with clearly understanding your target reader by creating a marketing persona – visualizing one fictional reader and outlining details about their personality, demographics, needs, and pain points.

With a well-defined persona in mind, conduct keyword research to identify relevant phrases. Analyze keywords to find terms that have decent search volume but aren’t overly competitive. Focus on specific, niche keywords that your future readers would find valuable, but where there’s an opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

With your keywords in hand, plan your content using a content calendar, and prioritize creating high-quality articles over sheer quantity. If an article is taking longer than expected, don’t be afraid to extend your schedule. It’s better to spend the time needed to craft a truly excellent piece of content that will resonate with your intended audience.

Writing content your audience cares about involves several steps, each with its own in-depth process. Here’s a recap of the steps involved, with links to more detailed guides if you want to dive deeper:

1. Create a Marketing Persona
2. Perform Keyword Research
3. Create a Content Calendar
4. Write High-Quality Content

Craft an Irresistible Incentive

To turn readers into subscribers, you need to offer an incentive – often called a “lead magnet” – that provides immediate value in exchange for their email address. Popular options include e-books, discounts, online courses, white papers, cheat sheets, or exclusive content.

The right lead magnet depends on your blog’s topic and your target audience. Think about the hurdle or roadblock preventing new readers from ultimately achieving your primary goal, whether that’s making a purchase, generating affiliate referrals, or something else. Then, create a lead magnet that helps bridge that gap and moves readers closer to your end goal.

For example, here on the ClearPath Online blog, the ultimate aim is for you to sign up for digital marketing coaching to grow your blog’s audience. A common hurdle for new readers is a lack of confidence in their ability to do SEO themselves. To bridge this gap, the lead magnet offered is a free course on how to do SEO yourself. It allows readers to gain confidence in their SEO skills and determine if coaching would be a good fit for their needs. This lead magnet helps move readers closer to the primary goal of signing up for coaching.

Optimize Subscription Forms

To increase the chances of readers subscribing, reduce friction by minimizing form fields to only what’s absolutely essential – ideally just an email address field. Lengthy forms with several fields can be intimidating and cause people to abandon the process before completing it.

In addition to minimizing form fields, make sure your subscription forms are visually appealing and easy to spot. Use contrasting colors that grab attention and clear call-to-action text so readers know exactly what to do. The design should be clean and uncluttered. Consider using graphics, images or illustrations related to your lead magnet to further draw the eye. Your forms should look like a natural part of your site’s branding and content flow. With an optimized form design, you’ll increase the chances of catching your readers’ interest and having them complete the subscription process.

You’ll also want to place your lead magnet’s subscription form in multiple locations, wherever it makes the most sense and relevance for the reader’s experience. A common approach is to include it in your website’s footer area, so it’s easily accessible after someone finishes reading an article. However, don’t be afraid to also embed forms inline within articles when the surrounding content is highly relevant to your incentive offer.

Share Across Multiple Channels

While having your lead magnet prominently featured on your blog is crucial, don’t stop there. Leverage the incentive by promoting it across other channels and platforms you’re active on, such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook groups or pages, podcasts, and more. Whenever you’re discussing a topic related to your incentive, mention its availability.

The key is to use those external channels to drive traffic back to your website and blog, where you have maximum control over the user experience.

Be Cautious with Exit Intent Pop-Ups

One popular tactic for boosting lead magnet conversions is the use of exit intent pop-ups – those boxes that appear when your cursor moves toward the browser’s URL bar, as if you’re about to leave the site. While effective, these pop-ups can also be quite annoying to some users.

Carefully consider whether exit intent pop-ups truly align with your audience’s preferences and expectations. In some cases, it may be better to prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to your subscriber numbers. Having fewer but more engaged, genuinely interested subscribers could be more valuable than inflating your list with people who were coerced into signing up.

Summary

Growing your newsletter subscribers begins with creating content tailored to your target audience’s interests and offering value-packed incentives. However, that’s just the start. To retain those hard-earned subscribers and turn them into devoted fans, you must continue delivering high-quality, relevant content on a consistent basis.

Always keep your readers’ needs and perspectives at the forefront as you explore and implement strategies to grow your blog. Prioritize quality over quantity in both your content and subscriber acquisition tactics. Focus on the right engagement methods for your particular audience, rather than techniques that may not align with their preferences. And never lose sight of your ultimate goals – whether it’s product sales, affiliate marketing, or something else entirely.

Consistently serving up valuable content and incentives tailored specifically for your audience will keep subscribers engaged and positioned to eventually take your desired actions. With the right balance of quality, relevance and subscriber nurturing, you can successfully grow your newsletter and turn casual readers into loyal followers.

Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:

Previously, we explored the decision of whether your blog should use a brand name or your personal name. If you are leaning towards using a branded blog name instead of your personal name, you likely still have questions. You may be asking: what should I name my blog? Here’s a guide on how to choose the perfect blog name.

Criteria for a Perfect Blog Name

When choosing a name for your blog, keep the following tips in mind.

Relevance

It’s important that the blog name relates to the content you intend to cover. The name doesn’t need to exactly describe your blog’s topic, but it should be relevant. It’s okay to be creative, but avoid confusing your audience with an unrelated name.

You also want to keep the future growth of your blog in mind. While the name should relate to your initial topic, make sure it’s broad enough to accommodate any potential expansion of topics down the road.

Memorability

Make sure your blog name is easy for people to remember, both in written and spoken form. Is it simple to say, type, and remember when mentioned casually? Choose a domain name that follows conventions, such as using a familiar extension like .com, as they tend to be more memorable. Avoid using unusual characters like hyphens or underscores.

Uniqueness

Try to choose a brand name that stands out from the crowd. This offers multiple advantages–it’s easier to secure the domain name and social media handles, it’s likely more memorable, and it can be easier to improve search visibility and brand marketing.

Conciseness

Opt for a brand name that is short and concise. A shorter name is easier to remember and to share with people. Securing short domain names can be challenging and expensive, but if you have multiple options, lean towards the shorter name.

Availability

Verify the brand name is available, as both a domain name and across social media platforms you plan to use. If the name is already taken, consider choosing something different to avoid confusion. This could be confusing both for your target audience and search engines.

Don’t Focus Solely on SEO

Avoid choosing a name strictly for SEO purposes. In the past, there was a trend where people would purchase domain names containing their primary keyphrase with hyphens separating each word. This tactic doesn’t improve your search ranking; it only leads to confusion and a lack of memorability for your target audience. For instance, a blog focused on dog training shouldn’t be named something like “dog-training-tips-online.com” just for SEO.

Brainstorm Options

The most effective way to choose a brand name is to start a list with all of your ideas. Continue adding to the list and refining it. Over time, a clear winner will emerge–a name that consistently stands out and grows on you, signaling that you found a winner.

Leverage AI

If your brainstorming list is empty and you need help generating ideas, consider using AI. Use a prompt like the following with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot:

List 10 potential brand names for a business specializing in: [insert your blog topic]

You can view the results I got when searching for brand name ideas for a blog that creates content on training older dogs.

These are the results from ChatGPT:

These are the results from Google Gemini:

These are the results from Microsoft Copilot:

Seek Input from Others

Once you have a few favorite brand names, gather opinions from friends and family. If you know anyone in your target audience, their input would be extremely useful. Otherwise, you can get opinions from people in your life to determine which brand name resonates most with your blog’s purpose.

In Summary

The perfect name may take time, but putting in the effort ensures your blog starts off on the right foot. Brainstorm as many options as possible, aiming for relevance, memorability, uniqueness, conciseness, and availability. If you’re still undecided, don’t hesitate to seek input and votes from others. Once you make a decision, commit to it and move forward. Whatever name you choose will be great–now it’s time to start creating content.

Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:

Writing a blog doesn’t have to be a daunting task. When I first started it would take me days. Now it typically takes under an hour to write a blog article. Having a system in place helps speed up the process substantially. I’ll outline how to write blog posts faster and more effectively by repeating a simple blog writing process.

Know Your Target Keyword

The first step to writing a blog article is performing keyword research. Now keyword research is a huge topic alone and if you need details on how to do that refer to our complete keyword research guide.

This step is critical because it confirms that the time you are spending to write a blog post is well spent because your audience is looking for that content.

There are times when you might write an article that is so unique and specific to your journey or your audience that a keyword wouldn’t be applicable. In those cases, you don’t need a shortcut to write a blog faster. Those stories almost write themselves because they are personalized stories you are sharing. It’s fine to share posts like that from time to time but if your goal is to grow your audience then make sure the majority of your content is keyword focused.

Create an Outline

Once you know the topic of your blog, start building an outline. Create a list with all of the items you’d like to mention in your article.

Once you jot down all of your talking points you can start organizing them. I like to do this with a bulleted list. Start rearranging and adding some structure to your ideas so the conversation will have a flow that’s easy to understand.

Look at the Top 10 Search Results

After you’ve written down all of your existing ideas and thoughts you want to mention, it’s time to take a look at what’s ranking currently.

Go to Google and search for the keyword you are targeting. Look at the top ten results that currently rank for that term. There are two things you want to look for while doing this.

First, make sure that the subject matches what you had in mind. If the results are completely different from the article you plan to write, in a way that’s so drastically different that the person looking at these results would never have any interest in your article, then you need to find a new keyword.

Search for a few other similar keywords until you start to find the right content for the article you have in mind. This doesn’t happen too often but every once in a while the language we use to describe something is vastly different than the general population and because of that the search results for that term are not as useful as we had hoped.

Once you are certain you are focused on the correct keyword, take a look at the results. Actually click through and take a look at the top ten search results. Scan through the subheadings on each article to get a good understanding about which topics are covered.

As you’re looking at the subheadings on the top ranking articles it will likely trigger more ideas for your own article. Go ahead and add those ideas to your outline. Remember not to copy the ideas though. The subheadings will act as idea starters and often remind you of topics you had wanted to include, but forgot about while creating your original outline. I make sure to never read the details on the top ranked blogs because I don’t want to accidentally word my article the same way as another.

I simply scroll through quickly glancing at headings to make sure I haven’t forgotten any talking points. I also take a look at visuals so I can get an understanding of what I need to do to stand out and improve on the top ranked pages.

Finalize the Structure in Your Outline

After reviewing the top ranked sites and adding any last minute ideas to your outline, make sure the outline is well organized. The outline should be in a bulleted list. The main bullets will be your subheadings. The secondary bullets will end up being your paragraphs and talking points.

Write the Intro

Once you have a clear outline write your introduction paragraph to give the reader an idea of what they will learn in the article. Make sure to include your keyword in the intro paragraph and give the reader a clear idea of what to expect.

Write the Article Body Using the Outline

After the introduction you’ll start writing the body of the article. To do this you’ll follow the outline you have created. Use the outline to remind yourself of the concept and then write about it.

Don’t worry about the grammar, that can be fixed later. Just take it one piece at a time and write whatever comes to mind. When you finish writing about that one topic, scroll back to the outline to remember what comes next. Continue writing about the next point and so on until you are at the end of the outline.

Write a Summary

After you’ve covered everything included in the outline, write a summary or conclusion paragraph. The goal of that paragraph is to summarize what was discussed in the article.

Once the summary is complete the blog article rough draft is done.

Edit the Blog Post

Once you have a rough draft finished, read through it in its entirety. Make sure it flows properly. Read through it at least once with no other goal than making sure it is coherent and all sounds good together.

After that, go back through the article to fix any grammar and spelling issues and do a more formal editing process.

Summary

Creating repeatable routines and writing often is the best way to speed up blog content creation. If you follow this process to create keyword focused content in an organized manner it will not only save you time but the article itself will be more effective and rank higher in search engines because it is created to answer questions people are looking for.

Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode:

About six months ago I got one of those ideas that wouldn’t go away. Instead, it continued to grow. The idea was to share what we’ve learned about camping off-grid in a micro trailer. After one year of ditching the tent and camping in the trailer, we knew we had a new obsession. Camping has been completely changed for the better. And my husband and I have a new habit of always trying to improve both our trailer and our camping routines.

We got to the point where we felt like we had information worth sharing with other families interested in doing the same thing, camping off-grid in a micro trailer and making lasting family memories. We wanted to both share the knowledge and preserve the memories. And we decided YouTube was the best place to do that.

Six months ago, we created our YouTube channel and we have been posting content every single week. We thought we’d go over what we’ve done with the channel, what we’ve learned, and how much money we’ve made with it. That way we can give you an idea if having a YouTube channel would make sense for you.

Creating a Plan for Our YouTube Channel

We knew from the beginning that we needed to have a clear plan for our channel and not create content at random. We first decided which types of videos we would be creating. We came up with three different categories.

First, we would create videos of our camping trips. These videos would have no voiceover but instead show what a trip could look like if you decide to visit that campground. These videos are meant both as family keepsakes and to give a clear idea of what that particular campsite and campground look like. For details about the location and to add extra value it was decided that each of those videos would also have a corresponding campground review blog article that discusses the good and the bad.

Next, we would create educational content. These videos would all have one specific theme and would include footage of one of us speaking. We would mix in video footage of camp trips to help illustrate our point, but the goal of these videos is to help people either with the trailer, camping off-grid, or camping with a family.

And finally, we would create content showing our camping recipes. Specifically we would focus on cooking on the Blackstone while camping. Our trailer came with a Blackstone, and we would never camp without a Blackstone now, so it felt like content that was important to include. It was also content that we were having issues finding on our own on YouTube so we thought it would be good to create it.

In addition to the YouTube channel we knew we also wanted to start a blog. Each video would have a corresponding blog article. The plan was to create the blog off of a modified version of the video transcript. Using the transcript would save us time but we knew it would need to be reviewed and altered slightly to make sense for a blog post.

And lastly, to grow our blog we planned to leverage the ClearPath Online DIY SEO Tool and follow the SEO tasks provided there to grow website traffic and help gain an audience.

Leveraging Affiliate Marketing

We knew many of our videos would highlight particular products. So we decided early on it would make sense to do some affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you partner with retailers and receive a personalized way to link to products so the experience is the same for the user but the retailer can identify the referrer and give a small fee for the referral without increasing the price to the user.

Affiliate marketing made sense because it was a win-win. Highlighting products without linking to the exact item is a pain. Adding the exact link is a benefit and convenience for the viewer. And if we generate sales it makes sense we would earn a small commission if it comes at no extra cost to our viewer.

Even though we do have many affiliate marketing links our number one goal is to help the viewer. So there are still times we add a link to a product even though we don’t get any monetary value from the link. Providing accurate information in a convenient format is more important than earning a small affiliate referral fee.

And we only ever recommend products we’ve used and tested. It’s not worth getting an affiliate commission for a product we haven’t tested. It’s more important to be a trustworthy source.

How Much We’ve Earned From 6 Months of Affiliate Marketing

We have signed up for two different affiliate accounts. We’re using Amazon and Battle Born. So far we’ve only made money from Amazon but that makes sense. Battle Born is where we purchased the equipment for our solar upgrade and that’s a project that takes months of research before you’re ready to commit. So I expect that to be a longer funnel.

To be honest, I added Amazon affiliate links because I thought it made sense. It seemed like a good idea since I was already recommending the products. I didn’t have any expectations so I was thrilled when it started making anything.

The first two months we made nothing. The third month we made just slightly under twenty dollars. The fourth month we made over forty dollars. And the fifth month we made one hundred and ten dollars. The sixth month hasn’t been calculated by Amazon yet.

So far I have been very happy with the income from affiliate marketing. I don’t expect this to be a steady stream of income, but anything we get is a welcome bonus.

Monetizing on YouTube

We are hoping to be able to monetize on YouTube so we can get a cut of the ads that already play on our videos. YouTube has some metrics you need to meet before you can monetize your channel. We need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Right now we are at 143 subscribers and 1,654 watch hours.

So, we have a long way to go with subscribers but I’m very happy with our watch hours. I thought that would be the more difficult metric to reach. Although we are already six months in and not even halfway on either of these metrics I’m still hoping we will reach these goals within one year of posting weekly content. So that gives us six more months. They are picking up some momentum so I don’t anticipate the next six months to go at the same speed as the first, I expect us to keep growing.

As long as we keep posting weekly content our numbers should continue to climb. Since there is more content available to be consumed there are more opportunities to gain watch hours and subscribers.

Growing Our Website

Having a blog and a web presence was an important piece for us. We use the videos as our primary content and create the text based on the video transcript. This makes the project much easier to tackle so we can focus on creating high-quality videos.

We started with a completely new website. We didn’t own the domain before, we started at ground zero with absolutely no visitors. After six months we now have over 300 monthly visitors and it’s growing each month. About 80% of the traffic comes from Google search results. The rest comes from social accounts (including YouTube) and direct traffic.

The Costs Involved with Our YouTube Channel

So far the costs involved have been very minimal. We intentionally tried to start with what we have and not invest a bunch of money from the very beginning. We wanted to see if this was something we were interested in continuing with and get a better idea of the gear we needed before we started spending money.

Camera Cost

Of course one of the most important parts of creating a YouTube channel is having a camera. All we’ve used so far is the camera built into our phones. Now, this is good and bad.

When we started my phone was actually broken. It had died for no apparent reason and a new version of the phone was about to be released. Instead of buying the current (about to be outdated) version I decided to wait. In the meantime, I borrowed a phone. While it was a nice phone (and I was grateful to have it) the camera was not as nice as my old phone. There was a moment where I told myself I couldn’t start the channel until I got my new phone.

I luckily have a husband who reminded me that was a bad mindset and I shouldn’t let something like that stop me. So I didn’t. I now have a nicer phone but the quality is still far from perfect.

What I’ve learned though is having my phone available for recording is a big reason why I’m able to make these videos. It’s convenient and I always have it. If I upgrade to a standalone camera the quality will likely improve but the content will likely decline. Anything other than my phone wouldn’t constantly be with me so it would be more difficult to capture all of the content I’d like to include.

So, my camera cost has been nothing because I use whatever phone I own as my primary camera. It is possible this would change in the future or we may add a camera such as a GoPro for extra footage. But right now this seems to be a benefit so it’s easy to capture the content that’s important to me.

Hosting Cost

Another possible cost is hosting. YouTube is free and doesn’t cost anything to host videos. But, if you start a blog as well there is a hosting cost involved. We already have a host we pay for monthly so this was not an added cost to us. But, if you need a host you can use Bluehost which is as low as five dollars per month.

(Disclosure: The Bluehost link is an affiliate link. By purchasing through that link you help support ClearPath Online at no additional cost to yourself.)

Transcripts Cost

Transcripts are very helpful both to add captions to the YouTube videos and to use as content for blog articles. For the majority of the transcripts I’ve listened to the video and typed them all out myself. This route is completely free but very time consuming. Depending on the video it would sometimes take me three hours to complete a transcript. I started realizing this is a bad use of my time.

For my more recent videos I used Rev.com. They have an option to have the transcripts computer generated instead of having the work done by an actual person. This route is extremely cheap, only twenty-five cents per minute. I gave this a try and while it wasn’t perfect, it saved me several hours for each video.

I had four videos transcribed for under ten dollars using Rev. I plan to continue using their service going forward. It was money well spent for all the time I saved.

Editing Cost

Since I edit the videos myself there isn’t a cost for an editor. I happen to already own the software I use for editing as well so that was another cost I was able to save. The software I use is called Camtasia. The software costs $300 but it is a one-time fee.

Where I did need to spend some money for editing was buying music. Camtasia did come with some music that works well for background tracks. But, once I used all of those tracks I didn’t want to repeat the same songs. I wanted a larger library. I only use music for our campground videos but if they all had the same songs it would be very boring.

So I started using Artlist for background music. It’s only $16 per month and it makes the process of finding music super simple. There are several search options that you can use to filter the results including the mood of the song and if there are vocals or just instrumental. It makes the editing process much faster when finding the right song isn’t a huge challenge.

Our Future Plans for Our YouTube Channel

We are six months into our YouTube channel and we’re having a ton of fun with it. We definitely plan to continue creating content and growing our channel.

Our primary goal for the channel is to be able to monetize it through YouTube. We also plan to grow it to the point where we can open an Amazon store which provides higher commission rates than the standard Amazon affiliate program.

And if the channel continues to grow we will use any profit it generates to upgrade our equipment. Eventually we would like to get a GoPro and start focusing on high quality video and audio.

Summary

So that’s where we are after six months of weekly YouTube content. The videos are getting easier and faster to edit. We are having a ton of fun. And we are even starting to make some money. If you’re interested in checking out our videos you can find them at RoginaRoaming.com.

We plan to do a follow up to this article in another six months. At that point we will have an entire year of weekly YouTube content. My hope is I’ll be able to tell you we have monetized with YouTube. Either way though I’ll provide an update on our progress and let you know how things are going.

Do you want to listen to this article? Here’s the podcast episode: