Subscribers are the life and blood of a newsletter. You can never have too much of them. In this article I will show you how to get more subscribers to your newsletter.

1. Place a subscription box in all of your websites in all pages

You want to website visitors give all possible opportunities to opt-in to your newsletter. Remove all possible effort for a subscriber to add themselves to your newsletter. Put your subscription box in all of the pages in all of your relevant websites. If you have websites about affiliate marketing, Internet marketing and email marketing place opt-in boxes in all of these websites to your Internet marketing newsletter.

More importantly try to place them above the fold – the section of the website the user sees when they land on your website without having to scroll down. Placement is very important. Another great place to place the opt-in code is right below each article in your website where readers are bound to be looking after they read an article.

For wordpress blog: If you have a wordpress blog in which you want to insert the autoresponder opt-in code, go to the admin panel and go to Appearance > Widgets. Add a text widget and insert the code for the autoresponder. Some wordpress themes have a separate region for each page type.

The wordpress CMS has two content types – posts and pages. So there may be some regions that contains the widgets that show in the pages only and another that has widgets that will shown in your pages. If your theme has that, make sure you create a text widget and insert it into each of the regions.

For a drupal website: If you have a drupal website, you must add a block to your website by going to Administer > Site Building > Blocks. Click on add block and insert the code for the opt-in form .

For your website that has plain HTML pages – use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or Kompozer and open up every page and insert the code of the autoresponder subscription form in all of the pages in your website.

2. Offer a bonus for subscribing

Most of us we can’t get subscribers merely by having a subscription form on all pages. That only works if you are a celebrity and your website content is regularly updated and forms a deep connection with your readers like say.. steve pavlina. Your website visitors will need a compelling reason to subscribe to your newsletter. To get theme to subscribe you ahve to give something away in return for subscribing to your newsletter.

Create a small ebook that promises some benefit that your subscribers. For example, you could create a book that shows how to get a 70% discount on buying a particular model camera for your photography newsletter.

Anything that saves time, money, effort will be a good fit for potential subscribe to join your newsletter. It may not be a book, it may also be a software tool. Oh, and try to  make the benefit an instant one. “How to speed up your computer by 400% instantly!” will get more subscribers than the one I suggested above. People love instant benefits.

Once you create the ebook or software that you want to give away in return for their email address, configure your autoresponder software to send the subscriber a link to the software or ebook.

3. More traffic from relevant sources

Very very few, actualy no one, who visits your website by clicking on a link in a site about japanese cartoons is going to subscribe to your newsletter about dog training. They will find the website very irrelevant and will click away immediately.

If your website receives traffic from relevant sources like – other websites about pets and dog training. You could try to submit content to those websites in return for a link to your website. Many website owners will not like the idea but many will. You could also offer to give them a link exchange for a link.

4. Guest post on relevant blogs

Almost any topic on which you can start a newsletter has a blog on the topic today. Blogs are again, the same as relevant traffic sources but they must be covered separetely because blogs are like newsletters. In many cases, blogs ARE newsletters when the blog owner provides email subscription. Submit a article to a relevant blog and link to your landing page from the blog artice.

For example if you have a newsletter on dog training and you find a blog on pet grooming, you could write an article on dog grooming for the blog. Apart from mentioning your website in your blog article as part of the author information, include relevant links to your website in the article itself.

Placing a link to your website will be barely enough for most readers to click through to your website. But if the content on your website to which you are linking is relevant to the topic of the article and somehow adds value to the reader, then they are more likely to clickthrough to it.

In other words, get creative and think up article ideas to write for relevant blogs in which you can shamelessly plug in links to your websites pages and landing pages.

Performancing has a great article on finding guest post opportunities on blogs

5. Test And Tweak Your Traffic Sources

The best traffic sources vary from niche to niche. Sometimes the way this will work will be counterintuitive. Your newsletter about freelance programming may receive more subscribers who came to your website from a forum like sitepoint than from writing guest posts on blogs like freelance switch (hypothetically). Only way you can know this is by testing your traffic sources.

Many autoresponder software and services like WP Responder provide a means to place a code in the subscription form. There is no tool that does this directly without needing some programming to be done. But here’s what I would do to find out where most of my subscribers are coming from:

All autoresponder tools allow you to add a custom field. The field can be a text field (like address, phone number) or a multiple choice question (like sex, age, country) or it can be hidden. the hidden custom field is not shown on the web page but it is still there in the page, the value of which is set in the HTML code of the page.

To track the source of traffic that gets me the most traffic, I will add a hidden field to the subscription form, put the code in the web page then add a javascript program that sets the value of this hidden custom field (lets call this custom field TS) when the page loads to the URL of the site from which visitor landed on your website. This way all of my subscribers will get a URL attached to their subscription that mentions which website they came from when the subscribe to the newsletter.

There will be many traffic sources but a selected few traffic sources will be sending majority of your traffic. You can see which ones these are if you see the list of subscribers in your autoresponder software.  Once 1000-1200 people opt-in to my newsletter I will check how many people came  from each of my traffic sources by counting the number of people with a TS value equal to each of the dominating traffic sources.

Once you find which one of them is giving you the most subscribres, you can focus more of your efforts on that traffic source and eliminate the poor performing ones. Now that I think about it, you can also use Google analytics to accomplish the same by using the goals feature. Here’s how:

Normally you must have three pages – one page where website visitors land on your website, the page where visitors are taken after they enter their subscription information (this one is optional)

and the page they see once they click on the opt-in confirmation email. Suppose these are the three pages:

• Landing – http://mysite.com/landing.html
• Request Confirmation Page – http://mysite.com/pleaseconfirm.html (optional if you are relying on the page generated by your autoresponder service/software)
• Confirmed Subscription Page – http://mysite.com/confirmed.html

Here’s how to configure google analytics to record each traffic source and the number of subscribers that come from there:

1. add the google analytics code in your landing page, and in your confirmation page so that you know where all of your confirmed subscribers are coming from.
2. go to Google analytics and create a conversion goal.
3. add each of the URLs above.

This way Google analytics can be configured to record one successful conversion everytime someone subscribes to the newsletter. Google analytics also tracks where each those successful conversions, that is subscribers, came from by traffic source. So you can get a clear idea of which traffic sources are sending you the most number of subscribers.