Why Blog Subscribers Matter More Than Leads

Every marketer launching a new blog makes the same first mistake: We instantly optimize for leads.

We see all the stats on how blogs can generate more leads. We feel pressure from executive management to prove the ROI of blogging. We crave immediate satisfaction of every post we publish.

But here's the thing ...

The goal of a new blog is growing email subscribers first, NOT leads.

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Now, I'm not saying your blog can't be a power source for generating leads - it absolutely can (and should) be. But building a blogging machine means building an audience to funnel through that machine first.

That's where email subscribers come in.

Defining The Importance of Blog Email Subscribers

Our blog email subscribers are the people who have opted-in to receive our blog posts through email updates.

When we first launched the Sidekick Blog, our first OKR (Objective Key Result) was to generate blog subscribers. Why? Because when we publish a new post, that post gets emailed to those subscribers, who in return promote it, bringing in a wider audience of new people.

Looking at the Sidekick Blog today, nearly 77% of all views to our blog posts come from these email subscribers. [Click to Tweet Stat]

HubSpot's Blog Machine Is Built The Same Way

Before joining the Sidekick team at HubSpot, I worked on HubSpot's core content marketing team. When looking at any of our posts on the Marketing Blog, we noticed that roughly 70% of all first week views to HubSpot blog posts came from our growing list of email subscribers.

And when you zoom out of the post's first week of publishing, and look at it's traffic month-over-month, you'll notice that the majority of the traffic for this post is now coming from organic traffic.

Think about it: The larger the initial audience you send your content to, the greater the opportunities to validate to Google that this post is relevant. By having a set number of people reading the post, you're giving Google actual cues of your content's value.

So, you could start a blog with the sole intention of generating leads.

Then every post you publish is a game - which posts will succeed, which won't? You end up comparing a post with 5 views to a post with 30 views, thinking that the latter is better because the internet somehow sent it more attention.

But the internet is a black hole. There are far, far too many factors that go into why certain posts get noticed, and some don't.

Or, you could start a blog by first building an email subscriber base.

Growing an email subscriber base guarantees you some level of success for every post you publish. Let's say you grow to 200 email subscribers. Overtime you see that roughly 18% of your subscribers see your new posts on the day of publish. That ensures that every single post you publish will garner at least 36 views. That is now your accepted base level of success for any post your publish. It's not a publish and pray-someone-notices game.

From there, these 36 readers will share the post beyond your current subscribers through tweets, email forwards, etc., helping you capture even more new visitors. As your blog gets shared, some posts may remain at 36 views, some may blow past 100 views. But at least now you can accurately assess what content you publish is better than others, because you know that your core audience has helped decipher what is and isn't interesting.

If you optimize for leads right out of the gate, you'll never build your audience, which means your content traffic will always remain flat or grow linearly rather than exponentially.

By focusing your blog strategy on generating subscribers before leads, you're setting up your business for long-term growth. You're allowing yourself to build a core audience that will build a machine that can consistently attract visitors and convert them into leads.

Your blog simply can't generate leads if it doesn't have a consistently growing audience to convert.

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So, how do we generate blog email subscribers?

I dive into specific tactics for generating blog email subscribers starting on slide 76 of the presentation below. If you're in the process of launching a new blog, I highly recommend clicking through the entire deck from the beginning.

Once you have a healthy and consistent foundation of email subscribers, flip the switch and begin optimizing for lead generation.

On the Sidekick Blog team, we gave ourselves four weeks to generate blog subscribers before we began optimizing for leads. And it's working quite well for us, as you'll learn in the presentation embedded above.

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P.S. We're looking for a design-driven marketer to help write / publish content for the Sidekick Blog. Connect with me on LinkedIn with a note in the invitation if interested.