Lately I’ve been focusing on increasing the sign up rate for my announcement list. And I’ve been less interested in getting people to subscribe to my RSS feed.
James Brausch gave me the idea when he had to switch domains for his blog. He moved from “.com” to a “.org.”
With RSS subscribers, you wouldn’t be able to continue updating your subscribers of new posts at your new domain. But if you have their email address, it doesn’t matter which domain you’re on.
So one thing I’ve done is added a pop-up to the blog. I’ve heard numerous people report that this has a large effect on increasing the sign up rate.
Another thing I did was to change the “What Would Seth Godin Do?” plugin to promote my announcement list instead of the RSS feed. I’ve even included a picture of the free software you get when you sign up.
These two things together have probably doubled or tripled my sign ups.
If you want to see either of these two elements, delete your cookies and hit refresh. Both elements should appear.