Dirty A-List Blog Subscriber Secrets Revealed…

Posted by Laura Bergells

September 30, 2007

A list blogger

Within a matter of hours, a newly-launched blog has hundreds of subscribers. (One post.)

Q: How did it happen?

A: The blogger has employees. (Or the blogger has a contract with the large employer…)

The employer makes subscribing to the newly-minted blog an employment requisite.
If an employee doesn’t subscribe within 72 hours, the employee is subtly harassed or even threatened.
Employees are required to recruit at least one other subscriber through their personal “friends & family” network. It’s not spamming - it’s “viral” marketing.
Vendors are ‘encouraged’ to subscribe. The threat to cancel future orders is implied.
Vendors with blogs are ‘encouraged’ to rave about the newly minted blog in their blogs. Once again, the threat is implied.

Listen, all of us online Midwesterners — at one point or another — have furrowed our collective brows when we have been ‘encouraged’ to subscribe to “A-List” bloggers.

A-listers might be writing English, but they often talking in jargon that most Midwesterners just plain don’t understand.

But we’ll pretend to — and even strive to understand — for a while.

After all, we Midwesterners are polite.

But we don’t like implied threats. And we’re bored with almost constant in-circle New York or LA jargon.

We’ll eventually drop — but in the mean time: a couple thousand people see the spike. They wonder what the hub-bub is about.

So thousands subscribe. (After all, it’s free. And that’s about what it’s worth…)

Lots of high numbers breeds curiosity. So more people subscribe, comment, link. The buzz continues…over very little.

And that’s how the A-list (mostly) gets to be A-list.

It’s not much to be an A-list blogger.

If you have a publishing contract (for instance), you should have a huge subscriber base within a week — because your publisher will threaten just about every employee and vendor to subscribe and blog about you. If you don’t, you’ve just signed with a low-value publisher.

If you have a company with only 10 employees and you haven’t got a blog subscriber base of 100 within a week of launch, you should consider just going out of business altogether. You have no clout.