We’ve all been in the blogging slump before, and perhaps you’re in the same unfortunate situation yourself. When your readership counts grows at a rate that barely gives drying paint a run for its money and your daily routine seems stale and ordinary.

If you are in this dreadful position, you can take comfort in knowing that the blogging slump is not only your biggest challenge, but also your greatest opportunity for success. The motivational surge you can create by taking a blog out of the slump and into stardom will send you to the keyboard making posts for years to come. It will definitely open up some wallets for you as well. So let’s get out of the slump, turn your site around and start creating something meaningful for your audience. By any chance, have you considered promoting your blog using free content?

WHAT???!! I hear you shout.

Yeah I know – that was my reaction when my mentor first mentioned this. We're all wanting to make money right?

Well you may or may not have heard "the money is in the list". So true and to add another phrase "Don't chase the money – let the money chase you."

In other words, concentrate on building the relationships with your visitors through social media, blogging, giving away free content etc.

I mean everyone love quality free stuff don't they? I do and I've also found that by giving quality products for free, people appreciate that and look forward to more – but don't just bombard otherwise it will be expected.

Free Content Will:

-Create the Right Atmosphere

Free content puts you out there as a person of integrity; a person who is willing to aid your audience without expectation of anything in return. If the very first thing you offer to a new reader is free, experienced content which can aid them in solving their problems, well then you just transformed a random internet surfer into a long term customer. Consider the opposite, if you were to immediately ask them to open their wallets before you built any sort of relationship with them, do you think that they would comply?

Of course not, free content allows you to start building a strong, positive relationship from the beginning.

-Test Value

Without value your content is useless, and free content is a great way to test the value of your ideas in front of a larger audience. By spreading your free content to other websites, blogging authors could potentially send your free ebook virally to all their subscribers which in turn would pass it on to their friends. Does your content inspire viral sharing or immediately deletion? Either way, you have to get it out there and test it before you will know for sure, so free content is a great way to run this experiment.

-Impress Your Audience

Your audience will be impressed by your free content if you make it delectable to the ears. Does it sound like your free ebook which requires an email subscription is the answer to what your customer is looking for? Does it sound like they cannot live without your precious information which also happens to be free? If people crave it, and you provide it for free, then you will have a feeding frenzy on your hands.

Don’t Just Give the Content

Free content is great in any form, whether that’s an ebook, a newsletter, video tutorial or just an extensive series of articles on your own blog. However, free content is online gold if you promote it correctly and use it to increase your subscription count. If you find that any of your free content is exceptionally well accepted by your audience then you should look to ask them to subscribe (for free obviously) in order to view it.

You can easily take your top 10 posts on a single subject area, package them into a series of ebooks and then finally mail them out one day at a time with an autoresponder. This autoresponder would require an email address to work, so there you have another subscription for your site.

Offering free content in the form of seven emails over the course of seven days was how I built a decent list in just six months. What’s more, I could then use email marketing to provide solutions to an audience which had come to depend on me for my free content, thus making it much easier to sell them products (which also helped them to achieve their goals). I opened their hearts and then they opened their wallets.

Do you offer free content in order to increase subscription numbers? If not, what’s stopping you?

More soon

Doug