Darren Rowse at Problogger is sharing a secret tip today. It’s a secret for finding new subscribers for our blogs, and it’s a good one.

Here it is.

The secret is to make your readers think that you will produce valuable content in the future.

It’s really quite obvious isn’t it?

Every blog feed in my reader is there because I expect that there will be new content at some point in the future that will have some significance for me. If a blog stops producing it will be removed. I might give it some leeway, two or three months perhaps, before I remove it, but really, it’s not doing me any good sitting there taking up space.

So how do you convince your readers that you will produce valuable content in the future?

Also pretty obvious. You create valuable content in the past.

The topic of creating valuable content could take up a whole truckload of posts. I’ll save those for a later time. Suffice it to say that there are three things that will convince your readers that your content is valuable enough to subscribe.

1. Relevance - Your content should be relevant. If you have a blog about tennis, your readers won’t appreciate always reading about your cat, unless he’s a great tennis player.
2. Quality - While blogging is a lot more personal, I think readers are turned off by poor grammar and spelling. That’s not all though. Creating a style all your own is part of building a quality blog.
3. Consistency - It doesn’t matter if you blog five times a day or once a week, make sure your readers know that you are going to keep producing new content. Actually, quantity does matter - too much or too little can both be bad - but regularity matters more.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?

Don’t fool yourself. Keeping on top of these three subscriber lures is a lot of work, and requires time and dedication. Sometimes it takes years.