Hmm... Maybe make the design of the newsletter form a little more polished and prominent?
How about an incentive gift to encourage subscriptions? Can you give away something special to new subscribers, and use that as bait to boost subscriptions?
<SPAM>Ideally you would find an incentive gift that is relevant to your topic, but if you can't come up with a good one, I know how you could give your new subscribers free web, ezine and forum hosting.
![Smile](images/smilies/smile.png)
</SPAM>
Shift your perspective. Think of your newsletter as the number one thing you're trying to sell on your site. Once they are on your list, you'll have time to sell the other stuff.
Automate your email operations. Set up an autoresponder to automatically feed your new subscribers a series of messages that contain great info, and affiliate links.
Find some partners. You promote their newsletter, and they promote yours.
I hear ya, links are a bitch. I have plenty of trouble staying focused on them, which is probably why I'm always ranting about them.
Hmm.... Are those things in the sidebar doing you any good? If not, maybe remove them.
Replace those sidebar ads with links to other sites. The partner webmasters put you in their sidebar, and you do the same for them. You know, lots of bloggers do this.
If you can get in the sidebar of 24 sites that have 200 pages each, that's 5,000 links. Two way links instead of one way, but still, more links than you have now.
Do you have a couple of friends that would help you get a small forum going? You don't have enough traffic to launch a big forum just yet, but you can set the stage with just a few posters. Point being, can you come up with ways to get other people to add content to your site? Aim for exponential content growth.
On my site, I've noticed quick, simple, little pages bring in traffic too. And it's easy to make lots of them. As example...
- Every good motorcycle video on YouTube could be on your site. Hundreds of new pages.
- Create a Flickr slideshow for every motorcycle topic you can think of. As example, search Flickr for a recent race, and see if folks have uploaded a bunch of photos.
- Create pages that highlight individual hot photos. You can use any photo here, if you credit the author.
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/
- Use Mapquest to create maps to all the big race tracks.
- Don't underestimate the power of image searches. Example, I had a site that was getting a few dozen visitors a day. I used an image of a popular band in one of my articles, the image got ranked high in Google (I have no idea why) and now we get 700 visitors a day. Point being, use lots of images, and be sure to give them descriptive file names and alt tags.
- Find good articles on other sites, and write a review praising them. Contact the author, and try to make a friend.
- Find things you disagree with, and politely debate them in articles. Contact the author, and maybe they will argue and link back.
Point being, it can be tough getting page one rankings. Another way to come at it is to load your site up with tons of relevant content, and get lots of obscure long tail searches.
Phew, ok, that's the best I can do for the moment.
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