Make it easy and obvious – make your subscription options famous, offer an email alternative to RSS, and ask for the subscription, if possible at the bottom of each post.

Be laser focused – Make sure that you are mainly focusing on a particular topic, and the more specialized that topic is, the better you’ll do. It is again a key to step back and assess whether there are sufficient prospective readers in your chosen niche.

Offer a bribe – It’s a moral bribe, in the type of a free ebook, report, e-course or audio series.

Use viral ebooks – This is a spin on the ethical bribe plan, but instead you let other people give away your PDF ebook or even package it for sale with other products.

Dedicated subscription landing page – Create a page that is devoted to nothing more than obtaining a subscription, and oblige traffic to it from your blog, AdWords, or actually any other source you want.

Become a guest blogger – Contributing content to someone else’s blog may appear crazy, but it’s a solid plan to gain introduction for your own blog and build your subscriber base. Just make it very noticeable to the blog owner that you need a very brief byline at the end of the post, with a link back to your site.

Start a podcast – Start a related podcast on your subject matter, and get it into iTunes and planned in the various podcasting directories. Mention your blog in every episode and the benefits of subscribing, and try to land some interviews with famous players in your niche.

Post in forums – A tried and true technique since the first days of the Internet is to be a helpful, practical participant in forums that are important in your niche.

Networking – This is perhaps the most overlooked plan for gaining traffic and subscribers. Don’t badger other bloggers for links, because it not often works anymore.

Cross-promotional deals – Find a blogger that publishes connected, but non-competitive content. Work out a deal where you both encourage each other in your RSS feeds, using Feedvertising.