best way to capture new subscribers on blog

A good theme worth its salt will have an "after entry" widget area so you can insert a call to action or opt-in form.

Also, a prominent button offering something truly tempting on the side widget area should work, it's all about offering something that your end users would find to be irresistible.

PS:

I would consider using "AddThis" to insert not only an "exit intent" popup, but also a top bar in order to promote your give away as well.

My top bar for example consistently converts at around 2%.

Pitiful right?

Well imagine if you have hundreds or thousands of visitors every day? Suddenly it's not so pathetic.

(Even if you had say 3,000 unique per month, at 2% conversion that's 60 visitors to your squeeze page, say 30 opt-ins every month. Not too shabby).

And, you can always split test for better results. Yes, 2% is quite pathetic lol, but it's free subscribers, and in my opinion...

Blog subscribers are very good subscribers.

Wish you the best.

It all comes down to testing your audience. Different audiences respond better to different opt-in formats.

Personally, I highly recommend implementing an AppSumo Welcome Mat or Full-page HelloBar. This type of opt-in converts extremely well for me.

please dont the pop ups. They are the most annoying things that you can ever have. In fact they dont help at all because many people have disabled the pop up function on the PC. you should the home page to promote yourself/ thanks

Yeah, those work.

They are using a plugin called SumoMe

Which is a list building plugin that does more than just have
that signup form it does a lot more as well.

Scroll boxes with opt-in forms and exit pop ups work
just as well.

Give those a try, but first make sure you are at least
getting some traffic to your blog posts.

If you aren't then installing SumoMe would be a waste
of time because no one is reading your posts.

Isaiah

Thanks guys.
SumoMe welcome mat was the one I was interested in. :-)
I've used a simple signup in the sidebar at the top but got no conversions with 300 uniques :-( Looks like the product I used was not good enough...

Thanks guys for sharing useful informations.

Feel free to check out the way I've set up the sidebar optin on my blog (johnlagoudakis.com). I get a 7.4% optin rate from it.

Recently I've started using pop ups again and will see how it goes...

Frankly I do not understand your prejudgment to pop-ups. I use picreel’s targeted forms and easily get my subscriptions. Yes, it could be annoying, but it works great and traffic is fine. That's the order of things.

No idea. I think it is hard to make it fulfilled.