Starting a blog is an exciting venture. Whether you’re doing it to help promote your business or just as a personal enrichment activity, it’s your chance to broadcast your ideas to the world. But, as excited as you are about your posts, it will take some time before you build up a significant reader base that is also excited about your posts.
Here are eleven easy tips you can utilize to help boost your blog readership from the beginning of your online writing adventure. Follow these tactics and you’re likely to see a boost in stats in the days and weeks that follow.
1. Network
Get involved in the blogging community and network with other bloggers. If they start to mention your blog in their posts, their readers will be intrigued and will check out your blog. There are forums and special events that you can participate in to meet with the other bloggers. You can also network by reaching out to other bloggers whose blogs you respect.
2. Promote it in your email signature
Think of your email signature as a digital business card. This is where you can provide your contacts with your pertinent contact information. By including your blog URL in your signature, those who you communicate with will have easy, instant access to your site.
3. Add to forum signatures
Online forums are another fantastic place to promote your blog. There are forums about every subject, so it will be easy for you to find one or more with people who have similar interests to what are discussed in your blog. By adding it to your forum signature, your blog URL will appear in every thread in which you post. It’s a subtle way to gain readers and will look less self-promoting than just adding posts that are asking people to read your blog.
4. Give something valuable for free
No, you are not going to loose money in the process. Something valuable could be in the form of an eBook, a report, audio file, screencast etc that you made. You can offer this as a bonus to users who subscribe to your blog. This technique is usually used with an email signup tied to an autoresponder.
5. Build a landing page for subscribers
This option can go really well with the “giving something away for free” option. You can build a squeeze page whose soul purpose is to convert the visitor into a reader by giving them something valuable for free then you drive traffic to this landing page.
6. Engage your readers by encouraging commenting
It’s not only important to gain new readers but also to ensure that they will keep visiting your blog. That’s why it’s important to get them engaged.One way to engage your readers is to pose questions to them; ask them for their opinions, advice and experiences as they relate to your blog post. After all, who doesn’t love to provide others with their advice and opinions?!
7. Put it on business cards
Business cards are inexpensive and easy to have made. Business people have been publishing their website information on their business cards for years, so why not include information about a blog? Even if your blog isn’t connected directly to a business, you can have business cards made with your blog information.
8. Submit your URL to search engines
Search engines don’t automatically detect every single website that is ever created. Sometimes you need to speed up the cataloging process by submitting your URL to the search engines. The popular engines often will have a “submit†link that you can utilize to add your blog. Keep in mind, just because you submit your URL doesn’t mean it’s going to appear on the first page of results. Nonetheless, getting your blog listed with Google, Yahoo, and the likes, is a great first step.
9. Utilize tags
Once you have your blog listed with the search engines, tags will help ensure that it appears more frequently in search results. With each posting, pick three to five main subjects to tag. The tags that are often most searched are people’s names.
10. Set up an RSS feed
Readers who utilize your feed will easily be able to access your new posts as they are published. This is a great tool to retain your current readership! If you use WordPress as your blogging platform then you get this by default.
11. Make it easy to subscribe
Offer an email subscription option as well as the RSS subscription. Some readers just like the good old email subscription method. Make sure the subscription option is easily visible to your site’s visitors (some people have a tendency to go out of their way to make it hard to find).
I am sure I haven’t covered all the easy ways to boost your blog readership techniques so please feel free to share your tips in the comment area below.
I love your site. There is so much useful information for us newbies. I just started learning blogging and website stuff a month ago and every time I come across another new blogger and recommend your site. Thank you
I’ll definitely try these out as I’m a little new to blogging. Thank you for these quick points. Let’s see what good these bring me.
I have been doing blog business for last 10 years nothing works better than article posting for getting a huge traffic.Write a unique content and post in article publishing site.
Good point, you can also add if submitting your blog to social bookmarking site.
I think being active and staying active is almost a must. Sometimes people start off good, but get discouraged easy. Don’t give up too easy. Good tips and suggestions.
some good tips for newbs here, gonna bookmark this and pass it to a few people i know who wanna start there own sites
this is very interesting posts. yes blogging is a way of sharing to the world your experiences and your life and it can also be used to promote online businesses. I love to blog about anything and there are lots of ways you can enhance your page rank or get more visitors to your site such as mentioned above. I have done all 8 and it seems highly effective.
@Gary, good point 🙂
You don’t actually need to do number 8 (Submit your URL to search engines). This is very old approach and it takes months to actually work. Just start link building and you will get listed in the search engines. If you only want to get listed and not do link building for the moment, just submit your site to a few social network sites and you will be indexed very fast :).
Pretty comprehensive and accurate. If they are optimized effectively, then prepare for the traffic!
This is an awesome article and I’m sure it will make a difference. You just need to write good content and the people will subscribe it, the more good your content the more they will subscribe and sticking to your site. Thanks!
Thanks for this concise list of ways to improve blog readership. I also find that posting articles regularly on the blog helps with the readership build up.