Finding New Readers for Your Blog

Finding a larger audience for your blog is just like selling to more customers. In each scenario, you’ll need to figure out how to reach them, how to interest them, and how to make them come back for more.

Darren Rowse and many of his blog’s readers put together a great list of ideas, some may say the ultimate list at the moment…

• Comment on Related Blogs “Commenting on related blogs is probably the most effective strategy early on in the process. And responding to comments when people leave them on your blog (this encourages them to keep coming back).”

  “I visit other blogs in my niche, add them to my feed and participate in the discussion on their blogs via the comments. Writing interesting comments often gets people to click through to see your site.”

• Join Forums “I’ve found that one very quick way to infuse readers to a new blog is to be active in discussion forums related to your blog topic. Locate posts that ask for help with something you are familiar with and share your experience.”
• Write Effective Post Titles “Simple and to the point. The title should create an instant urge to read the entire post… But of course it should be related to the topic of your blog”
• Interviews “One example being to interview fellow bloggers who are in the same niche as me. This has gone down well, and has been great for both myself and the interviewee as traffic flows between us.”
• Persist “Persistence is key. After starting up a new blog last month and letting go of another this month, I notice that traffic (quality traffic) doesn’t happen over night. On my last site, I think it took 6 months before ASK.com found me.”
• Connect with Local Bloggers “The other thing I’ve been doing just recently is connecting up with other bloggers in my city and the neighboring towns. We’ve got something of a link exchange going and a nice side-effect to this is that I/we have discovered that there are quite a few more bloggers and/or website authors in the area than ever expected.”
• Give Away Free Stuff “I’ve had some success with giving away free stuff, like free templates for WordPress. It doesn’t give me lot of new readers, because my blog is written in Norwegian, but the templates give lots and lots of new links to the blog, giving it a much better pagerank in Google, which in turn should mean more readers from search-engines.”
• Be Opinionated “Be opinionated, but encourage opposing viewpoints in the comments. Opinionated makes you interesting - encouraging other perspectives makes you essential.”
• Ask Questions of Other Bloggers “Ask questions of other moderately successful bloggers and try to network. If you shoot too high, you’ll often get blown off because these people have so much stuff to read and deal with.”
• Use Trackbacks “Sending highly creative and penetrating trackbacks about a blogger’s original post.”
• Advertise “Buy advertising space on related websites.”
• Educate Readers about RSS “With the most recent blog I launched I created a page in WordPress called Feeds which not only has the RSS icon on it but a description of what a “feed” is and what
• Offline Promotion “Talk to friends, family and coworkers about them… you’d be surprised how much the traditional way of “networking” really does work…. also Business cards, depending which blog I’ll post on a community board at a grocery store.
• Search Engine Optimization “Properly optimizing my blog has been a big boost to my readership. Once I figured out how to play around with SEO I started getting a regular 25-35% of my hits from Google.”
• Quality Content “Posting only quality content.. obviously! Better posts are discussed more, increasing both the number of comments and references in other blogs.”
• Blog Carnivals “submitting posts to Blog Carnivals”
• Memes “I’ve picked up a handful of wonderful friends and readers through initiating the “Thursday Thirteen”. Yeah, a meme. Bloggers want to know about bloggers, not just the business aspect of it but the *person* writing the blog. Reading a quick list of “getting to know me” type tidbits gives me instant inside information on whether or not I will become a regular visitor. Some participants have used it solely to gain business, but frankly I think that turns people away. People are interested in people first, and what they do second. It works.”
• Frequent Posting “I also try to post frequently. I find that the more I post, the more readers I have. The less comments, but the more readers.”
• Guest Bloggers “I invite other bloggers to guest blog and allow always one link back to their site. I have 3 active guest authors … and in return they link to my site from time to time.”
• Get Links from Other Blogs “Getting mentioned on other sites and blogs in the same niche, I think, has been the best way to get a readership who keeps returning to a blog. Make contact with other bloggers in yoru niche via comments, email, AIM, skype, homing pigeons - whatever.”
• Newsletters “The Zookoda newsletter provides nice spikes and people tend to forward the newsletter to their friends.”
• Social Networks “Submit your story to Digg and reddit and, regardless of whether it makes the front page or not, you get 50-100 free hits. The easiest way to generate quick exposure. Failing that, comment frequently on blogs that you like. With any luck, the blog author will want to find out more about you, follow the link to your blog, and perhaps write a post referencing one of your posts.”
• Pitch Your Posts “I view other bloggers as a PR pros view journalists working in traditional media. I reach out to bloggers using tactics successfully employed in the world of professional media relations. For instance, I “pitch” specific posts that they might find adds value to topics they are writing about. I also send email introducing them to my blog, but only if there’s a good fit between my blog and theirs. The key is to be very selective in approaching the “media gatekeeper”–just as successful and smart media relations people do.

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