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.