Tips on building your blog readership

Blogs are started for different reasons; for recreation, as a hobby or as a source of income. Whatever the reason may be, attracting traffic to a blog is a challenge. So it has to be made certain from the beginning itself that visitors who come to read your blog are comfortable enough to stick around.

The most important thing to do to maintain a good readership to your blog is to publish fresh content to your blog regularly. This is because once readers become familiar with the frequency of your posts, they will come to read it on those specified days. When providing fresh content to your blog, remember to stay to the topic as readers prefer blogs that were focused on a particular theme or topic. If you have no theme and just going on posting about anything, then readers become passionate about your blog and may move on somewhere else! Headlines are the pullers of an article. Similarly, titles of the blogs announce what the post is about, and thus helps people navigate to your blog and this in turn influences your ranking with search engines.

People are more comfortable with personal conversations. This is the reason you have to think of your blog as a type of conversation wherein you post matter and readers comment on it. Whatever comments they give, be as active and positive as possible when you interact and converse with your readers. As you go on writing in the blogs, you are bound to have some posts termed as best posts. Don’t let these best posts get lost in your archives. Instead, focus on highlighting these posts by perhaps linking them to your best posts from a ‘best posts’ category on the main page of the blog. And if you have many pages for your blog, make it a point to provide good navigation for your readers to the popular pages of the blog. This makes the reader’s visit more enjoyable, easy and comfortable.

Maintain a regular schedule for your posting on the blog. This is because if a reader visits your blog and finds that the last post was about three weeks ago, they are bound to be disappointed and it also gives them the benefit of doubt over you. They may come back a few days later to recheck for new postings; but they are bound to lose interest quickly if you fall out of your regular schedule. When writing for the blog on a serious matter like business and medicine, you have to make it a point to be informed about the subject, to maintain your credibility with the readers. Do some research to be informed about the latest trends and information and don’t rehash old stuff that has been around for some time. Whatever you write, make it a point to use your spellchecker for any spelling and grammar mistakes there may be in the blog. This is because the more mistakes you have in your blog, the lower are your creditability in the eyes of the reader.

Blogs are meant to have short messages and views about a topic; and remember that blog readers are always on the lookout for short postings, and not to read a novel on the blog. So always maintain short and sweet blogs. Maintain an entry to a blog to only a couple of hundred words. If there is more to say, split it into a series of entries or you could perhaps write it as an article and then link it to a shorter entry in your blog. This also adds links to your blog as you get more links and thus more traffic to the website. Don’t post nonsense on the blog as it is always better to have some really gritty commentary on an irregular basis, than filling the blog with fluff to drive away the fans.

Thought blogs may be a great means of promoting your product or service, be subtle when using the blog as a marketing vehicle. This is because people hate the idea of being subjected to a sales pitch; just weave references to your product and affiliate links into solid and informative content for people to read. Make it a point to submit your blog to blog search engines. There are many blog search engines in the internet that can be found using Google. Make sure to write a good title and a good description to your blog when submitting to blog search engines to that people can easily find it and thus click on your link. This in turn leads to an increase in targeted traffic to your blog.