If you are new to the blogging world, you are probably writing daily and just hoping that people will stumble onto your site. The analogy would be if you were an actor, and while in LA you decided to sit in a diner that famous people were said to patronize in the hopes of “getting discovered.” Unfortunately, there are so many blogs (and so many wannabe actors!) that a passive Web presence is not the way to “be discovered.” Instead, one must be very proactive in promoting oneself in order to lasso readers of your blog.

The Details

• Identify who you are writing the blog to or for. It is always important to know your prospective audience and write to that audience specifically.
• Use Google Analytics or some other analytical program to determine who is reading your blog, when they are reading it and if they seem to be interested enough to read all of it before leaving the site.
• When you find a topic your readers seem to love, go with it! Target audiences are hard to gauge until you see what they actually want to read.
• If you do not have expertise on a topic, or are unwilling to do the research to become knowledgeable, don’t blog on it. This includes highly emotional topics that everyone has an opinion on, like politics and religion.
• Allow comments. Make sure there is both give and take on your site. If people can contribute, they will come back again and again to see responses to their comments.
• Make sure your content is timely. Nobody loves reading blogs that are out of date. If you are going to blog, make it a regular part of your day or week.
• Use search engines to help people find you. This will not happen without being proactive and actually promoting your blog.
• Promote your blog on social networking sites. Add links on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and any other social networking site you can become a member of.
• If your blog is a part of your business and a way for you to bring attention to it, don’t be boring! Instead, tell stories about your industry. Relate your own experiences. People do not want to feel like they are wasting their time just reading blog-advertisement posts.
• Make use of search engine optimization (SEO) and do proper keyword research. Google has a tutorial on this subject to help your site come up in searches sooner.
• Make sure your content is useful in some way. If you were to read your own blog, would you glean useable information from it? Would you come back to see what other information you could use?
• Use guest bloggers occasionally if you are tired of constantly blogging and are running out of ideas.
• Link to useful websites that are relevant to your target audience. You can even link to other bloggers whom you enjoy reading.
• Create sideline items on your blog such as wish lists, recommendation lists, top ten lists, etc. Readers who enjoy these things will come back time and again for your next list so that they can try things out.
• Aim to write some longer blogs and break them up. End each with some sort of “cliffhanger” to bring your readers back for the next installment.

The Bottom Line

Blogging may seem easy, but gaining readership and keeping it can be very difficult, since over two million unique blog posts are added to the Internet every day. Be proactive and sensitive about your posts and you will eventually build up the readership you have always wanted.

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