February 14, 2016 Follow @andymerch
February 14, 2016You have created your blog and posted some great articles exploring a new frontier in a unique and fascinating way. You are excited about the future of your blog and believe it will excel in telling amazing stories that are never told anywhere else. Yet many weeks, and even months, after you launch the blog, there is hardly any traffic to it. You are shocked! While creating blogs is usually easy and fast, attracting readers to a blog on a consistent basis is difficult. This is the reality that every beginner must face.
But is there a magic bullet for success in attracting readers to a blog? Certainly not! Attracting readers to a blog usually takes massive effort, commitment and perseverance. Nevertheless, with the right techniques, you can build a successful blog with a huge number of readers. Here are some outstanding ways of attracting readers to your blog.
- Blogging on a specific niche: You can never be all things to all people. If you try building a general blog, you will end up disappointing most visitors and will hardly have loyal readers. You need to pick a niche for your blog and stick to it so that your readers know what they can expect from you on a consistent basis.
- Be visible on search by optimizing your blog’s content for SEO: To attract readers to your blog, they must find you in search engine results. Make sure to optimize your blog content for SEO by creating Meta descriptions, using relevant keywords and linking your blog to other websites, among other ways. Also, make your blog’s infographics, pictures, videos and everything else SEO friendly.
- Conduct keyword research before writing your blog posts: Each blog post should be focused on a particular subject that people actually care about. These days, subjects are defined by keywords.
- Focus on long-tail keywords: While it is difficult to rank high on the short and popular keywords, your blog can rank high for long-tail keywords that explain what the searchers are looking for in detail. Every search has a purpose and providing valuable content that is focused on long-tail keywords will boost your organic traffic immensely.
- Decrease your bounce rate by delivering valuable top-notch content: While you can’t eliminate bounce rate completely, you can reduce it by offering great content.
- Write more how-to and list posts: Readers like lists and how-to posts because they know exactly what they expect from such posts. By adding relevant data and depth to list posts, you will convert readers more effectively.
- Make regular blog posts: Just like magazines and newspaper publications that run on daily, weekly or monthly basis, your blog should deliver content according to a regular schedule that your readers are aware of. If you do not, your readers will never know when to stop by for the next article.
- Publish more articles: Studies have shown that blogs that publish 16 or more articles per month get 4 times more traffic and readers than blogs that publish less than 5 articles per month. Increase your content frequency and you will increase your number of readers significantly.
- Publish longer content: Google and other search engines give greater preference to longer and more comprehensive articles than shorter ones. By creating detailed and longer content (such as 1000+ word articles each), your blog will be more visible on search results and will attract more readers.
- Develop a blogger outreach plan: You will fail to get the readers you desire if you publish your articles and wait for readers to find them. But if you can have a list of bloggers working in the same niche, you can always email them your articles and request them to share. This will bring thousands of new readers to your blog.
- Use high-quality images and graphics: The average reader has a very short attention span. You need to use images and graphics to refocus their attention to what you are describing in your articles.
- Post blog content on social media: Your current social media followers may be interested in your blog’s content. Therefore, as soon as you post something on your blog, share it on your social media channels so that your current followers can start reading your blog. In fact, they may also share the content and help to drive more traffic to your blog.
- Make it easy to share your blog content: Making the task of sharing content on your blog easier will encourage some readers to do so. Avail social sharing buttons or pre-written emails so your readers can share your blog’s content with their friends.
- Use exciting and engaging titles for your blog posts: Your readers are most likely to judge your content by their titles. Titles with numbers, data, breaking news or funny twists will attract readers to your blog.
- Join communities where your audience gathers: Instead of waiting for people to come to your blog, join discussions and threads where your audience gather and post links to your blog. Also leave links to your blog on the comments you make in other blogs.
- Add tags to your blog: Tags enable readers to find similar contents easily and help to convert visitors into regular readers. Besides, it takes just seconds to add the tags.
- Never forget email marketing: Email marketing is a powerful tool for building a steady audience for your blog. Start building your email list as soon as possible.
- Use Google Analytics (or similar software): Google Analytics will help you to keep track of your site’s traffic while allowing you to know how each section of your site is performing. Master how to interpret the software, it will help you a great deal.
- Reference your posts and those of other writers: Blog posts must never be standalone content that you never reference. Link to your older posts by explaining certain things in great detail and reference other people’s posts to get valuable links.
- Guest blogging and allow other bloggers to make guest posts on your blog: Guest blogging will bring more qualified traffic to your blog while allowing you to be viewed as an expert in the field when you guest blog on authoritative sites.
- Do case studies of market influencers and request them to share your blog posts: Identify top influencers in your niche and do case studies on them. When the articles go live, request them to share on their social platforms and other sites.
- Publish a few resource articles: Resource articles are more effective in attracting readers to blogs than average articles. Studies have shown that resource articles can hit up to 10,000% more views than average articles.
- A killer design will capture the attention of prospective readers: No one likes a boring design. A great design will not only make your site attractive to readers, but will also enable them to navigate it and find the content they need with ease.
- Increase your blog’s visibility through Q&A forums: Question and answer sites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers can help you to attract readers to your blog. Just visit and sign up with these sites and then answer questions related to your blog. Leave behind links to your blog.
- Connect all your web content and profiles to your blog: Linking your blog to your web profiles enable search engines to recognize you according to your connections with other authors, PageRank of individual articles, numbers of quality back-links pointing to your blog and your engagement on Google+. This will, in turn, boost the ranking of your future articles, allowing you to reach targeted readers quickly.
- Add value to popular conversations: Most readers want to read blog posts that add value to specific conversations that are of interest to them. You do not have to take a stand, but can add real depth to conversations by pointing out why you believe things should be conducted in a certain way. If you are an expert, your opinion really matters.
- Use Pingler to distribute your blog posts: Pingler provides a free service for distributing posts to News Reader sites and search engines. In fact, Pingler will boost the chances of your blog posts being found through search engine results.
- Invite readers to leave comments: The comments from your readers will not only inform you about what they think of your blog posts, but will also provide ideas for your next articles. Make sure to invite your readers to comment at the end of every post.
- Respond to reader comments: Responding to reader comments promotes interaction between you and your blog’s readers, allowing you to attract and build a community of loyal readers. The interactions will enable the blog to grow quickly.
- Publish regular infographics: According to different studies, infographics get 823% more re-tweets when shared on Twitter than articles and images. A single infographics can boost a blog from zero traffic to over 10,000 visitors per month. Promote your blog to readers by sharing good-looking infographics with crucial statistics and facts.
- Publish slides to Slideshare: More than 70 million professionals visit Slideshare per month and it is one of the top 100 most visited sites globally. Share your blog on this website and attract the attention of expert readers.
- Blogging about major events and personalities in your niche: People are obsessed with personalities and great events. So what if you blog about Obama’s comment on an issue in your niche? There will be an instant rise in traffic to your blog.
- Constantly refresh old blog posts: Updating old articles in your blog will help you to tap into Google’s freshness algorithm. Make sure to review the articles you published many years or months ago, removing outdated information and bringing them forward. This will instantly improve your search rankings, attracting more readers.
- Rewrite some of your blog posts and publish them on article directories: While article directories are no longer as effective as they used to be, rewriting some of your blog posts and distributing them to article directories can increase traffic to your blog. Ensure you add links to your blog on the distributed articles.
- Translate your articles/blog posts into other languages: When you translate your blog articles into other languages, the translated versions will begin to rank in the country-specific search engines of the languages you have translated the posts into. This will attract new readers and boost the traffic to your blog massively.
This blog post was originally published on bloggersrequired.com.
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