Blogging: 5 Insider Tips for Growing Your Blog Audience
It can be frustrating when you spend a great deal of time writing that terrific blog post filled with your targeted keywords for Denver-area readers, but find that your reader base is still smaller than your dog’s personal Twitter following.
Here are 5 tips you can use to drive traffic to your blog, and get the right audience to become readers:
1) Link your social media profiles to your blog
This is the easiest one. When you’ve posted your content on your blog, be sure to link that blog post across all your social media profiles. Your blog content should be posted on LinkedIn, your Facebook business page and Twitter.
By posting your blog on these sites, your friends and followers will see it, and if they like it, they will share your content with the people in their network. This increases your “reach” to a much larger audience.
In addition to each individual post, make sure that your blog link is clearly visible within your profile information, so readers can easily get to your blog.
2) Submit your article to the major article directories
After you have written a compelling article that provides solutions to your target audience’s needs, submit your article to one of the major article directories such as “Ezine Articles,” “Go Articles,” and “Articles Base.” Check their submission standards to be sure you meet their criteria (minimum/maximum word count, etc.).
Remember to add your website address or blog link at the bottom of your articles. This tactic will help to redirect people to your site to find out more about you. You should also “tag” your articles with the appropriate keywords so that your articles show up in the search results when people are looking for your type of information.
3) Submit your blog post to social bookmarking sites
Social bookmarking sites are great places to post relevant content within your niche. It’s a way for Internet users to organize, store, share and search for “bookmarks” of various resources that can be found online. If your blog covers a particular topic that your niche audience finds valuable, you can share your blog on these social bookmarking sites so that other people can find it.
Popular social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, and reddit. Again, be sure to tag your blog post with the appropriate keywords.
Since these social bookmarking sites have a high volume of traffic, they can also help boost your site’s search engine rankings, further increasing the chances of your blog being found online.
4) Comment on other people’s blogs
Check out other bloggers in your niche, and read their posts. Pay especially close attention to the blogs that have a high volume of traffic, along with those posts that are recording a high number of comments. After reading the blog article, post your own helpful comments and include a link back to your blog. Be sure your comments contain valuable thoughts and insights and further the discussion. Otherwise, other readers will view it as spam, and the blog owner may remove your comment and defeat your goal. When other people see that you’re providing valuable insights, they will be check out your own blog through the link you included.
5) Guest post on popular blogs
Research your niche and find those blogs that have a high volume of traffic. You can find these blogs by searching on popular keywords in your niche, and checking out the blogs that rank high on Google searches.
Before asking a blogger if you can write a post for their blog, offer to post some of their material on your own blog. Focus on building a strong relationship with these bloggers and show them how your blog can provide added value and reach to their audience. Once you do this, you can ask them to write a guest-post on their blog, and (of course) include a link back to your own blog.
And above all, maintain consistency in your blogging. There are millions of abandoned blogs on the web because someone gave up too early. Don’t be one of them!
Do you have other suggestions or ideas that can help our readers? Please post your thoughts below and forward this post to anyone you think can benefit from it.
