Attract Readers to Your Blog

Do you know how many people are visiting your blog? Here are ways to get your blog known and increase your readership.

Make your blog public

In setting up your blog’s preferences, be sure your blog is checked as public. That means the blogging service you use will let others see that you have a blog. WordPress has a feature where other WordPress blog posts that have the same keywords and tags as your blog post will list your post at the bottom of the other blogs. In order to take advantage of this, you need to be sure to list tags and keywords each time you post to your blog.

Write engaging titles

The title of each of your posts is very important. Search engines like Google will search the Web and then index the title of your blog. If, for example, your post is a review of gaming devices and has the title, “Which gaming device should you get?” you will attract fewer readers than if your title was “Xbox 360: Is it the best gaming device?” Here’s how we know. Use a tool such as Google Keyword Tool and you can see the most searched words. Go to www.google.com/sktool. At the bottom of that page select “Or see top keywords across all categories.” On the next page select Hobbies and Leisure. What’s the top searched word in this category — Xbox 360. One million people had Googled that term. So if your blog had Xbox 360 in the title of a post, your blog would be found by Google and then by the people searching that term. You can click on the magnifying glass beside the word and get more details such as where in the world that word is searched the most.

Include descriptive tags

You have two ways to “tag” your post. You can set up a list of recurring terms/themes for your blog. After writing a post, you can click which of those terms apply to this post, and those terms will be tags for that particular post. You also can write tags that apply just to a particular post. Those tags also will help search engines find your blog. Because the search engines gather data about your blog from the title and the tags, you want to use as many specific tags that relate to your post as well using highly searched words.

Link to similar blogs

Whenever you find another blog that deals with topics similar to yours, link to that blog or add the blog to your blogroll (the list of blogs you include on your blog). In turn you will find that those bloggers will see that you direct visitors to their blogs and they will link back. Blogging is a world where sharing brings more sharing. If you learn to read your statistics, you will also be able to tell when other bloggers give you a shoutout (referral) and send readers to your site. It is not cool in the blogging world to e-mail bloggers and ask if they will put you on their blogrolls. Instead, post comments on other blogs with your own tagline being the URL for your blog. Of course your comments need to be thoughtful, genuine and appropriate to the post and not just to get a link.

Utilize trackbacks

When you have links or embeds in your posts to other sites, podcasts, YouTube or blogs, put that URL in the “trackback” part of your post. If the other Web sites look at their statistics, they will see that your blog mentioned them and they will read your blog – and hopefully come back to your blog again.

Analyze your audience

You want to be able to see who is visiting your blog, who has subscribed to your blog, and what posts they have liked the most. Nothing tells you this more than analyzing your statistics. If you use WordPress.com, the stats provided for free are excellent. They will show you how many people visited your blog, what posts they read, and where they came from (the Web page they were on before visiting your blog). If you use Blogger or Tumblr, be sure to use a free service like Google Analytics or Statcounter and embed the code on your site so you can learn about your visitors. Set this up as soon as possible, as it usually takes a week or so before you will start to see results and what other blogs link to you.