11 Ways To Boost Your Blog Readership

Starting a blog is an exciting venture. Whether you’re doing it to help promote your business or just as a personal enrichment activity, it’s your chance to broadcast your ideas to the world. But, as excited as you are about your posts, it will take some time before you build up a significant reader base that is also excited about your posts.

Here are eleven easy tips you can utilize to help boost your blog readership from the beginning of your online writing adventure. Follow these tactics and you’re likely to see a boost in stats in the days and weeks that follow.

1. Network

Get involved in the blogging community and network with other bloggers. If they start to mention your blog in their posts, their readers will be intrigued and will check out your blog. There are forums and special events that you can participate in to meet with the other bloggers. You can also network by reaching out to other bloggers whose blogs you respect.

2. Promote it in your email signature

Think of your email signature as a digital business card. This is where you can provide your contacts with your pertinent contact information. By including your blog URL in your signature, those who you communicate with will have easy, instant access to your site.

3. Add to forum signatures

Online forums are another fantastic place to promote your blog. There are forums about every subject, so it will be easy for you to find one or more with people who have similar interests to what are discussed in your blog. By adding it to your forum signature, your blog URL will appear in every thread in which you post. It’s a subtle way to gain readers and will look less self-promoting than just adding posts that are asking people to read your blog.

4. Give something valuable for free

No, you are not going to loose money in the process. Something valuable could be in the form of an eBook, a report, audio file, screencast etc that you made. You can offer this as a bonus to users who subscribe to your blog. This technique is usually used with an email signup tied to an autoresponder.

5. Build a landing page for subscribers

This option can go really well with the “giving something away for free” option. You can build a squeeze page whose soul purpose is to convert the visitor into a reader by giving them something valuable for free then you drive traffic to this landing page.

6. Engage your readers by encouraging commenting

It’s not only important to gain new readers but also to ensure that they will keep visiting your blog. That’s why it’s important to get them engaged.One way to engage your readers is to pose questions to them; ask them for their opinions, advice and experiences as they relate to your blog post. After all, who doesn’t love to provide others with their advice and opinions?!

7. Put it on business cards

Business cards are inexpensive and easy to have made. Business people have been publishing their website information on their business cards for years, so why not include information about a blog? Even if your blog isn’t connected directly to a business, you can have business cards made with your blog information.

8. Submit your URL to search engines

Search engines don’t automatically detect every single website that is ever created. Sometimes you need to speed up the cataloging process by submitting your URL to the search engines. The popular engines often will have a “submit” link that you can utilize to add your blog. Keep in mind, just because you submit your URL doesn’t mean it’s going to appear on the first page of results. Nonetheless, getting your blog listed with Google, Yahoo, and the likes, is a great first step.

9. Utilize tags

Once you have your blog listed with the search engines, tags will help ensure that it appears more frequently in search results. With each posting, pick three to five main subjects to tag. The tags that are often most searched are people’s names.

10. Set up an RSS feed

Readers who utilize your feed will easily be able to access your new posts as they are published. This is a great tool to retain your current readership! If you use WordPress as your blogging platform then you get this by default.

11. Make it easy to subscribe

Offer an email subscription option as well as the RSS subscription. Some readers just like the good old email subscription method. Make sure the subscription option is easily visible to your site’s visitors (some people have a tendency to go out of their way to make it hard to find).

I am sure I haven’t covered all the easy ways to boost your blog readership techniques so please feel free to share your tips in the comment area below.

5 Tips On How To Make Your Blog Visitors Stay Longer

The length of time that you can keep your visitors on your website can be a crucial factor in determining how successful your blog will be.

Simply getting traffic in the form of thousands of unique visitors daily is meaningless if the time they spend on your site is less than a few seconds or your bounce rate is more than 95%.

There are certain things you can do in the way you present your pages and posts which will maximize the chances of your visitors sticking around for a longer period on your site.

The longer people stay the greater your opportunity to monetize their visit or convince them to take your desired call to action.

A call to action is an Internet marketing term which refers to the primary action that you want your visitors to take when they land on your page or website. One example of a call to action  is where you want someone to click your “buy now” button and purchase your product. Another might be that you want to get people to download your free ebook after signing up as members.

Below are some tips which will help you to keep the attention of your visitors or at the very least keep them interested long enough to stay and explore your site and ultimately perform the call to action you want them to.

1. Remove unnecessary external links from your landing pages and use internal linksTrying to increase the average visitor time on your site is one of the ways that you can decrease your bounce rate and increase your rankings.If you use Google Analytics you’ve probably already heard of the term “bounce rate”.Bounce rate (as defined by Google) is:“..the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page”.
   Therefore plastering your affiliate banners and links all over your pages can work against you if your visitors leave your site immediately from the page they entered from.
   Try to entice your visitors to read more by offering them some relevant links to another internal page or post where you provide a useful review and which ultimately contains your affiliate banner. This way you are not pushing people straight out of the same door they entered.
   There are some useful WP plugins you can use to add relevant internal post links to your blog such as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
2. Use emotion to present your message People most often buy from emotion whether they admit it or not. This is because the actions which emanate from emotion are quite often subconscious.
   Hence, an emotional response is much more likely to achieve a call to action than a logical one.For instance if you are trying to convince someone to buy your product by using logic, then the chances are that they will also look at your argument from a rational point of view and they will weigh up the pros and cons of buying versus not buying.If you introduce an emotional element to your message such as presenting a benefit or selling a solution to a problem or highlighting how people can get closer to achieving their dream, then you will appeal to the emotional decision making areas of the brain.
   This will maximize the chances of gaining a customer because it will create an emotional connection between your message and the reader.Therefore once you have successfully forged a positive emotional relationship with your readers, they will happily want to come back to your site to explore further or even become regular customers.
3. Include video content on your posts and pages Video is one of the most effective ways to communicate a message to people. Even short videos of just a few minutes can often deliver more value to your readers than multiple pages of writing can.
   Therefore in the cases where you would usually get people browsing through an article in 10 to 20 seconds before leaving, the added benefit of using a short video is that it increases the likely-hood that people will stay on your site for longer because they are watching your video.
   Video on the Internet is really just a modern extension of TV but the great thing is that you get to be the producer of the content.
4. Use captivating images in conjunction with your copy or content
   Quite often the right image coupled with the relevant content can induce an emotional response and it can help lay the foundations for the right mindset you want to create before somebody reads your sales pitch or post.
   Humans are quite easily visually stimulated and you can exploit this by using effective images and colors with your message.
5. Focus on providing value and informative content rather than blatant advertising
   Your content and the value which it provides is the sticking point which helps to build a relationship with your readers. A relationship needs some measure of trust by both parties but when you successfully gain this trust from your readers or clients then you are also creating a longer term investment where current customers also become future customers.There are many ways you can provide value for people who will in turn be very happy to return the favor by becoming a customer. For instance you could offer free online courses or a series of tutorials which people can access after they sign up as free members.
   You could also set up your own forum or support system which provides help to people but also an opportunity for people to interact with each other.