1. Put your URL—in clickable form— in your email signature line. It’s built-in visibility, every time you send a message. You can also add a short (one-line) description to entice people to visit your blog.
2. Link to a blog post on Twitter, but make it interesting. Ask a provocative question or offer help. Test your tweets to see which ones work best.
3. Use the social media ‘share’ buttons. Make it easy for someone to share your content by including Digg This, del.icio.us, Tweet This!, Facebook Like or other buttons at the bottom of each post.
4. Comment on other blogs. Though used rarely, this is one of the best strategies to drive new readers to your blog. Just make sure your comment is meaningful (not, ‘Nice post.’)
5. Include your most recent posts on your online profiles. LinkedIn, Biznik, and other communities now allow you to do this. It’s a good way to reach even more people.
6. Offer both ways to subscribe to your RSS feed. (More than 50% of people stil prefer email over a reader.)
7. Ask. This is often overlooked, but sometimes just including an invitation at the end of a post and pointing people to the signup spot can get you more subscribers.
8. Make your content engaging—and specialized enough. This may seem obvious, but the more specialized your topic is, the more you will draw a specific, and loyal, audience. If you don’t feel that your content is anything special, make this your first task. Because all the promoting in the world won’t get you more readers if your blog posts don’t shine.
9. Offer something of value for free on signup. A report, a tip sheet, an e-book: any of these will be extra motivation to push someone over to the subscription side.
10. Guest post on someone else’s blog. This is one of the best ways to get new subscribers. Find a blog with a similar audience as yours and propose a guest post to the author. Some readers will be curious enough about you to click over to your blog and check you out. Make sure your guest post is original (not recycled) content and make it the best post you can possibly write.
Thanks, Bob. These are great tips, and just in time for one of my New Year’s resolutions – blog more! I can always count on useful tips from you.
Cheers! Jala….
Cool, glad to help with those resolutions!
Outstanding tips to grow blog readership. Seemingly basic, but will definitelyboost engagement when done right. Great content at this site.
I actually write about linking to others and trackbacks in a new post over at:
Blogging about Blogging: Tips, Motivation, Free Blog Images http://rsmithing.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/blogging-about-blogging/
I’d be very curious to know your thoughts on the ideas there, particularly as directed to new bloggers — let us hear from you in the comments over there if you would care to share. Thanks, and again, great post, Bob.
@rsmithing Thanks for dropping by. It’s funny, as many times as I teach workshops, even to bloggers who have been doing it for sometime, we always seem to need to revisit the basics : )
Will pop over and check out your post as well, thanks for sharing!
Came here via a link in a post on another site and so glad I did for there is a wealth of valuable information on your site. Only points 7 and 10 are missing from my regular strategies so having only been doing this for a few months it’s pleasing to see I’ve learned a few things along the way. Still much to learn of course.
Quick question: Saw some advice recently suggesting that every site you own should be on a different IP. Apart from being a bit outside my techie knowledge that advice seemed a bit expensive. Is the advice relevant or did I perhaps misinterpret the suggestion?
Best Wishes from NZ for a fantastic 2012
@Jonathon I’m like you, I always seem to find a point or two that I am either missing or I need to revisit : )
As far as the IP address, that is one question that has been controversial over time. From what I read, no it doesn’t matter. But again, some will argue with me. There are theories of why it might not be good to have them on the same IP address, but none of us really know how Google works so it’s hard to say for sure.
I have had several sites on a subdomain and never had a problem with the search engines finding them, nor have they been penalized for it. I think decent SEO on the site and great content are much more critical. Hope that helps some!
@bobWP Thanks Bob. Being a bit technically challenged some of those myths and contradictions out there can be a bit hard to decipher. I’m assuming by separate IP they meant separate hosting provider. Anyway all my sites are ranking so I will stick to writing content and doing onpage SEO which seems to work just fine.
I also found your point 4 rather intriguing since most ‘online marketing’ coaches actually include that in their teachings. I often get as much value following the comments as from the post itself. Checking out the websites of others who have commented can often prove helpful in many ways.
BTW your site is the first I’ve come across with the livefyre link and I’ve just been looking at that to see whether it’s worth adding to my niche sites.
@Jonathon Yes, commenting is a great strategy if done right. I think of people who do it just as “link baiting” it comes across that way. But like you, I find myself commenting on blogs I enjoy and feel I can add to the conversation.
And yes, been using Livefyre for sometime and really like it. It’s interesting because I think the use of it really depends on what expectations you have for your blog and your commenters. So as a result, I have heard pros and cons.
On the pro side it provokes more conversation between the commenters. But at the same time, I’ve heard some who say that those conversations often can feel closed and they are reluctant to join in.
Also, they have made it an open commenting system, so you don’t have to either be registered with Livefyre or sign in via Twitter, Linkedin, etc. The also have some other nice features…
My wife at CatsEyeWriter.com has gone back and forth with it. And she has written a few posts on it as well. In the end she found that her readers weren’t commenting as much when she used Livefyre, because of the one reason I mentioned above. The other reason is the “link to a post” for commenters. If you are familiar with CommentLuv, you give a commenter the option to be able to link to a post of theirs at the end of the comment. Livefyre does the same, but it only works if you are registered with them. That was a deciding point on her end to drop Livefyre and use CommentLuv instead.
And lastly, in my blogging workshops, I usually recommend Livefyre when someone wants to create more of a social community on their site, but doesn’t want to go through the time and expense of building one using something like BuddyPress.
My recommendation is to try it and see how it works. Always easy to switch to something else or go back to your WordPress default commenting system. Doesn’t hurt to test the waters : )
Bob i am utilizing most of your tricks but particularly liked the second and fifth point “blog post on Twitter, but make it interesting” specially “make it interesting” thanks for it..
Hi Bob,
Even though the post is old, I learned quite a few things to improve my blog and attract more readers. Thank You !
Great post! Thanks for the tips. I still struggle on getting more readers I guess I just need to work harder 🙂
This is an amazing post. Finding the right readers for your blog may be a big challenge especially or the people who are just starting. This post helps in identifying the things that can help in attracting the right kind of readers and take the blog to the next big level.