Running a blog can be a lot of work, though very enjoyable at the same time. Regardless of why you started your blog, whether it was for personal or hobby reasons, or if you are one of the many people that either blog for profit or intend to blog for profit, there seems no point to updating your blog if no one is reading it. But, where do you find readers for the blog posts that you are working so hard to put online? This is a question that every blogger at one time or another comes up against and has to answer.
Your blog content will eventually get indexed on search engines and be found by people performing their daily searches there. There are other ways though that you can be proactive in acquiring readers for your blog content. Here is a look at seven ways you can find potential readers for your blog content.
Forum Participation
Online forums are very popular places to go where people share their thoughts, ideas, and preferences. Participating in a discussion on an online forum and using the URL of your blog, when appropriate, is a great way to get potential readers to visit your blog. It is very important to not spam your URL any where, including an online forum, this can not only negate any positive steps you were trying to make concerning your blog, but it can also lead to your blog gaining a poor reputation and preventing people from ever giving it a chance. Most online forums provide a signature space to their members where they can include links to their favorite websites, online profiles or social networking sites, or blogs. By placing a link to your blog in the signature space in an online forum, your blog becomes accessible through that link following every post you make.
Blog Commenting
As long as there have been bloggers posting content, there have been readers commenting on that content. A great way to find potential readers for your blog content is to visit blogs that share your niche or are related to your subject in some manner and then contribute useful and insightful comments to the content that is posted there. In most blogging situations, when you post a comment you also post a link back to the website of your choice. By posting a helpful comment with a link back to your blog, you could encourage those that read your post to follow that link back and see what else you have to say through the posts on your blog.
Web Surfers
There are a good many people that are always searching the internet for information and ideas that they are interested in. To do this, many choose to go from blog to blog sampling various ideas from a wide variety of bloggers. The best way to turn some of these casual web surfers into loyal readers of your blog content is to give them a healthy dose of high quality content and to update your blog frequently. If a blog reader comes to your blog and finds either sub-par content or content they can read at thousands of other blogs, then they are apt to keep on surfing right on to the next blog. If a potential reader comes to your blog, likes what they read, then comes back tomorrow or the next day and you have not added a new post, they also may choose to check out other blogs and not come back, assuming that you don’t care enough to update your content frequently.
Directory Submissions
There are a number of online directories that can send potential readers to your blog based on those readers finding a listing for your blog when they are searching for information they are interested in. The only thing stopping them from finding your blog in those directories is the fact that you have yet to submit your blog to them. Directory submission can be time consuming and without immediate acceptance of your blog into the directory, it can seem like it takes forever to see any benefit from the whole process. Rest assured though that over time these listings from directories do add up and send potential readers to your blog. It generally works out best though if you concentrate your efforts on listing your blog in niche directories that already attract people that may be somewhat interested in the topic of your blog. For example, if you have a blog about cars then it may see better results in a smaller directory devoted to car sites and car blog than it would from being including in a more popular and larger general directory.
Guest Blog Posting
A great way to find potential readers for your blog is to offer to guest blog post on another blog that shares some specific traits with your blog. This is beneficial to the owner of the other blog in that they receive free content on their site and it is beneficial to you in that your guest blog post will contain a link or links back to your own blog. Some people prefer not to do guest blogging because they don’t like the idea of providing free content to someone who they think of as in competition with them for the same readers. The truth is though that he benefits that come from this type of marketing of your blog far outweigh any losses you think you may incur. You do have to be realistic when it comes to guest blog posting though, if your blog is brand new and has little to offer in terms of authoritativeness, it may be difficult to convince the owner of a well established blog to allow you to guest post there. It certainly doesn’t hurt to inquire though.
Link Swapping
Another great way to partner with another blog in an effort to help each other out in the constant battle to find more and more readers is to participate in limited link swapping. The way link swapping works is that in exchange for you posting a link to someone else’s blog on your blog, they do the same for you. In the end both blogs have links on them pointing to the other. This is a great way of alerting the readers you already have to the fact that this may be another quality blog that they may like to read, it is also a great way to get your blog content in front of the readers of the other blog in the hopes that you can convince them to become a reader of yours as well.
Local Offline Promotion
We tend to think of blogging only in terms of what we can do online to gain new readers, but there are many ways that we can win over new readers on a local level too. Offline promotion of your blog can take many forms including bumper stickers, flyers, classified advertisements, and more. One of the simplest ways to try and gain new readers for your blog content is to simply put theURL of your blog on your business cards. Offline promotional methods have worked for hundreds of years and they haven’t become ineffective simply because we now have the internet.
One of the goals of any blog that can be found on the internet is to have a large and ever-growing readership. To do this though, you as a blogger cannot just sit back and hope that people come to your blog to read the content that you are putting there. You must take a proactive role in finding readers to come and visit your blog. This is the only way that you can successfully grow your blog readership. There are plenty of ways to go out and find potential readers for your blog, don’t limit yourself to just the methods described above, the only trick involved is that you have to actually do it.
