There is so much more that goes into running a blog, than simply writing and publishing blog posts. Being a blogger means that you need to figure out a comprehensive blog strategy for your site. A large part of this strategy will be geared towards attracting and retaining an engaged blog readership. Here are 5 great ways to do this, for a successful, vibrant blog.
#1: Adding Multimedia To Blogs
A blog is not only made up of words and ideas. If there's one thing you can bet on - it's that at least half or more of your readers prefer multimedia. Adding images, infographics, video and slideshare presentations is an excellent way to gain new readers. Figure out innovative ways to include multimedia in your posts to enhance them or create posts based on singular images or videos.
#2: Institute a Blog Outreach Program
The most successful bloggers know that a blog without an outreach program, is like a movie theatre without ticket sales. Your blog is not an island. It needs to make friends with other blogs. That means approaching experts in your field and offering to write a guest post for them. Or inviting them to write one for your blog. This will expose many readerships to your blog, and they will eventually become your readers too. If your blog isn't good enough, get a makeover!
#3: Grow Your Facebook Fanbase
How does Facebook help your blog, you ask? A lot! Growing your Facebook fan base rapidly by adding in exciting apps and social games - can feed traffic directly to your blog in several ways. The most obvious being: adding a blog app to your page. Your blog roll will appear there and engage your Facebook fan base, turning them into long term blog readers. Viral sharing is key to great posts, and these happen most here.
#4: Use WordPress Properly
We don't have to tell you that SEO is important - it makes the cyberworld go round. But getting a good blog readership is also about driving traffic, so it's time to take your WordPress SEO seriously. Categories, tags and meta-data are the core of each post you publish. These keywords need to be included in your post copy, so that Google and other search engines start to like your copy as well.
#5: Advertising The Easy Way
Everything online happens because somewhere, someone has taken the time to create adverts or promotional material about it. If you want to boost those numbers, you need to invest in a display or PPC advertising campaign - preferably both. Paid media is what separates amateur blogs from pro-blogs. And once yours is bringing in the huge numbers, you can sell ad space there for money.
These five simple steps will help you attract and keep a readership of attentive fans. They'll visit your blog more often, subscribe to your feed and become a fan of your other social media pages. That's what you want, and with this 5 step formula - you can have it! Test it out and tell us how it goes.
What one action that you performed resulted in a boost in readership numbers for your blog? Share your experiences with our community below.