It’s all well and good having a blog, but it starts to feel a little lonely if no one visits your blog or engages with it. There’s a bit of an art to building an audience, and the truth is: if you create killer, engaging content you will find yourself attracting readers. This can be a relatively slow process, however, so here are some suggestions of how to build a blog audience.
1) Comment on Other Blogs Similar to Yours
This is great for a number of options as it gets your blog “out there”, allows you to build some extra links to your blog naturally which is great for SEO and you’ll be surprised by the number of people who read your comment and click on it, especially if it’s a well-known blog. The important thing is not to rush your comments, either, and to spend some time actually engaging with the content you’re reading. I really enjoy this side of getting my blog “out there” as I get inspiration for new content, get to read some great content and often have interesting comment conversations.
2) Make Sure Your SEO is GOOD
Search engine traffic is one of those things that is quite slow to get started, but can easily snowball. In order to help your blog along in terms of SEO, you’re going to have to make sure each and every page and post of your site is optimised for SEO. This means carefully placing some keywords that you want to rank for, throughout your content. This doesn’t have to be spammy. Make sure the keywords are in your page’s title, the meta description and you’re good to go. I find it easier to do the SEO as I go along, rather than in one big chunk.
3) Get Social
Social media is a wonderful way to build an audience, as they can easily check out your updates on either your Facebook or Twitter pages. I’ve noticed that Facebook is not being very generous in exposure since introducing paid advertisements and I get the impression that it’s not as useful for Facebook Pages as it once was. Regardless, both Twitter and Facebook are used by a large portion of Internet users and are a great platform. Try to post regularly, at least once a day for Facebook and a few times a day is fine for Twitter.
4) Offer Something They Can’t Get Anywhere Else
This could be a free guide to building a blog, as I have offered on my site, an E-Book, your personal story… Whatever. Give them a reason to come to your blog, stay and share it socially. If you offer your readers something that they can’t find anywhere else, then they’ll be back when you need it. I’m offering transparency in my earnings which a few bloggers do, but really there aren’t that many.
Building up an audience takes time, but in the end it’s worth it. I’ve had some really engaging discussions on my blog that I’ve really enjoyed.
Do you have any tips for building a blog audience? Let me know in the comments below.