3 Ways to Attract Readers to Your Blog
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When I asked my readers to identify their biggest blogging challenge, the number one answer was “to attract readers.” It can be very discouraging to spend valuable time researching a topic and writing what you think is an amazing post, then to get no comments, retweets, or other indications that anyone even read it. Sometimes it’s enough to make you wonder why you’re blogging at all!
Before you throw in the towel, ask yourself the following questions.
1. Do you blog strategically?
Is your blog about you and your interests, or do you consider the type of information that your target market is looking for?
When you answer your ideal client’s most pressing questions, using terminology they can relate to, you stand a much better chance of them finding your blog and sticking around to read it.
2. Do you read and comment on other blogs?
Do you know what blogs are popular with your target audience?
If not, find out! If you do, make a point of reading them as well.
Leave comments that demonstrate your subject knowledge, without giving a sales pitch. Most blogs allow you to include a link back to your own blog, and people who see value in your comments will often click through to explore what you’ve written.
3. Do you take advantage of social media?
After you’ve spent time and effort to write a new blog post, don’t just put it up there and hope someone notices!
Promote your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media sites that are popular with your target audience. Even if you only use Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, it’s a great way to make sure they’re aware of what it is that you do and how you can help the people they know.
Make it easy for others to promote your content by taking advantage of one or more of the many social sharing tools that are available.
Adopting these three important strategies will help you to attract readers to your organizing blog.
What is YOUR biggest blogging challenge?
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Very educative post, learned a lot from this article. So glad I found your blog, and was able to learn new things. Keep posting informative articles, it’s really helpful.
Nice post good information thanks
Giving readers content they want to read is typically my goal. Although I will say that I sometimes just write about something that is on my mind that I feel like sharing. I love reading, sharing, and promoting other organizers’ blogs. It’s interesting to me to see that quite often we are talking about similar concepts.
I think it’s good to sometimes just write about what’s on your mind. Mixing things up a bit keeps it interesting, and injects a bit more of your unique personality so readers can’t get to know you better.
These are such excellent points, Janet! It’s not always the case, but as I read each point, I recognized that I do these things and it makes a difference. When I look at my older posts, they had less engagement. It’s because I was learning (back then) what it meant to engage. There is always more to learn and improve on, but I’ve definitely gotten better at commenting, sharing, socially engaging, and creating content that resonates with my readers.
There’s nothing more uplifting than when a reader feels inspired to action or connected to something I wrote. Or, when a client hires me because from reading the blog and being on my website, they felt I understood them.
Well, you have definitely learned how to engage! You’re one of the most dedicated bloggers I know when it comes to sharing, responding to comments, and engaging on other blogs (like this one) as well.
It’s important to share your new and older posts on social media. Sometimes we write our post, and it doesn’t have traction right away. But, in a month or two, we may see a change. Resharing older posts are a great way to share the posts that have become popular since they were released. Using a virtual assistant or an automated plugin is an excellent option if you do not have the time to revisit old posts and reshare them on social media.
I’ve tried different ways to automatically reshare older posts, but most of them didn’t worked the way I wanted them too. I was given a free trial of Hiplay and I really liked it, but not enough to pay for it.
That’s a good idea to think about visiting, and commenting on, blogs that my target audience is reading. I’m going to work on this. 🙂
It will be interesting to do that research!
What a great dip back into a classic (if updated) post. It’s funny how the things we did to attract readers and build our blogs a dozen years ago may be very similar, or very different.
I use an RSS reader (sigh, I still miss Google Reader) and have a feed from my page, but someone asked me just this weekend how they could subscribe to my blog via email, and I was flummoxed…even though I can see a screen showing I have readers who subscribe by email! I definitely make good use of social media, and interact with other bloggers, but I miss the era when we all had blogrolls on our sidebars! And I’d like to think I’m blogging strategically, but I also don’t want to bore myself, so I’ll admit that I try to constant create novelty, and for all I know, readers may prefer to see the same advice over and over (such as the magazines often provide).
I see a subscribe box clearly in your sidebar – did you just add it, or is that what they saw too? You have a LOT of subscribers – congratulations!
I miss blogrolls too. They were a great way to give and receive link love.
I do all those things, but the best thing I’ve done for my blog is to join your Blogging Organizers Facebook group. I even used the idea and manage a similar group with the members of my coworking space. Unfortunately very few people in that space blog. But it still gets my message out to them. Blogging gives me so much content to share that I don’t have to create much more social media content.
I’m so pleased to hear that, Janet! And I was inspired to structure Blogging Organizers after another Facebook group I was in, so I guess we’re constantly learning from one another.
You make a great point about blogging giving you content to share. If you want to take a break from sharing links, you can always just take snippets from your blog posts to make standalone social media posts.