blackleafmedia

Going for your reader’s jugular: how to get more readers for you blog

I know this sounds like weird as this blog is still in its infancy, but I’ve written enough on the Web to know how to score yourself some readers. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and see how your blog is progressing and do more to encourage its growth. Feel free to comment on other ideas.

• Controversy: One instant way to stir up new readers is to create controversy. Find a hot-button issue that you are well-versed in and blog about what you think about it. Encourage your readers to comment on it. Readers will always want to call it how they see it. Even if you have a very small niche you cover on your blog, chances are that your readers are still very different from each other with different beliefs and vastly different ideas of how things should work.
• Carve Your Own Niche: You may think that getting into a small niche isn’t the best way to gain new readers. What if you have a blog about calculating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Make it the resource for doing that. Make it so that your blog instantly comes to mind when people need that information.
• Don’t Be A Hermit: Comment on other blogs. Make sure you have a link to your blog in your email and forum signatures. Just be careful not to be a complete tool about it, some forums have rules about what can be put in your signature and you don’t want to email your boss and have a link to your Star Wars porn collection.
• Make It Easy For Readers: With the advent of Akismet and the like, you don’t have to worry as much about spam. Don’t require your readers to register just to comment. Who wants to register when you will forget your awesome point about who shot first? (Han shot first, by the way).
• Content Is King, But Ugly Blogs Suck: This is pretty self explanatory. I know we aren’t all graphic designers, and at least for WordPress there are plenty of great free themes out there, but come on. There are so many ugly blogs out there! Seriously, how lazy are you to keep the damn default WordPress Kubrick theme? Have someone design you one (Shameless plug: I can design one for you). Hell, this blog at the time this post is being written has a theme I didn’t even create, I just really liked it’s style. Constantly keep refining who things look. Reorganize when you find something more conducive for your readers.
• Give Away Some Value: Write an e-book about your subject. Give it away for free. Publicize it everywhere. Create patterns or brushes for Photoshop. Write tutorials. Use your imagination.
• Exploit Social Networks: I am almost ashamed to say I have a Myspace account, but lets face it., you need them. As stated before, make it easy. Encourage your readers to spread info about your site. Let them know who to do it if they don’t know. Social networks are extremely adept at blasting quick messages to let people know what you are up to.
• Push Your RSS Feed: Show your readers how an RSS feed can help them fit more info into their workflow. RSS really is a fantastic technology but is only really used by us geeks. I keep trying to get my mother to get a Netvibes start page, and I think I may have finally convinced her that it is much faster to skim over feeds to see if there is something that gets you interested than going to every page you normally read.

Hopefully I have given you some ideas to get more readers to your blog. Make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get more updates about getting more readers for your blog. Please share your comments as well.