Attracting readers to your blog
by Jane Harmon
So you've jumped on the blogging bandwagon, and started your own blog. You've posted trenchant, hard-hitting opinion, heart-wrenching poetry, or humorous essays about your life with three kids (counting hubby), two dogs and a squirrel. And yet the only comment left by a reader is from your mom, wondering how you have the time to write all this and yet no time to phone your mother.
Where is everybody? How can you develop a following if you can't get anyone to read your blog?
Before you go out and actually spend money buying online ads to drive readers to your blog, read on. Gaining an audience for your blog is really quite easy, although it can be a lengthy, and fairly continuous process. Just follow the steps outlined here and soon you too can be an international media star.
Step One – the Hit Counter:
First things being first, you must have a good hitcounter on your blog. You won't be able to judge what works and doesn't work if you can't tell who's visiting, and where they're coming from.
Go to Sitemeter or CGCounter or any number of other free hitcounter providers and sign up. Follow their site-specific directions; they will vary from provider to provider, but are quite simple and straight-forward. Ultimately, either in email or by following a link they will send you, you will receive some code that you need to copy and paste into your blog's template. Most blog service providers will have a help file that describes how you can do this. In Blogger, you simply go to the 'template' tab in your management control panel, and scroll down through all the mysterious html until you find the </body> tag, and put your counter code somewhere before it.
Once your counter code is in place, every time someone visits your blog, you can visit your hitcounter webpage and see your hits incremented by one. And even better, if they followed a link to get to your blog, rather than coming in from a bookmark, you'll get the URL of the website they came from. This is a 'referral', and is very useful information.
Step Two – the BlogRoll
Whatever the subject of your blog, there are other blogs out there with a fairly similar subject, from parenting to politics, indie movies to underwear fetishes. So your next step is to find the similar blogs, and 'blogroll' them. This means creating a linked list in your blog's sidebar that links to these other blogs.
Find similar blogs via Technorati.com or through google's new blogsearch. Enter a search phrase that might characterize your kind of blogging. For instance, if you blog Idaho politics, enter 'Idaho politics' and see what kind of hits on that phrase you receive. Visit the blogs you find and decide which ones are both similar enough to yours that your readers might like them, and not so similar that your readers will all desert you for this other blogger.
How to edit your sidebar is blog-host specific, so visit your provider's FAQ. Give your blogroll a title like "daily reads" or "blogs I like" to encourage your readers to visit these blogs also.
Once your own blogroll is in place, visit the blogs you are linking to, find the contact email of the blog-owner, and ask them to reciprocate with a link to your blog. Don't be annoying about it – some will and some won't.
And don't feel obligated to remove any links to blogs that don't link back to you either; it looks petty. The blog you want to link to you may already have hundreds of names on their blogroll and not be interested in expanding. Or they only blogroll personal friends. I have a number of sites listed on my blogroll that wouldn't know me from Adam. I don't take it personally that they aren't as fond of me as I am of them.
Step Three – comments on your blog
You must have commenting enabled on your own blog. This is an exercise in simple human psychology. Everyone has an opinion and wants to share it. If they visit your blog and want to tell you what they think, they want to be able to leave a comment. If you have commenting enabled, they will comment and – this is key - they will return periodically to see what other people have said, if anything, in reply to their comment.
Engage your commenters in conversation in the comments threads; this will make them feel connected to you and create a sense of community among your readers.
Step 4 – comments on other blogs
Now you need to visit other blogs. Here's where you must exercise some tact and restraint. You must read regularly those blogs that you think are similar to yours and whose readers might enjoy your blog. When they post something about which you might have something constructive and/or interesting to say, visit the comments thread to that post. Post your comment, making sure you fill in all the blanks on the comment form that include your email address and your URL. This puts your URL in the comments thread of the other blog, and people will, if they find your comments interesting, follow the link back to your blog.
Here's where the tact and restraint part comes in. Sometimes you can just post something in an open comment thread like this: 'please visit my new blog – http://myURL.com'. This is called blog-pimping or blogwhoring (yes, I'm afraid it is) and some blogs are more open to this than others. Since the very high-traffic blogs have comment threads that go on for hundreds of posts, some of them will typically post something called an 'open thread' periodically – this is just a one-liner whose purpose is to create another comments thread, for general chatting purposes. Usually 'blog-pimping' is okay in an open thread but read a few open threads through first to make sure it's not considered rude. 'Community standards' will vary from blog to blog, so you want to assess the environment before putting your foot in.
Step 5 – register with Technorati
Technorati is an indexer of blogs. They track who links to who, and very interesting information it is, too. You can enter your own URL and find out who links to you. You can enter a search phrase and find out what blogs are discussing that topic. If you register with Technorati, they'll index you and then people searching on a particular topic will find a link to your blog if it's something you've posted on.
And that's not all; here's where it can really help you draw readers. Several of the big media outlets, notably the Washington Post and Newsweek, are using Technorati to show who's linking to them. If you go to a Newsweek or Washington Post article on their website, you will find a little block off to the side that says something like 'what blogs are discussing this article', which is powered by Technorati. So if you are registered with Technorati, and you also link to and comment on an article in the Washington Post, your linked blogname can show up in that little block, and everyone reading that article online can see it and potentially visit you. Yes, you! Linked right there in the Washington Post!
Step 6 – Keep posting
So you've followed steps one through five. People visit your blog. They are enchanted, engaged, outraged… in short, they love you. They bookmark your blog! You have a new reader!
Then tomorrow, they visit you again. Nothing new. Oh well. Try back later. The day after…. Still nothing new. So perhaps they let a few days go by and try again. You'd sure better have new content on your blog at this point or they're gone for good.
Yes, after you attract readers, the only way to retain them is to post. And post. And post.
Look at the blogs with the really high readership; the ones who are getting enough readers that the lucky blogger can charge the earth (and get it) for ad space on his or her blog. You'll find they all have something in common – they post something new many times a day, if only a one-liner with a link to a news article elsewhere.
Sounds like work, doesn't it? Well, it is. But if you're in a job where you have access to the internet all day (and blogging from work isn't likely to get you fired), you can add updates throughout the day. You read the news, don't you? When confronted with a news story that makes you want to rant to a co-worker, blog it instead. If your kid does a cute thing that makes you want to race to phone to call your mother, blog it instead. Then phone your mother with the URL. She's been wondering why you never phone.
But what about vacations? Do I have to blog all the time? you ask. Well, yes. If you tell your readers you're going on vacation and they should check back in two weeks, some will and some won't. People just get out of the habit. When the New York Times suffered a strike that kept them off the streets for months in 1963, they discovered that when they did return to daily printing, many of their readers had vanished. The readers found an alternate source for their news, or just discovered that their daily newspaper didn't add much to their enjoyment of life.
So how do you take a break yet keep from losing all your readers? Enlist a guest blogger – someone you trust to keep your blog going in the same general direction you started. For instance, if you blog about parenting toddlers, you probably don't want to turn your blog over to a teen with boyfriend issues. Also check in on your blog from your vacation – post photos from Spain or the Grand Canyon and say 'hi' to all your readers, assuring them that you'll be back, that you're having fun and hope you're making them all jealous (you will be), and so on. Then make sure you blog a lot upon your return, and inform all your blogrolled blogs via comments that you have returned.
MAINTENANCE:
Once you've got all these things going for you, your readership should start to pick up. But stay aware of what your hitcounter is telling you, and if you see your readership start to get soft, revisit the steps. Are your comments active? Are you routinely visiting other blogs in your community? Are people still linking to you? A downturn in readership may just mean people are drawn away by the Olympics or other large media event of that nature. Or it may be a symptom of a problem that you need to address.
So be vigilant to your position, be interesting, informative and dependable, and be there for your readers, and your readers will be there for you.
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