Blogging, which used to be a hobby for those who love to write, has now turned into full-fledged business. People or organizations who started a blog to share the content they produce are now making a lot of money out of it. This is because blogging has become a means to develop a stream of income.
However, a blog does not generate income for you automatically. A lot of effort and time goes into it before you can start making money from your blog. All your effort needs to be geared towards increasing your blog readers and improving the traffic to your blog website.
There are many ways to get your blog to gain traction and get more blog readers who increase the value of your blog. If you want to know how to get blog readers, make sure you read this post until the end.
10 Ways to Get More Blog Readers
Here are 10 ways or marketing tactics that you can implement for enhancing your blog readership.
1. Give an Easy Name to Your Blog
The first thing for you to tell people about your blog easily is to give it an easy name. Think of a name for your blog. If you are running a business or already have a brand, your blog name would be the same as your business or brand name. But if your blog is independent of any other business, you will have to think of a suitable name, especially for your blog.
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Your blog name should be concise, unique, clear, and relevant to the topics you usually write on. For example, if your blog is a news portal on cryptocurrency, you could check out some popular crypto blogs, such as the following.
- Coindesk
- Cointelegraph
- NewsBTC
- Kraken Blog
- CryptoNinjas
- CryptoSlate
- CryptoPotato
As you can see, all these names are directly or indirectly hinting that they have content on them about crypto. Keeping the name short and relevant helps attract blog readers. You also need to check if a top-level domain name extension is available for the blog name you choose.
2. Choose a Niche For Your Blog
Although this goes without saying, many bloggers don’t take this seriously, especially when starting a blog and growing your blog readership. You wouldn’t want your blog readers to be confused regarding what exactly you like to write about.
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If, for instance, your first article is about your favorite make-up items and trends in the cosmetics industry. Your second article is about the habits you observe in your pet cat. In this case, your readers won’t be able to figure out if your blog is suitable for them or not. People need to know which topics you cover and which ones you don’t. They need to know this so that they can decide whether or not to follow your content. If you write on a vast range of topics, your audience will sooner or later lose interest in your blog, because every time they visit your blog looking for posts on a specific niche, but instead they will find your posts scattered all over the place.
Therefore, you must decide on a specific niche for your blog. For example, you can decide that you will write about fitness. Even though that defines the overall theme of your content, it is still not specific enough. Now let’s say, you choose to write articles for women specifically looking to get back in shape and enhance their physical fitness right after having a baby. This is what you call choosing a specific niche for your blog. This will keep your blog readers comfortable, as now your blog will be suitable for attracting readers who are specifically looking for the kind of content you post on it.
3. Post Articles Regularly
Anyone who visits your blog regularly would expect to see new articles on your blog every day. This is the secret of all successful blogs that grow in traffic exponentially. They are very regular in posting good quality articles and never tire away from producing new content.
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If you are running a blog individually and have a limitation to the number of posts you can make every week, you can hire freelancers at very reasonable rates to do the job for you. Organizations that run blogs also often hire remote workers or freelancers who write professional articles for them at relatively lower rates than full-time content writers.
Whichever way you adopt to publish new articles daily, your blog must get updated with new content every day. This not only keeps your existing blog readers engaged with your content but also attracts a lot of new readers to your blog.
4. Take SEO Actions
An excellent and critical way to gain more blog readers is to take actions that enhance your blog website’s search engine optimization. If your blog positions well in search rankings, more new readers will be able to discover it in Google search results.
Here are some actions you can take to enhance your blog’s search rankings for ultimately improving your blog readership.
- Write a clear and precise site description.
- Use the relevant keywords throughout your content.
- Split your articles into paragraphs.
- Use appropriate headings and subheadings in your posts.
- Add relevant tags to each one of your posts.
- Build attractive thumbnails for each article.
- Select an appealing, responsive, and user-friendly blog template.
- Post new content regularly (as mentioned above).
- Insert good quality, copyright-free images in your articles.
- Create a neat header and footer.
- Include your contact details or build a contact form to make it easy for your blog readers to get in touch with you.
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The strategies mentioned in the points above will all contribute to your on-site SEO. You need to adopt other techniques for off-site SEO, such as social media marketing and guest posting, which are explained in the points below.
5. Create Social Media Handles
Creating social media handles for each of your articles enables your blog readers to share your posts with their friends and peers by simply clicking on the handles and sharing your posts on their social media profiles.
These social media handles or buttons can be inserted at the end, bottom, or side of each article. They are split into icons of different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, etc. If somebody likes a post you have written, they’ll be enticed to share it with their friends, and the easiest way for them to share it is by posting it on their social media.
Posts shared on social media have a high chance of going viral. This is because of the ease of sharing posts on social media. For instance, one of your blog readers shares a link to one of your blog articles on their Facebook profile, and from there, a friend of theirs sees it, likes it, and shares it further on their profile. Another friend sees the post on the second person’s profile and chooses to share it further with their friends’ list, and the process continues. Before you know, about a hundred new readers have visited your blog without you having to invest a single penny in marketing.
6. Integrate Your Blog With Social Media
Another way to use social media to gain blog readers is to integrate your blog with your official social media profiles. This means you create social media accounts or pages, especially for sharing your blog posts on them. This way, you can increase your blog readers, followers, and subscribers by spreading your content through social media.
For instance, create a Facebook page, and every time you post an article on your blog, share its link as a new post on the Facebook page. As you get more and more followers on your Facebook page, you will also automatically get more and more blog readers and increase the traffic to your blog.
One way to integrate your blog with this kind of Facebook page is to insert social media icons on the footer of your blog website. You can also insert these icons on the side of your blog or on any other place that suits your blog design and is easy for your blog readers to view.
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7. Do Guest Posting on Other Blogs
This is an essential and effective strategy. As you build and maintain your own blog, it is also important to contribute to other blogs. Making guest posts on other blogs helps you to drive traffic from their blog to yours. One way this is applicable is because when you write on another blog, you are usually allowed to insert links into your posts that direct the blog readers from their blog to your blog.
Secondly, when you create such backlinks to your blog, it helps in boosting your blog’s SEO. Google bots view your blog as well-integrated with other websites and blogs across the internet and start placing it higher in search results.
These are some of the strategies you can apply to increase your blog readers. Don’t forget maintaining your existing blog readers is just as important as getting new readers. It is, therefore, critical that your blog design is easy to navigate. If you build your blog on Strikingly, we provide many templates for you to choose from. Not only that, our tools and features make it easy for any layman to create a simple blog all by themselves. If you want to build a blog, you can also check out our website building tools at Strikingly.