5 (More) Ways to Increase Your Blog Readership

Mastermind Weekend 1/16

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I'm Tina

I’m the owner of Carrots ‘N’ Cake as well as a Certified Nutrition Coach and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P). I use macros and functional nutrition to help women find balance within their diets while achieving their body composition goals.

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Awhile back, I wrote a post about How to Increase Your Blog Readership. Since then, I’ve thought of some more ideas to add to the list, so here are five more ways to increase your readership. 

Create an Offline Presence

Quite a few bloggers are starting to expand their presence offline. For instance, Matt of No Meat Athlete has done a really great job with his t-shirts. I swear, I see at least one at every road race I run! There’s a million ways to create an offline presence, but anything that creates buzz for your blog will do.

Recently, I’ve had some success with creating CNC t-shirts and stickers. I only make about $1 off each shirt that I sell, but every one has the CNC logo on the back, so anytime someone wears it, my blog gets some free marketing. Similarly, I gave away CNC stickers to my readers. I had to pay for the postage to mail them, but it was totally worth it for some extra blog promotion. Plus, fun stickers make people happy!

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Use Some Basic SEO Practices

At Fitbloggin‘ this year, Matt of No Meat Athlete covered some basic (not sketchy) search engine optimization (SEO) practices that bloggers can implement to help search engines find their sites. The session was summarized here: SEO for Fitness Bloggers and then later turned into a webinar, so you can see all of Matt’s suggestions, but here are a few of my favorites that I’ve used on CNC:

  • Use good anchor text: When linking to an old post of yours, don’t link to words like “click here” or “this post.” Instead, link to keywords, such as “treadmill workouts” or “How to Strength Train at Home.” Doing this helps search engines better find your blog. In addition, when you link out to another blog and use good anchor text, you help out that blogger by building links to their blog, which makes their blog easier to find and gets them more traffic. Most of the time, the blogger will likely reciprocate this practice to help you out.
  • Write strong headlines (post titles): Good post titles get people’s attention, and a lot of the time, people will retweet or share them without even reading the post. Matt’s Cosmopolitan Trick and Copyblogger.com are great tutorials to help you improve your post titles.
  • Write linkable content: In addition to good headlines, write posts with content that you would want to read. Matt suggested writing posts with lists, how-to’s, interviews, compilations involving other bloggers, and resource posts (“The Ultimate Guide to”¦”). Writing quality content gets people to link to and find your blog, which, ultimately, increases your blog’s readership.

Post Business Cards

This one is really simple, especially if you already have business cards for your blog. If not, VistaPrint.com is really easy to use and has some great deals!

At stores with community bulletin boards, like Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Bruegger’s, I sometimes post a couple of my business cards on the bulletin board. You never know who might find it, and it’s a quick and easy way to market your blog.

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Create a Facebook Fan Page

People always ask me when I first I saw a spike in my blog traffic. About six months after I started CNC, I added my blog URL to my Facebook profile and posted a couple of links on my wall. Once I did that, I saw a considerable jump in my blog traffic.

Since then, I haven’t used Facebook much to market my blog, which is crazy because Facebook has something like 500 million users. A couple of weeks ago, however, I created a Carrots ”˜N’ Cake Facebook fan page, and I’ve already seen a small spike in traffic. I mean, just think about how many connections the average Facebook user has”” there’s so much potential for people to discover your blog!

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Participate in Twitter Chats

The first step with this one is creating a Twitter account and then tweeting! Twitter is such an amazing way to network and promote your blog.

Participating in Twitter chats is another way to connect with people of similar interests and help them discover your blog. It’s also a great way to find new blogs to add to your own daily rotation. Two of my favorite Twitter chats are #runchat, which is held on the second and fourth Sunday of each month, and #FitBlog, which is held every Tuesday at 9 p.m.

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104 Comments

  1. Thanks for the great tips! I struggle with the ‘marketing/numbers’ side of blogging. Honestly, I just.want.to.blog.

    But getting some sort of reward for all of your time and effort is always a plus. Its hard NOT to get caught up in the numbers sometimes!!

  2. Great advice! I’ve wanted to increase my readership, but I don’t want to spend considerable time coming up with PR (full time student, job, life…) These are great easy, fast tips!

  3. funny you posted this on the day i decided to make my (very) young &amateur blog public! i also happened to make a link/shout-out to you!

    have loved following. hope you start feeling better soon!

  4. I also would like to add, I believe you need to respond to those that take the time to leave comments. As they take the time to visit, I think we should take the time to then visit their blogs as well.

  5. This is great advice, thanks Tina! Really really helpful for so many bloggers who have wonderful content that the rest of us want / should be able to easily discover. 😉

  6. This is great! Thank you for the tips – I’m going to check back on your previous post as well.

    Ever since I started blogging a couple of months ago, I have fallen in love with it. I love sharing with people – how I train, how I eat, my successes, my failures… it makes me so happy. I also love the connection I feel now with other bloggers.

    Love your shirts BTW – How do I get one?!

  7. Thanks for the great (and simple) tips!
    Also, I love the sayings on your shirts! So cleaver!
    I hope one day I can do that as well 🙂

  8. Great tips. I also agree with Yolanda. I find that bloggers that take time to respond to comments build up a more loyal readership. Being a newcomer to the blog scene I am trying to respond to as many comments as possible, and I think it has been helpful in encouraging readers to return.

  9. Thank you for the tips! I started blogging because we are a military family, and I wanted to keep my family and friends “in the know” about what we were up to, but make it more personal than facebook. Now that we live overseas in Korea, I find blogging has been my way of still feeling connected to people and places back home.
    I still blog just for me, but recently want to increase my readership to those out there that are moving, military, or just want great travel stories! I loved the part about creating better anchors…thats going to be my goal for my next post!!

  10. I love these tips, very helpful! Fortunately I’m starting a new job in August and they are ok about adding my blog link on my business cards! And like you said about the t-shirts, I think it’s important to pay attention to as it happens in all businesses: not all costs will bring about direct profit but it doesn’t mean their impact is non-existent!

  11. This post is awesome! Thank you! My little blog has been growing slowly but surely over the past year and I’m getting to the point that it is a full-time job. Since I’m devoting so much time to it, I’d like to get more people reading it!

  12. Love your site, and love the tips! I think that using social networks would be a very easy and effective way of spreading the word about a person’s blog. Thanks for sharing, and keep writing because I love reading your posts! =)

    Kristen

  13. Once again, you’ve put out some awesome tips for us new bloggers! =] Thank you for helping us all out! I hope you are feeling better… xoxo

  14. Thank you for these tips! They came at the perfect time for me. I had just read all your past tips the day before, and then you added these! I’m definitely working on using better anchor text!

    Thanks again and feel better soon! 🙂

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  16. These tips were so helpful! I just started my blog with my twin sister this past September and we’ve learned a lot along the way, but it’s so helpful to come across helpful resources. Thank you!

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