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!
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.
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!
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.
