Finding Readers for Your Blog (Part B)

Also read Parts A – C and D of this series.

Part B

5. Interact with Readers – I’ve written about how to interact with your readers before so I won’t go into it too much except to say that if you interact with your readers they are more likely to put some time aside to come back and engage with you – its just human nature.

6. Update frequently – With the advent of news aggregators people can be notified of your new post in real time. I noticed that when I publish a new post that my stats nearly always go up slightly just afterwards as those readers with aggregators log in to have a quick look at my latest musings. Of course this only works if you have an RSS feed (get one!) and have readers who use aggregators. Update regularly and give your readers a reason to come back regularly. You’ll also find that the Search Engine bots will come visiting more often if your site is constantly changing.

Also related to this is the hits that come when you ping sites like weblogs.com or technorati. These sites keep track of changes on websites – the more you update the more you will ping them (if your blogging tool enables pinging) and the more they will take notice of you and include you in their lists.

7. Search engines – The longer your blog is active and the more you post the higher the chance of a search engine like Google or Yahoo referring visitors to your site. There are a lot of theories of how to boost your ranking on search engines floating around the web but an obvious starting place is to submit your blog’s domain to them so that they’ll start listing you.

Getting listed – There are a lot of services out there that will do it for you (for a fee) – but there are also some free services (which claim to submit your site to a smaller amount of search engines). I can’t guarantee them but its worth a go. For example – Submit Express. I’ve used a number of these services and they seem to have worked quite well as I’m listed on all the major search engines.

You can also go directly to many search engines and register for a free listing – for example here is Google’s submission page. Most other SE’s have them also.

8. Add a signature to your outgoing email – Many bloggers do this. Simply add the domain name to your outgoing email. Most email programs will allow you to do this automatically. However be careful with automatic signatures if you don’t want your blog to be read by everyone that you email.

Also read Parts A – C and D of this series.