Bloggers have a few handy weapons in their arsenal for accumulating a large readership and following. Start by writing something your readership wants and/or needs to know and then use every positive means of visibility to draw attention to your blog. Update your blog frequently, so each return visitor is not bored with stale information, but given a new morsel or tidbit each time they return. Use social networking and profile pages, images, surveys, subscriptions, guest hosting and a number of other tactics to point, draw and attract readership to your blog.
Establish a solid blogging marketing plan
Implement a plan of execution for marketing your blog. Indicate what results you hope to achieve with each marketing technique. Monitor the results and any method that works particularly well, amp it up to see how much better the results can be with greater effort being applied. Try other methods as well, but keep the bulk of your energy focused on methods with a proven return on investment (ROI). Most of these marketing methods don't cost actual money, but they do cost time, energy and creativity which in turn is translated into cash.
Give in to the powerful lure of Social Media
One of the best ways to increase your blog readership is to use the powers of social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ etc. It’s beneficial to establish a presence at all of these websites. Having that presence as an individual and as a brand will allow you to double your influence on your target audience. The social networks are also great places to develop a profile for your target audience. You can see who appreciates what you have to say and follows your blog religiously. They post their own profiles and you can start to formulate an idea of who your target audience truly is, their interest, their demographics, hobbies, etc.
Go where others share and join in
The social media participants are more willing to share information with others, so find out where they congregate and post links to your site there as well as on social media sites. FindPeopleonPlus and FollowerWonk are sites that spread the word to others and are great places to share content to get more exposure. Watch the results from your efforts with the right analytics. Google's free service, Google Analytics might be a good place to start.
Images Speak Loudly
Become a content creator and use your own images, especially if you are an illustrator, photographer or graphic artist to attract visitors. When your blog becomes well known for its images, traffic will increase to your blog simply because it’s interesting visually and stimulating with its content. Others will appreciate and possibly want to use your images on their own websites. Using the search image function will help you keep track of images from your site that are being used by others. Obtain links by opening a dialogue with other sites that use your images.
The Seduction of Surveys and Subscriptions
Using surveys and subscriptions are two other ways to increase readership of your blog. Use your email contacts to generate more traffic by inviting email subscribers to participate in interesting surveys with outcomes to be published, so that people will want to follow-up and get the results. Select a timely topic of interest to many. Make it of particular interest to your target audience and invite those visitors to return using RSS feeds or email through a sign-up on a blog post.
Use guest hosting to promote your blogs
Participating in Question and Answer (Q&A) websites is yet another way to get the word out about your blog. Websites where you can voice your opinion give notice to your view point and can allow links to your blog. Guest hosting draws an audience. Invite a well-known guest to your blog and promote the event and if asked to guest host on someone else's blog, promote that event also.
Summary
There are many options for increasing readership. These are just a few successful methods that have worked very well for other blogs. Use them together or one at a time, but by all means use them. Over time with the use of analytics you can determine which has the greatest return with your target audience and use those methods repeatedly to grow your readership.
