23 Ideas for Getting New Readers~~3-Part Series

This will be a 3 part series on how to get new readers to your blog.

1. Comment on Related Blogs - Commenting on related blogs is
probably the most effective strategy early on in the process. And responding to
comments when people leave them on your blog (this encourages them to keep coming back). I visit other blogs in my niche, add them to my feed and
participate in the discussion on their blogs via the comments. Writing interesting comments often gets people to click through to see your site.


2. Join Forums - I’ve found that one very quick way to infuse
readers to a new blog is to be active in discussion forums related to your blog topic. Locate posts that ask for help with something you are familiar with and share your experience.

3. Write Effective Post Titles - Simple and to the point. The title should
create an instant urge to read the entire post… But of course it should be related to the topic of your blog.

4. Interviews - One example being to interview fellow bloggers who are in
the same niche as me. This has gone down well, and has been great for both myself and the interviewee as traffic flows between us.

5. Persist - Persistence is key. After starting up a new blog last month and letting go of another this month, I notice that traffic (quality traffic) doesn’t
happen over night.

6. Connect with Local Bloggers - The other thing I’ve been doing just
recently is connecting up with other bloggers in my city and the neighboring towns. We’ve got something of a link exchange going and a nice side-effect to this is that I/we have discovered that there are quite a few more bloggers and/or website authors in the area than ever expected.

7. Give Away Free Stuff - There have been some success with giving away
free stuff, like free templates for WordPress. It doesn’t give a lot of new readers, but the templates give lots and lots of new links to the blog, giving it a much better pagerank in Google, which in turn should mean more readers from search-engines.

8. Be Opinionated - Be opinionated, but encourage opposing viewpoints in
the comments. Opinionated makes you interesting - encouraging other perspectives makes you essential.

Read part 2
I hope you got some ideas from part 1..now here is part 2


9. Ask Questions of Other Bloggers - Ask questions of other moderately successful bloggers and try to network. If you shoot too high, you’ll often get blown off because these people have so much stuff to read and deal with.

10. Use Trackbacks - Sending highly creative and penetrating trackbacks about a blogger’s original post.

11. Advertise - Buy advertising space on related websites.

12. Educate Readers about RSS - Create a page in WordPress called Feeds which not only has the RSS icon on it but a description of what a “feed” is and what are some of the most common ways to subscribe and use feeds, mostly pulled from a CC article.

13. Offline Promotion - Talk to friends, family and coworkers about them… you’d be surprised how much the traditional way of “networking” really does work…. also Business cards, depending which blog I’ll post on a community board at a grocery store.

14. Search Engine Optimization -Properly optimizing my blog has been a big boost to my readership. Once I figured out how to play around with SEO I started getting a regular 25-35% of my hits from Google.

15. Quality Content- Posting only quality content.. obviously! Better posts are discussed more, increasing both the number of comments and references in other blogs.