Blogging Tips to Get More Traffic, Subscribers, and Readers
Mar 10th, 2009 | 3 Comments
Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton
Here is a list of blogging tips, to increase your readership and exposure. Some I need to apply more myself, but here they are:
- When writting a post for a blog, use bullet points, headers and try to keep paragraphs short. These things attract readers to actually read the post. Read Melissa’s blog Writing Forward for writing tips, which are very useful.
- Try to always include an image; imagine a newspaper without images. Quite boring. If you can’t find something relevant look for usable images on Flickr.
- Encourage your readers to signup for your RSS feed. Perhaps write a post on how to use an RSS reader (such as Google Reader) and its benefits. Use Feedburner to track your RSS readers and perhaps monetize on your feed in the future.
- Start a contest to give something away, such as something free like an Ebook or perhaps an Ipod Nano. Get people to Tweet about your contest as an entry or sign up for the RSS feed. Reward your commenters too with an entry to the contest. John Chow has great tips for getting lots of subscribe and readers in a short amount of time.
- Thank your commenters, either personally or automatically with a Wordpress plugin. Also try commenting on their blogs and if you like what they write subscribe to their RSS feed and ask them to join yours.
- Blog as much as you can without affecting quality. Try for daily postings, but if you can’t, at least a 3 or 4 per week, but remember not to just write for the sake of writing. If you have nothing to blog about, don’t force yourself and comprimise your blogs quality. If you feel real inspired one day and you are able to crank out a few posting, schedule them to be published in the future for the days or just keep of backlog of post for days when you can’t find inpiration (or perhaps time to blog).
- Network: Try to get interviews with recognized bloggers. Perhaps he/she would be happy to give you a quick email interview, in exchange for traffic for their blog. Get a guest blogger to write for your blog and write for someone else’s, both of you will benefit with the cross-promotion
3 Comments
Great blogging tips! Thanks for including Writing Forward
Please put an attribution right next to my photo of the “remmington”, as required by my Creative Commons license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en
It should read “Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton”
Thank you, and thanks for wanting to use my photo.
In addition, flickr has a rule that there should be a link from the photo itself back to the original webpage of the photo on flickr.
You might suggest to people that they carefully look at the license. For example, mine does not allow derivatives (including cropping).
From the looks of your blog, it seems commercial from all the ads. That would make my CC license not apply. But you may use it anyway, as long as you elaborate more on copyright and Creative Commons in a an update.
really good post. Im trying my luck with a contest but its been slow going thus far!