Grow 4 Ways to Get More People to Read Your Blog

by andynathan | Jan 24, 2012 | Blog | 31 comments

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The most frustrating part blogging is to dedicate so much time to writing quality content on your site, only to have absolutely no one read your articles. That is why we want to get more people to read your blog.

I’ve been hearing the same advice for the past five years on how to grow a blog. Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before: “Write good content, post on Facebook, post on Twitter, post on Linkedin, and watch the magic happen.”

But what happens if you don’t have Facebook fans, or many Twitter followers, or many Linkedin connections? You can post on those sites all you want, but you will probably never get the results you want.

Here are four ways that you can grow your blog readership pretty fast, assuming you have some good content to offer your audience.

How to get more people to read your blog

1. Guest posts

There are three critical reasons you want to write guest posts on other blogs:

- Backlinks to your blog for SEO purposes
- Drive a ton of quality traffic to your blog
- Establish a relationship with the bloggers in your niche (which in my opinion is actually far more important than the other two reasons).

If you were to ask for one strategy that answers the question of how to get more people to read your blog post it would definitely start with guest blogging. That is because this is a powerful way to build connections with others in the industry you can leverage to generate an abundance of traffic. Not to completely overstate the obvious, but once you decide to guest blog, you need to find places to do so.

For me, I use Google and Twitter to find guest blogging opportunities.

Google

In the search bar, you want to first type in your niche followed by the words “write for us”. For instance, in the picture below, I want to search for marketing blogs and that gives me a pretty good list to start with.

Once you’ve exhausted all of the blogs with the search phrase “write for us”, you can then move onto other terms such as:

Contribute
“Guest Blog”
“Guest Bloggers Wanted”
“Become a Contributor”

Twitter

Another place that I frequently find guest posting opportunities is through Twitter. In Twitter’s search feature, I will type in the phrase “Guest Bloggers Wanted”.

I will admit, Twitter isn’t really as good an option as Google is because it’s a bit harder to target your specific niche. If you’ve tried this tactic three or four times without much luck, I would probably focus my efforts on finding compliant blogs using Google.

Target Personal Blogs

If you get a blog post featured on something like Mashable and MarketingProfs, you have the chance to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog – Eventually.

I say eventually because usually sites like these are booked months in advance. And because sites like these are more like media companies than blogs, it’s hard to build a relationship.

I submitted a guest post to MarketingProfs about three months ago and it was accepted. The post still isn’t up, and I forget what I even wrote.

Compare that with a site like https://andynathan.net/. I got in touch with Andy less than two weeks ago. We’ve exchanged emails, and the post is now live.

By the time my post on MarketingProfs gets published, I’ll have dozens of posts on blogs like Andy’s driving significant and qualified traffic to my site.

Guest Post Ratio

When I look at new blogs, one of the biggest mistakes that I see is that they are spending far too much time creating content for their own site.

Instead of writing four posts on your blog each week, cut that back to two, and spend the rest of your time guest posting.

Your blog will attract more readers that way.

2. Get Others to Talk about You

Let’s say your company creates Facebook fan pages for businesses. One of the things that you can do is work for free for a blogger in return for an endorsement.

Here’s what you can do.

Find bloggers in your niche with large audiences who could benefit from both reading your blog and your fan page service.

I’ll assume that if the blogger has a large audience, he also has a fan page. Chances are, even if the fan page is good, it’s probably not perfect.

Send the blogger an email pointing out a few ways that you can improve the performance on the fan page. Share with him the results that he can anticipate with his improved fan page. And then tell him that you will fix it for free, in return for an endorsement of some kind.

This will make your expertise incredibly obvious to a large audience and build trust for your business and your blog.

3. Remove the Clutter

Another mistake that I see when I visit some blogs is the overwhelming clutter. These blogs have three or four columns and multiple distractions, including social media buttons.

Many blogs have multiple calls to actions. Do you want me to read your ebook, watch your webinar, or buy your product?

When someone comes to your blog, what is it that you want them to do?

Here are a few options:

Sign up for your newsletter
Watch your webinar
Friend you on Facebook
Buy your product or service

Once you’ve determined what it is you want the reader to do, then build your entire blog around that one action.

On my blog, I want people to download my ebook, which puts them on my mailing list. In order to make that 100% obvious, I’ve removed all other distractions. You can’t even get to my Twitter profile from my blog.

Is that a bit extreme? Perhaps it is. However, I find that to be the most effective way to accomplish my goal of getting readers of the blog onto my mailing list.

4. Start with Your Customer Base

One of the most forgotten ways to grow the readership on your blog is to start with your current and former customers, even if you have a relatively small customer base.

It’s not always the size of your audience, it’s the quality of your reader that matters.

Your current and past customers are much more likely to trust you and value what you have to say because they know first-hand that you know your stuff.

These are also people who are much more likely to share your content with their friends, like your Facebook fan page and follow you on Twitter.

Start to cultivate a little community, even if that community consists of just ten members. If you are loyal to that community and provide them extremely valuable content on a consistent basis, your blog will grow quickly into a valuable asset for your business.

Final thoughts on how to get more people to read your blog

Growing a readership base for your blog isn’t exactly rocket science. However, it does take hard work, determination and an extreme amount of persistence.

None of the four tactics to get more people to read your blog will work every time. They might not even work half of the time. However, if you are dedicated to growing your blog, you will be surprised at how quickly your readership will grow.

Greg Digneo is the author of the new blog Sales Leads in Thirty Days which shows marketing agencies and consultants on how to get more clients in 30 Days.

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