Building Readership

Having covered how you measure your readership and influence, and four major ways to build your readership, here’s a longer than usual list of small but useful things you can do to build your blog. We’ll start with some basic, cover-your-bases stuff and move on from there to more advanced techniques.

Know your stats. At a bare minimum, you need to know where to find your stats in your blogging software and/or have a Site Meter badge. As RSS continues to ramp up, get that free or paid FeedBurner account!

Who are you? Don’t be coy about your About page and profile if you want to garner readers. Even if you are blogging anonymously, give your readers something.

Master basic social skills. Whether you love or hate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, at least some of your readers love them, so make it easy to vote for your posts. There’s a multitude of ways of doing this, but the simplest is Socializer, a free automatic bookmarking tool by Pierre Far (http://ekstreme.com/socializer). Check it out.

RSS above the fold. For blogs, “above the fold” means before you need to scroll, and that’s where you want your RSS stuff standard, FeedBurner, or specific RSS reader badges to reside. Making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog and save clicks pays off.

Get listed. Multitudes of blog directories are out there. Three you should make the effort to check out and get listed in are Blogwise (www.blogwise.com), Globe of Blogs (www. globeofblogs.com), and Blogarama (www.blogarama.com). Looking for more blog directories? See RSSTop55 (www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55) for an excellent list. Don’t forget website directories that accept blogs, such as Yahoo Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com, paid), the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org, free), and specialty directories in your industry or geographic locale.

Respond to comments. At the risk of boring you, let me say it again: Blogs are a conversation, and that means you absolutely should respond to comments. Doing so will turn first-time visitors into loyal readers.

Be contrarian post on weekends. Conventional blogging wisdom is you shouldn’t post on weekends because fewer people read blogs then. By the same token, there are fewer posts competing for attention.

Show your back stock. One way or another, get a list of your best/most popular posts onto the front page of your blog. There’s no better way of turning a chance meeting into the start of a lasting relationship with your blog.

Give credit and links where they are due. Simply put, the more links out of your blog, the more people will link to your blog. So even when you can’t pin to a specific post, link to that blog or website and give credit where it’s due.

Post when your readers expect you to post. When you post creates expectations. If you post twice a day for months then not at all for two weeks, your readership will drift away. Know what your posting goal is and keep to it, and don’t be shy sharing that with your readers.

Make use of trackbacks. When you’re blogging about some major blogger’s post, either positively or negatively, use your blogging software’s ability to send a trackback to that blogger. You will be surprised how often the trackback recipient will comment on your posts. This technique works only if you’re blogging in earnest, not fishing for links.