How to Get More Readers for Your Blog
When I mention blog readers I mean visitors who become active readers and/or RSS feed subscribers. These are visitors who read your content on a regular basis and enjoy what you have to offer. Attracting visitors and creating loyal readers can be two completely different things.
Generating the right kind of traffic is very important when you’re trying to get more readers for your blog. Make sure you’re optimizing your site for keywords or keyword phrases that direct to real content that your target audience will benefit from or enjoy. Give your readers what’s in their best interest and what will actually help them with whatever it is they are trying to accomplish.
I’ve recently seen a lot of forum posts with people asking how to get more readers for their blog and generate return visitors. The answer is simple and I can’t repeat this enough. Blogging is a community and one of the greatest ways to generate blog readers is by commenting on similar blogs or participating in group discussions on related forums.
For example, your blog is all about sports cars and you want to attract readers interested in sports cars.
Blogs:
1. Find blogs relating to or discussing sports cars
2. Register for that blog
3. Read the blog articles and provide good solid comments frequently
- Add a link to your blog every time you comment
- This is also a great way to build backlinks for your blog
Forums:
1. Find forums discussing sports cars or containing your target audience (ie: young males)
2. Register on the forum
3. Actively participate in discussions
- Add a link to your blog in your signature, it will show up every time you post or reply
- If other members respect what you have to say they’ll most likely visit the links in your signature
Remember a little participation goes a long way!
Easily Find Your Search Engine Rankings
Those of us in the niche marketing and internet marketing world are addicted to checking our stats. We check our Feedburner subscribers, our Twitter followers, and how many Diggs our posts have. We also check our Google analytics, how many comments our blog posts have, how many backlinks we have and we also check our search engine rankings.
I recently found a great tool for checking your search engine rankings, called ExactFactor. ExactFactor is a fairly new tool that does quite a lot of things, and best of all, it’s free. You can check the search engine rankings for one of your sites and a competitors for up to 3 keywords/session without having to register. Your search engine placement is checked for Google, Yahoo, and Live searches.
Here’s some screenshots:
You can also register to their site, to have your search engine placement checked for 10 different keywords. In addition to weekly alert updates, you can also be notified when your site hits the top ___ (1, 5, 10, 20, etc.) for the 10 words you specify.
This isn’t the only search engine rankings tool out there, but I recently found it, and it’s quick and easy, so I wanted to share it with you. Hope this helps track your niche marketing progress!
General Marketing vs Niche Marketing
This is a topic heavily discussed in the marketing community and within companies in general. Should I use general marketing or niche marketing to reach my customer?
Most experts will agree that without a doubt niche marketing is the clear winner. Often times niche marketing allows you to reach your customer or target audience easier using only a portion of the marketing budget. This is obtained by narrowing down your specific customer and marketing to them directly.
For example, if you are trying to obtain visitors by targeting the keyword “movies” on Google it’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself on the first page anytime soon. This would be considering marketing visitors looking for “movies” in general.
If you’re running a website that sells all kinds of movies then great… you’ve at least targeted a customer. The problem is that by being unable to compete for page1 on Google, visitors rarely ever visit page2, it’s unlikely you’ll get any traffic from the keyword “movies” in the near future.
Another thing you’ll need to consider is that if a visitor types in movies you don’t know what kind of movies they are inquiring about. It’s possible that you don’t have the movie they’re looking for or maybe they’re trying to look up the dictionary definition. If the market you target is too general it’s hard to tell what your visitors are actually looking to achieve.
On the other hand by using niche marketing you’re targeting a more specific customer and a niche in the general market. A niche could be as broad as “adventure movies” or something more specific like “tom cruise movies”. This allows you to provide content that is geared toward your target audience. If your niche is something as simple as “tom cruise movies” your content would contain all the movies Tom Cruise had a part in.
With niche marketing it’s easier to understand your audience and provide the content they desire. It’ll be easier for you to compete in search engine rankings and allow you to profit by providing links to purchase niche based items such as Tom Cruise movies.
