Blogs are a powerful way to pull readers to your website, to educate and entertain them and lead them to action on your website. But how do you attract readers to your blog?
Compelling, useful and regularly updated material is, of course, essential. But other communication tools can also be useful to advertise your blog across the web.
Twitter: I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for a few months now and have more than 100 followers (people who have clicked to ‘follow’ - aka subscribe - to my Twitter feed). This is a small number compared to the many people with thousands of followers but the number is steadily growing every day.
So how do I attract them to my blog?
I put up an appealing (I hope!) Twitter post (aka a Tweet) about each blog post I make, and link back to my blog post. My followers and the many other Twitter readers can see it and can visit my blog, if they are attracted to my message, simply by clicking on the link . If you search and monitor the Twitter traffic, you will easily find people with an interest in the information on your blog and can tailor your Twitter messages to attract them.
Similarly with social media sites: I put up brief posts about my blog items on a social media site with a similar subject matter to this blog. People read the post and then come to my blog to learn more. Measurement of my most heavily read blogs shows that a significant readership has come directly from this social media site.
Email: The Copyblogger site recommends pushing people to your blog using an email newsletter. Copyblogger says email your blog’s RSS feed as a newsletter; start a simple opt-in email newsletter; link back to your blog; and place newsletter subscription tools everywhere.
You have to experiment a bit with linking to your blog from various other online services, but give it a go and see what works for you.
You might also be interested in these articles from other sites:
Four ways companies use Twitter (Read Write Web)
Fifty ideas on using Twitter for business (Chris Brogan)
