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How do you get visitors to your blog?

Your blog is brand new and you want the world to follow it. Rest assured, building a loyal following of blog visitors is an ongoing challenge for almost all bloggers, unless you’re, say, Lady Gaga.

Blog profile iii
To make the task a bit more manageable let’s break it down into steps, and think about it in terms of what you want people to do:
Blog profile
Obviously not everyone who hears about your blog will end up subscribing. A proportion of people will drop out at each step, often for reasons that are nothing to do with how good your blog is. Some people will subscribe and enjoy your blog without ever commenting, others may leave one-off comments or share a blog post or two without actually subscribing. To get people to even just view your blog you need to build awareness of it.

Cast your net wide

Who is your audience? The more niche your subject matter, in some ways, the easier it will be to raise awareness of your blog, because there is probably already an online community centred on your area of interest that you can make connections with.
But to begin with, you may have no idea how to reach that niche and generate blog visitors. So you have nothing to lose by casting your net wide. This strategy may well change once you start connecting with your audience. But to begin with, the more people that come across your blog, the more chance there is that a few of those people will be your future blog subscribers.

Tell your friends and ask for their help

Let family, friends, and, if you feel you can, colleagues know about your blog. Give them the web address, and (this bit is important) ask them to help you start building a readership by telling others about it.
Rather than saying ‘please visit my blog, which is all about baking,’ refer people to something specific, such as a recipe you’ve just posted or a fun giveaway you’re running. Announcing that you’ve started a blog is also a great excuse to get back in touch with people and letting them know what you’re up to. A note of warning: be wary of blasting your contacts lists too often. Just because it is easy to send an email or update to all your contacts, it is also easy to annoy people with endless promotional messages.

Sweat the small stuff

Put your blog address into your email signature, on your stationery, and onto your business card (if your blog is related to your business) to help raise awareness of what you’re doing and encouraging blog visitors. If you don’t have a business card, think about what you could hand out to people that would get them thinking and talking about your blog. It could be a conventional business card or perhaps something more individual or handmade. Or you could go one further and design a promotional decal sticker for your car! One thing you should definitely do is get a Google Sitemap for your blog, which will help get all your blog’s pages indexed by Google. It’s easy to do—see Google’s help pages or those of your blog host for details.

Start thinking ‘search’

If the research is to be believed, there are two things everyone is doing on the internet: searching the web and social networking (including things like playing games). It’s what online marketers talk about all the time: search and social. Now blogging is inherently social but not all blogs get found in searches. So the sooner you start thinking ‘search,’ the better for building blog visitors!
It's worth tagging images: it helps search engines to index them and who knows what traffic you might gain from image searches! It’s worth tagging images: it helps search engines to index them and who knows what traffic you might gain from image searches!
The good news is that the more frequently you update your blog, the more Google will love you. Search engines are looking to serve up fresh, relevant content in their search results pages (SERPs). To help them find you, make sure you tag your blog posts with relevant keywords—the words or phrases that people are likely to be searching for. Make sure all your content is tagged, including photos, audio, and video.

SEO basics

If your blog host provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) support then you should be able to write the title and description for each blog post. Alternatively you may need to find a plugin for this. Search engines pay attention to page titles, so make sure the title includes your keyword or phrase for that blog post.
Adjust your blog settings so that new posts are given meaningful URLs, rather than numbers, which mean nothing to search engines.
Develop some good in-bound links to your blog. This will be a long-term, ongoing activity and although there are low cost tools and services available on the web to help with this.
Blogging for Creatives is Robin Houghton’s step-by-step guide to everything you need to know about how to design and profit from a beautiful blog that people will want to return to again and again. With advice on which blogging platform to choose, essential tools and accessories, and how to take your blog to the next level, whether you’re looking to create a platform for your creative trade, an inspirational journal, or a hub for people with similar tastes and interests, learn how to benefit from being part of the blogosphere in this accessible, non-techie book.

Blogging for Creatives by Robin HoughtonBlogging for Creatives, by Robin Houghton
£6.99 Download the PDF now!

This PDF version retains the styling of the original print book. RRP for print edition: £12.99