How to reach more blog readers
You are investing in a content marketing strategy of quality, but your posts don’t get all the reach that you expected. You international clients haven’t noticed your website yet, despite all your time (and probably money) invested. Well, it’s high time to do something about this, right?
At this point, you have probably realised that good content is just half of the battle. If you want to increase the number of page views, you’ll have to implement (or improve) your self-promotion techniques. Do you want to know how you can do so? Then stay with me and keep reading.
Why do you want to get more readers?
The answer to this question is essential, as it’ll be the core of your promotional strategies. What I want you to be aware of at this point is that more views do not necessarily mean more conversions or sales.
It’s better to have a blog with 100 visits a day and 50% of conversion rate, rather than a blog with 1000 visits a day and 2% of conversion rate.
That’s why you should pay attention to your website’s analytics and be sure that what you want to improve is your page views and not something else (for example, your conversion rate).
Ok, I’m sure I want to reach more readers. What can I do?
Sometime you feel that all the time invested in writing good content isn’t paying off. No one reads or comments your posts. Have you ever felt like this? No worries, me too. We all have been there at some point. So, let’s see what can we do!
- Focus on your niche and find out what your audience want to read.
You need to have in mind your audience when you’re writing your content. They are the most important part of your blog. If you’re tackling their needs, you’ll be building a loyal audience.
Use social media to know what your audience is interested in. Analyse the trending topics on Twitter and ask them directly. That’s also a good way to engage with them.
You can also join forums and analyse the type of questions that people are asking. Maybe you can solve their problems writing a blog posts about a question that is frequently repeated!
- Self-promotion and reuse your content.
Don’t be afraid of promoting yourself. If you’re creating quality content, people will be interested in reading it. Add the link of your blog in your social media profiles and your email and forum signatures.
It’s also important to create evergreen content that you can reuse throughout your promotional channel. For example, if you’ve published a blog posts on X topic, then you can try and create an infographic to share it in your Pinterest account. This way you can create two types of content from the same topic.
- Make it sharable.
How easy is to share your content? The easier, the better. Make sure that you’re using social sharing buttons at the end of your posts. Personally, I use the WordPress plugin AddToAny. (Have you got any other suggestions?)
Try to end your posts with a strong call-to-action. Let your audience know what you want them to do with each post.
- Combine your blog with social media channels and a newsletter.
Decide which social media channel is better for you. Where are you going to find your audience. Personally, I focus on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, but maybe you prefer to Pinterest or Instagram if your content is more visual.
Statistically, Facebook is the social media network that will bring you more traffic to your website. If you invest enough time to build a loyal community on Facebook, you’ll benefit greatly from it.
If you are going to use LinkedIn and its new blog platform, try to make it personal and keep it professional. It could be the best tool to network with other professionals in your industry.
Email marketing can be very beneficial. It’s a good way to address personally to you audience and offer added value.
- Collaborate with other bloggers
I’m always opened to new collaboration. For example, you can read a couple of interviews and collaborations that I did for Websites for Translators, Intouch Translations or Clases de Traducción. I think it’s a good way to bring new eyes to your blog and build relationships with other businesses.
You can also accept guest blogs from other bloggers and write for other bloggers to promote your blog. Guest blogging are beneficial for both your blog and the blogger that writes a guest blog.
- Pay attention to SEO and SSO.
If you work on your SEO in every single post that you write, your website will rank higher in search engines, which will be translated into more organic visits.
On the other hand, people that don’t rely on SEO start talking about social search optimisation. I think that this is a new technique that we should bear in mind for the future, as Internet users are increasingly searching for content directly on their social networks.
- Evaluate your titling strategy.
We can’t deny that an appealing title will get more clicks and, therefore, more visits to your website.
Here you can find a good blog post on how to write the best titles for your blog posts.
- Set an editorial calendar.
If you want to build a loyal audience, let them know when to expect your posts. Are you going to posts twice a week? Twice a month? It doesn’t matter, but tell your audience.
If you want to increase the number of readers of your blog, you should consider increasing the number of blog posts that you publish for a while.
- Invest in the promotion of your blog: SEM and ads.
There’s nothing wrong with paying to promote your blog. You can launch an ad campaign on social media or invest in SEM to rank in the first searches of Google to reach more blog readers.
However, make sure that the money that you invest pays off. Take your time to define your audience and plan where to launch your campaign.
- Don’t forget your passion.
Don’t forget that you like what you do. Having a blog can be time consuming and sometimes you can feel that all the efforts that you’re making are useless. When this happens, take a rest, think of what you’re doing, revaluate your strategies and never give up.
When you feel that you’re forced to write for your blog, your audience is going to notice it.
What about you? Would you add any other strategy to reach more blog readers? Leave a comment below!
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