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10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers

Posted By Darren Rowse 28th of February 2006 Blog Promotion 0 Comments

This post has been submitted by Yaro Starak from two of my daily reads – Entrepreneur’s Journey and Small Business Branding. He’s also working on a new site at Blog Traffic King. I’ve asked Yaro to write an introduction to finding readers for a blog – something which I’ll write more on also in the days ahead.

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best mate about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be series about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

This concept can be confusing so I suggest you take a look at the Carnival of the Cats for an example. You can also find a list of all the carnivals and submit your articles at the Carnival Submit Form.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. I think someone forgot to mention the duplicate content penalty with #2. Instead of taking your direct content and submitting it to the article directories, you should probably reword it slightly before doing so.

  2. ‘… the more pillars you have on your blog the better…’

    I like it!

  3. Great tips, just like always…i totally agree with the “pillar” theory, which proved itself for me personally, back to writing now :D

    A.H

  4. Yes the duplicate content penalty can be an issue, however if it applies as it should, your blog post, being the oldest version of your article, will not be penalized.

    I’ve been using article marketing for Entrepreneur’s Journey now for about six months and I believe it’s a good technique. I think the fact the Ezine Articles has become such a useful repository of information people are starting to use it like a library. Hence the article views you get just from EzineArticle.com surfers is valuable, not to mention any times your content is republished elsewhere.

    Personally I think direct referrals, people reading your articles elsewhere and then coming through to your blog, far outweighs any potential SEO issues.

  5. The pillar article idea is an excellent one. Keep in mind, also, that you may not necessarily know in advance what will become such a pillar article.

    A year ago I wrote a very short, two-paragraph article, just sort of expecting it to get a few hits and fade into the obscurity of the archives. Instead, it’s become an article that I refer to at least once a month or so. (Yes, I got that much important information into two paragraphs.)

    Your archives are going to be very important, and you don’t necessarily know in advance whether what you write is going to be an article that gets read today and forgotten, or a timeless classic.

  6. “…your blog post, being the oldest version of your article, will not be penalized.”

    This is definitely the first time i’ve heard of this. Learn something new everyday.

    I’ve submitted a couple in the past, but i’ve always made sure to rewrite a little so as to keep the content on my sites unique. The last point you made sounds pretty good, and I never really thought about it that way either. I guess it boils down to how badly you’re penalized by search engines (let’s just say Google – who are we kidding?). If it’s just that one article/page (which I’m sure it would be), then the referal benefits would outweigh the penalty (like you stated). If the penalty spread across the whole site somehow (like losing a couple of Google cool points), then the obvious choice would be not to.

  7. And now I can go ahead and point a client straight at this pillar article – which saves me a lot of work – and ideally grows readers for both Yaro and Darren.

  8. helena says: 02/28/2006 at 4:33 am

    Google does penalize for duplicate content and is not able to find out what the original source of an article is. Yahoo and MSN do better. See: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Duplicate-Content-Penalties-Problems-with-Googles-Filter/

  9. excellent article. I never knew about this carnival blog stuff, or even
    blogtopsites.
    Brian
    http://www.helplosefat.com

  10. I too didn’t know about Blog Top Sites. I also like the suggestion on the 5 pillar articles. I’ve seen a few new blogs from the big blog networks that have launched with some pretty weak articles, and I think their performance would have been better had they started with those 5 pillar articles. Thanks for that tip too!

  11. I have a question about Ezine.

    Doesn’t cross-posting hurt pagerank?

    I was curious about it before, just asking.

  12. Great ideas. I guess driving traffic to a site is always going to be hard work. The pillar article concept is great.

  13. well,so a pillar article shoud be pretty original,huh?Thanx for the enlightment regarding eZines,pillar articles,carnivals and stuff!!well,I shud put more effort into a pillar now!!

  14. All my posts happened to be pillars.:)

  15. I recently started a weblog in conjunction with my website and I am seriously conflicted about having duplicate content. Both the website and blog reference each other, but I try not to use the articles I post on my website on my blog. I keep thinking that my ‘readers’ (God bless them!) will be reading the same content on two separate sites, but I think I’m finally figuring out that the reader of my website and the potential readers of my blog will not necessarily be on and the same. So, my question is, how much of my website should appear in my blog and vice versa?

  16. Sonya – If your weblog and website are closely interlinked, for example a person who discovers your website would see a big fat “blog” link which is each to follow, and you post the same content to both sites I don’t think that would be a good idea. I wouldn’t be happy to read the article on your website and see that your blog has exactly the same content.

    If your blog and website are not linked together too much then it may not be much of an issue since perhaps your blog will get a different audience to your website as you said.

    However you do risk that one of your sites will be penalized in the search engines because it duplicates the content of the other site. How Google decides to apply this is difficult to determine but the risk is there.

  17. Gaining More Blog Readers Using 10 Helpful Weblog Tips

    So I know I haven’t posted recently as I have been busy with the site’s new design and quite frankly,…

  18. […] 10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers […]

  19. Some great advice their.
    Also creating a link page and swapping links with other sites can bring trickles of visitors as well.

  20. […] This isn’t the post for talking about traffic building strategies (try here and here) – but a holistic approach to building an online income will definitely factor traffic building as a primary objective. […]

  21. This was very helpful. I spend the better part of an hour or so scanning Yaro’s site and I even signed up for his newsletter. He had several great basic tips that I hadn’t thought of, though when I read them thought, “what a dummy I am, I knew that but didn’t do it!”

    Thanks again for another great post.

  22. This was very helpful. I spent the better part of an hour or so scanning Yaro’s site and I even signed up for his newsletter. He had several great basic tips that I hadn’t thought of, though when I read them thought, “what a dummy I am, I knew that but didn’t do it!”

    Thanks again for another great post.

  23. Question about blog name: do you think that a blog should have the same root domain name as the website such as http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/ or should it have an entirely different name than the root domain?

    Thanks for the great blog,
    Mark

    Mississauga Real Estate Blog

  24. Hi Mark,

    If the blog is what the website is all about than the root domain should be the blog. If you have a website and the blog is just part of it then use something like /blog.

    That’s what I recommend anyway.

    Cheers,
    Yaro

  25. HI Yaro,

    Thanks for your thoughts. Since the blog is just part of my site then it sounds like I have done it right by adding /blog

    At least one person agrees with what I have done!

    Thanks again,
    Mark
    Mississauga Real Estate Blog

  26. Thanks Darren,
    I especially like the point about pillar articles, I know from my own traffic stats that there are several articles which have that practical howto about them, and they are the ones which get searched for in google more frequently.
    Cheers,
    Jonesy

  27. Great advice .. now let’s get cracking.

  28. Thankyou!! What I needed to hear. You have to be in for the long haul. I’m only getting dribbles of traffic but I must be patient. Thanks again.

  29. I have a site but not yet start a blog. My blog is expected to launch next week and I’m sure will test some of the great promotion tips above especially article marketing.

  30. Thanks for the very practical and obviously effective tips!!! I plan to include more ‘pillars’ straight away!

  31. Hi Julie,

    I’m glad you found the tips helpful. I’ve been busy adding lots of advice like this to my newsletter so if you enjoyed it I hope you sign-up.

    My course should be ready sometime around May too (fingers crossed anyway!).

    Cheers,

    Yaro

  32. Great tips. I hope they help me get my blogs off the ground.

    Thanks,

    Jason

  33. […] So I know I haven’t posted recently as I have been busy with the site’s new design and quite frankly, I feel like I have hit a wall. We have hit our one month mark and our traffic hasn’t really increased, so I feel it’s important to review steps again and see what needs to happen. Of the sites I follow, one of my favorites is Darren Rowse’s Problogger.net and on his site, he had a post by Yaro Starak called 10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers which is what we are going to follow to see if we gain more readers. So lets review and implement. […]

  34. Thank u for ur tips

  35. […] Easy Article Marketing It Really Works/ Article Marketing Article Marketing Building Traffic With Article Marketing/ Article Promotion To Increase Link Popularity Article Marketing Article Marketing Article Marketing Cat Grassroots Strategy Article Marketing Article Marketing For Bloggers 4 Tips Article Marketing Article Marketing Blizzard Toolbox Marketleap Link Popularity Check Article Marketing Article Marketing Four Article Marketing Secrets To Boost Your Internet Home Business Profits Article Marketing Thank You Sponsors And Network Recap Article Marketing 10 Techniques For Finding Blog Readers Article Marketing RSS Vs Email – Its A Stupid Debate Top Affiliate Article Search Directory Article Marketing Whats The Worth Bookmark and Share:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]

  36. I think, this is the best post/article i have read since long time…

    It is very useful and i can’t wait to start using the pillar system. I hope It will rock…

    Thanks for your practical advice..

  37. Good article. I am a new entrant to blogging. Just learning to post some humor and day to day musings. Reading other’s blogs and offering comments also helps to build up readership.

  38. I’ve been blogging for two months now and I have to admit I don’t update daily my blog. Have to think how to do it daily.

    Also good tips from you about the five pillars article.

    I’ve been reading you blog frequently and find good advices here.

  39. […] 10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers […]

  40. […] If you are just beginning to blog, you are not left out of the problogger agenda.  There is a complete section just for you.  Step by step (loving that structure) advice for starting your blog and achieving readers, and income for it.  It is not soft advice either.  Read articles like “Blog Tools“, “Blog Design for Beginners“, “Using Titles Effectively on Blogs” and one I could of really used when I was first starting, “10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers ” […]

  41. Good techniques, I am guilty of not utilizing most (if not, any) of them, because I’m lazy in that manner. :P I always thought going around town/school/work and telling people about your blog is a pretty nice and lazy way to get visitors.

  42. Hello,
    I am a new blogger, Very usefull tips i got from you

  43. Awesome post!! My blog is only two months old. I’ve been focusing on writing a lot of good posts before I start getting aggressive about promoting it. I’m going to bookmark this post so I can implement all of these.

  44. […] This type of content is also known as ‘pillar articles‘ and ‘attraction tutorials’ (from Brian Clark’s tutorial marketing article). […]

  45. The word “Traffic” really scares me. It still is. It’s very hard to get traffic to any of our website. Wish there is an easy way.

  46. I’ve just recently launched a Cooking Chat blog…have got some of the basic content in there, so these tips are very helpful in terms of how to begin to get traffic. Or at least a few cars on the virtual highway!

  47. Great tips i will try some of them. Carvnival thats a new one for me never heard of that.will look in to it. Nice job.

  48. Darren

    This might be my favorite post that I have read yet. Thanks tons.

  49. wow, I really needed some insight on generating readers. i have just started two blogs awritersink.wordpress.com (an official one) and awritersblueprint.blogspot.com (a narrative). i love to write, so this is a fresh breath of air for me.

    thank you for posting this article! newbies need love too.

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