» Blog Readership

When blogging, one thing you always want to do is to keep in touch with your readers. You’ll always have your quiet readers who never comment, etc, but there ways to get them to speak up…without having them actually speak up, which we’ll get into later.

But to the point, it’s very important to connect with your readers to be a successful blog. Because, let’s face it, without your readers…you don’t have much of a blog, do you? There are a few ways to connect with your readers that take little time or work on your part.

The first thing you can do as a blogger is simply get involved with the comments that your readers read. For some unknown reason, many bloggers will read the comments but don’t really take the time to interact with them. I’m not sure why? I mean, in a way, you have a very small “celebrity” type personality when you own a blog, and people do enjoy hearing from you, the blogger…so take the time to write back to their comments, be it a question or not. It’s lets the reader know you are reading what they’re writing and are willing to take time out of your busy schedule to let them know they’re important.

Another important way to connect with your reader is using the “social platform” method, which is simply letting your bloggers know more about you. As a blogger, you should fill out your “About Me” areas of your blog and do so thoroughly. Readers like to know about the blog owner/author and it’s a good feeling for the reader to have more than just an idea or image in their head about who exactly you are. Pictures also work well. A face to put next to the writing really improves a readers perception of you and your blog. In addition to the “social platform” method, you also should take the time out to connect with your readers through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. If you don’t have an account, time to sign up. Make sure you let your readers know you have profiles on those websites as well.

Lastly, use your sites content to your advantage. Through the stats page in your blogging platform, you’ll be able to see the popular postings and what people like. In addition to that, set up public polls that will allow readers to help you decide what types of things will improve your blog. There are many readers that are quiet (as I stated above), that will be more than willing to anonymously help you improve your blog…so let them. Ask simple questions about how you can improve your blog, what they would like to see more of, see less of, etc.

It’s very important that you include your readers in your decisions, because without your readers, you have a journal…not a blog.

One thing that I’ve always recommended bloggers do is make sure to include a picture in their blog post, be it actually within the text of the article or on the default/preview home page (as exampled by this blog). As interesting as your articles might be, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Not only does the picture captivate the reader and bring them in, it also adds a little needed spice to your article.

Oddly enough though, finding pictures (especially the RIGHT picture) proves to be challenging at times. Personally, I always have used Flickr.com or Yahoo.com and their picture search engine to locate the pictures I needed. The main problem I continually ran into though was the pictures were rarely what I asked for and/or the pictures were unavailable to be saved to my computer or linked to, defeating the purpose.

Google provided a similar service to that of Yahoo’s picture search engine, which yielded similar results, but they’ve revamped their picture search engine to make it much more user friendly as well as the ability to search for different types of picture licenses.  Though, it does take a bit of searching to find the needed page, so you’ll need to look carefully. To find the new features, you’ll need to click the Advanced Image Search page and then  under the usage rights section you will see a drop down menu with different types of licenses that you can search for. This is an extremely nice feature to have as you should be aware that not all images are free for you to use.

To use the Advanced Image Search, click here

Old blog posts - what are they good for?! Actually - a whole lot! You might think they’re a waste, but Findableblogs.com tells us how to use our old posts to our advantage. A must read for any blogger.

You’ve probably been there: you spend hours writing a great blog post, get some good feedback on it, and (justifiably) feel like a brilliant blogger. But then, a week or two later, the post has been replaced by newer entries on the front page, effectively relegating it to the dark corners where readers seldom venture.

Sure, you might still get a little Google traffic, and if it was a really good post, hopefully some other bloggers linked to it and you’re still getting a few visitors clicking through. But wouldn’t it be nice to keep the post alive and kicking on your own blog?

Fortunately, it’s not that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress (I mention some plugins below that are for WordPress blogs, but you might be able to find equivalent ways of doing these things on other platforms, too). Read on to discover a few tricks you can use today.

Help readers find related information

The easiest way to keep old posts visible is to link to them. It’s also extremely effective: you can pretty accurately predict what will be interesting to a reader based on what they’re currently reading.

To see the rest of the article click the link below:

Resource: http://www.findableblogs.com/get-more-from-your-blog-posts/

Do you ever wonder who is reading your blog? If not, it might be beneficial for you to find out. It’s become very important to not only find out who is reading your blog, but, to find the correct reading audience for your blog niche. Findableblogs.com has a very in-depth article on ways you can identify your ideal blog reader:

If you’re convinced that you need to create an ideal reader, you’ll be eager to dig into the details. Get a notebook and pen, or use your computer and open up a text editor. Let’s go!

Start with generalities:

• Who is your target audience for your product or service? Does it make sense for your ideal reader to be the same?
• Thinking about your business goals for your blog, who is the target audience that is most likely to help you reach those goals? For instance, if one of your big goals is three leads a week, then your ideal reader is someone who is your ideal customer, but has increased motivation to take action now. If a big goal is to increase credibility and become known as an expert, your ideal reader might be a person who’s considered an expert among his or her peers and has a lot of connections and influence.
• What is your reader’s main motivation to visit your blog? In the first example above, the “ideal customer” is motivated to find a solution to a problem that’s currently causing discomfort or pain. On the other hand, the “connected expert” (in the second example) is more likely looking for interesting information that he can pass on to his circle to enhance their opinion of him and cement his good reputation.

Once you have some general ideas about your ideal reader, start to narrow it down and discover a single person that would read your blog. You might be able to use an existing customer or colleague as your model. Feel free to start writing a bit of a narrative rather than just answering each question individually.

• Is your reader male or female? How old?
• Is your reader tech-savvy?
• Where does your reader currently get the information he/she needs? For instance, talking with people, books, magazines, websites, etc.
• Why will this reader care about your blog?
• What’s significant about where your reader works, lives, shops, and or/plays?
• How knowledgeable is your reader about your topic?
• Is your reader reading for personal enrichment or professional development?
• Is your reader’s need for your knowledge urgent or curiosity-driven?

To see the rest of the article click the link below:

Resource: http://www.findableblogs.com/how-to-identify-your-ideal-reader/