What can you do to grow your blog? It’s not as tough as you’d think.
To gain readers and traffic, be authentic, write well and often, understand what your readers want and give it to them, and create a presence where readers can congregate.
That sums up the blogging mantra of Darren Rowse, the Aussie behind ProBlogger and Digital Photograph School, and one of the first to make a decent fantastic living solely from putting words (and pictures) into posts.
Rowse started blogging 10 years ago and began supporting himself and his family as a full-time blogger several years after that. In blogging circles, he’s best known for ProBlogger, which runs advice for beginning and intermediate level bloggers. But today Digital Photography School, which he started in 2006 to help people take better pictures with their phones or digital cameras, gets six to seven times the traffic.
Rowse discussed the formula he’s come up with for getting more readers and blog traffic in a recent webinar. I’ve condensed what he shared into these tips:
1. Understand who you want to read your blog.
The more you can picture who you want to reach, the better you’ll be able to target the material you put on your blog. Rowse suggests creating a hypothetical reader profile, or multiple profiles if you’re targeting different types of readers. Knowing who your potential readers are will also help you find them online, he says. If you already have a blog, you can survey readers to find out more about them (age, location, interests, where they hang out online, etc.). That’s information that can come in handy not only for deciding what to blog about but also what events to sponsor and what type of guests to invite to meetups, Rowse says. But not all readers are created equal. One mention on Reddit can bring in a swarm of readers, but they typically aren’t kind that stay long or come back, he says. “I’d prefer 100 readers I want over 10,000 readers I didn’t really want,” he says.
2. Create posts that meets readers’ needs, then promote the heck out of ’em.
It might be your blog, but it’s not about you. For a blog to take off, it has to appeal to readers. When you write, write with readers in mind. Good content is a good start, but “a build it and they will come mentality isn’t enough,” Rowse says. If you’re just starting out, you have to actively promote your posts and blog by writing guests posts for more prominent blogs in your field, interacting with readers on Facebook and Twitter, and going to industry events. “You need to get off your blog and go find those readers because no one else is going to do it for you,” he says. That leads to his next point:
3. Figure out where readers gather and be there.
If the majority of people who read or subscribe to your blog hang out on Facebook, you should be on Facebook. If they’re on Twitter, be on Twitter. If they’re on Google+, be there. If you know where readers are and where they gather, you’ll also have an idea where you should go to find more of them.
4. Build a useful presence in those places.
Write guest posts, comment on blog posts, answer questions on forums, build relationships with bloggers and forum members, do all of the above. Your goal is to “build authority, be useful, and be generous,” Rowse says. “It’s not just about directing people back to you, but sharing information.”
5. Engage the readers you have.
Building a blog isn’t just about amassing more new readers. You need to share the love with long-time readers too. By serving existing readers, you empower them to take ownership of your site, so they’ll think of it as “theirs” and share it with their own network. When one person shares your site with someone in their network, you’ll end up with more readers of the kind you already have, which is a good thing, he says. An easy way to get readers engaged with your blog is running a challenge. DPS has photo challenges where Rowse asks readers to take pictures of certain things and then share them on the blog. Or have a discussion. Write a post of 4 or 5 sentences and ask readers to weigh in with what they think. Getting readers to interact “takes them a step closer to becoming evangelists for your site,” he says.
6. Give people relevant and easy ways to subscribe and or belong.
Find out how readers prefer reading your posts and then give them what they want. In the early days of DPS, readers wanted a forum, so Rowse created one. They also prefer getting posts via email over RSS feeds, so he made it easy to sign up to get DPS posts via email. How do you find out what readers prefer? Ask them through a survey or poll.
7. Stick to a schedule.
Another way to drive engagement and traffic is to stick to a regular posting schedule, and use ways to introduce existing content to readers new and old. On Thursdays or Fridays, Rowse runs lists of recent posts. He also publishes frequent series, with multiple posts on a related theme based on posts that he digs up from the archives.
8. Create share-able content.
Track your website analytics to find out what types of posts readers are more likely to share and run more of them. On DPS, resource posts get shared a lot, so Rowse runs them on a regular basis. Resource posts don’t have to be written from scratch. Rowse recently ran a post on DPS called “21 Settings, Techniques and Rules all New Camera Owners Should Know” that consisted of links to 21 previous posts, each one with a paragraph and photo describing what it was about. Share-able content can be fun – funny photos, holiday themes, seasonal topics, or inspirational sayings. Ask readers to pick their favorite of something, and run a post with the most popular responses. If you use Pinterest’s “Pin It” plug in to let people pin your content to their Pinterest boards, you can see what types of posts they’re sharing and use that as a guide for running more of the same. Rowse recently used Zeen.com, an app that creates an online magazine from a collection of blog posts, to create a magazine of 15 digital photography tutorials that had previously run on DPS. The post went crazy. “In one day, 4,000 people had viewed it, and we had 300 visitors to DPS from it,” he says.
9. Repeat all of the above.
Once you’ve done everything on the list go back and do everything over again. Continue refining who your audience is, the best ways to reach and engage them, and the kind of information you should be sharing with them. Rowse says if he’d stuck to what he did five years ago to attract readers neither of his sites would be where they are today. He continues to change strategies and experiment.
Got your own formula for gaining readers for your blog? Please share by leaving a comment.
Fantastic tips. Thank you Michelle (and Darren!).
Now I just need to do it… 😉