3 Ordinary Blogging Tactics To Grow Your Audience
We often ask “How can I attract more traffic to my blog?” without giving enough thoughts on “How can I grow the number of audiences on my blog bigger?”
We’re searching for ways, day and night, to increase the traffic to our blog, from link building to forum posting, link selling and buying, without finding ways to increase our blog readership.
Does the traffic mean much more than our audience?
No, I personally believe that audience is equally important as traffic and while we are focusing on building our blog traffic, we should not forget about how to grow our blog audience.
That’s because sometimes, traffic comes and goes, unless you make some hook to transform them into readers and subscribers. For instance, I received more than 1500 visitors for the article about 22 ways to make money online. However, after 2 days, my blog traffic’s back to normal. No conversion is made, no increasing in subscribers. You may argue that’s because SU is not a target source of traffic. Then, how’s about target traffic through Google? I agree it has a bit more quality, but again, if you don’t create some hook to transform that target into your audience, your blog is pretty doomed.
Audience is different. They can be your RSS subscribers, they can be someone who visit your blog often. They can even be newcomers who hear about your blog through viral effect. They’re a part of your blog. They tweet and comment on your posts. They spread your blog out. In the long-term, audience contribute greater value to your blog than the traffic.
People who can become your audience come from 3 different sources:
- People who you networking to. They can be friends or people whom you talk to in an event or conference, who show great interest in your blog and may become your audience prospects.
- People who know you through viral effect. They are the people who hear about your blog through the core audience, so they decide to check your blog out to get more information.
- People who are from search engines. If you offer much value to them, they may become your audience prospect as well.
And here are the 3 tactics I often see A-list bloggers apply to grow their audience much more bigger
Write great posts
You may see writing great posts as a top item in many list, but to what extend a post can be seen as a great post and how you could write one?
The definition about a great post vary from individual to individual but according to lots of bloggers, great post is post that has 2 or more following characteristics:
- From 2000 words and up. This is the first condition of a great post. It doesn’t mean short post is considered not a good post, but because longer post tends to contain more in-depth information.
- It’s deeply researched. You can tell which post is deeply researched before author write it from facts, figures and graphs given in the post. The well-researched post makes readers put more trust into the validity of the information.
- Contains lots of examples. I really admire bloggers who write post that has a lot of examples. I don’t know where they take them but examples give much more clarity for the content as well as motivate readers. Examples from author’s experience is better because it somehow connects the author’s personal life with readers.
Here’re 2 questions that you can always ask yourself to know whether you have written a great post or not:
- Will this post be helpful to my readers?
- Will readers are willing to share it with other people?
If you can really answer these two questions after you write, your post has a good chance of becoming a great post.
Create a Small E-book, Guide, Manual, How-to and Offer It For Free
This tactic works well in most cases. You spend several days or so creating e-books about a passionate topic of you. Then, let other people download it for free.
It’s really odd if you require them to subscribe to your newsletter and download the e-book. I mean, there are plenty of chances you could invite them to subscribe to the newsletter. In addition, if they really like you, they will subscribe right away, which leads to higher conversion than when you force them to subscribe to.
And don’t forget to promote your e-book through friends and your network so you can grow more audience.
When Corbett at Thank Traffic blog offers his e-book, “18 months, 2 blogs, six figures“, for free, guess how many people he attracted? Over 7986 readers come to his blog over the past 5 days and among them, some may become his main audience. What he has achieved so far really motivates me into publishing my own manifesto soon.
Pay Attention To Offline Promotion
As I observed, most bloggers still don’t have a business card which they can trade to people who care about blogging in social media events or conferences.
It’s a very big mistake because as I learn in my e-commerce class, according to a research, offline promotion leads to 1/3 sales online. So, if we assume you hand out 1000 business cards to people, you have a good chance to attract at most 300 people to your blog.
In addition, business cards are easy to print and buy today for as low as 1 cent per card. You can go to VistaPrint or Print Place to print a whole box which contains about 250 card for you.
Any missing point?
Those are the three things I see most bloggers apply to grow their blog audience. Do you have your own way that you want to share with us? Please comment below..
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