If there is one thing we all fight for as bloggers, it is targeted and increased blog traffic. Without readers, your blog would be a ghost town and no one wants to own an idle website. You want to know how to make a blog popular. You want a community of raving readers for your blog. I know that’s true!
Your blog’s community generally has two categories of readers:
- Returning visitors
- New visitors
Returning visitors have visited your blog before and are coming back for more. Here you find out if there is nothing worthy about your blog, your new visitors ain’t going to come back. So it’s important to build a sticky and attractive blog that grabs and turns your new visitors to repeat readers.
A responsive blogging community is made up of readers who react quickly and positively to your publications. Each time you submit a new post, they are quick to read, comment, share on social media or link back to it from their websites.
When new readers discover your posts from search engines, a mention or link, they just don’t close and quit. They want to hang around, comment or share your articles. Having a large community isn’t enough. The question is how responsive are your readers?
I want to suggest some tips that will help you build a community of responsive readers who will help take your blog to new heights and make it well known.
Recommended: How to Create a Successful Blog
7 tips on how to make a blog popular and build a community of responsive readers
Before we move on, I’d like you to know there are always going to be ghost readers on your blog. These are those who silently read and walk away with the knowledge you share without any engagement (No comment, no shares, etc)
Note however that they are also important in that they add up to your traffic stats. If they don’t engage with you, search engine spiders know they were on your blog. So they can’t be completely hidden.
So let’s now see some helpful tips to help you on how to make a blog popular:
1 – Make your blog posts interesting
There are two things that come to mind each time I want to create a piece of content for my blog:
- The message I want to pass across
- The way I want to convey the message.
Now, you may have a hot piece of information to put through to your readers but the way you carry it forward completely obfuscates its attraction. There are many ways to make your content (even with a boring message) attractive and sticky:
- Use simple language your readers understand without turning to their dictionaries
- Use short paragraphs
- Format properly with bullets
- Use images and videos
- Crack jokes and be conversational in your phrases
- Don’t imitate someone else. Be yourself
- NEVER use misleading titles. Just because you want to attract clicks shouldn’t drive you into misleading your readers in your post titles.
- Adding to the titles, make sure your post introductions are welcoming and sticky.
- Reply to comments on your blog.
- If your readers share your content on social media or link to it from their blogs, show appreciation. Send back a “Thank You” tweet, post, comment or email.
- Always be amongst the first to publish on any new topics in your industry. When people are reading something for the first time on your blog, chances are high for them to engage.
If your readers are comfortable reading something they find useful or quite entertaining on your blog, there is the likelihood for them to respond.
Recommended: 5 Tools to Effectively Promote Your Blog Posts
2 – Give your blog a professional touch
You may have a wonderful or helpful information in your blog posts and a super-exciting way to put it but if your blog isn’t good enough, it may all turn out to be a bad experience.
Fortunately enough, you don’t need to slaughter your wallet to have a professional blog today. From professional hosting to premium themes and plugins, you don’t need over $200 to make it happen.
In any case, these are some of my recommendations to build a professional blog:
- Make sure your blog isn’t slow. Readers don’t have the time to wait for a sluggish website to load. This goes from choosing a good hosting to using fast-loading themes, limiting the number of plugins you have and treating your images to load fast. For some help, here are 10 ways to speed up your WordPress blog.
- Avoid distractions and unrelated advertisements.
- Give your readers sharing facilities. If they can easily figure out where your social buttons are, chances are higher for them to click and share.
- Avoid boring colors, fonts and backgrounds. These are all functions of the theme you choose to use.
3 – Don’t send boring boring emails to your list
I can’t end this post on how to make a blog popular without talking about list building.
It’s one thing to build a list for your blog. It’s another thing to keep it alive. Sending boring and unrelated emails will end up destroying your reputation and killing your community responsiveness.
As a matter of fact, there are two things that matter when it comes to measuring the value of your list:
- Open Rate (OR)
- Click through Rate (CTR)
Your OR is defined by the percentage of your subscribers that end up opening your campaigns. CTR is the percentage that finally clicks the link in your newsletter. Here are a few tips to boost your OR and CTR:
- Make sure your readers sign up to your list themselves. Do not use email extractor to extract and add addresses to your list without user consent.
- Enable double opt in. This way, you will take care and filter out invalid addresses before they even get in
- Make sure you only send professional emails. This isn’t something that easy to do. But you can find help in the linked article.
- Segment your list and only mail relevant segments. Segmentation is a way of cutting your list into different topics so you don’t send materials to the wrong people.
If your list is well maintained and fed with the relevant content, you will always experience outstanding responsiveness from your subscribers
4 – Attend offline blogging events
Did you know the best way to create solid and long lasting connections is to meet like-minded folks face-to-face?
According to Joseph Abboud, “Making a strong first impression is as important as ever, especially when meeting face-to-face”
I’ve met thousands of people online but the few I have actually shook hands with, had a drink or shared something in the physical world have ended up being very responsive readers.
The reason is that we’ve had real contact and the impact is stronger than virtual. There are always offline blogging events around us. Make an effort to attend as a speaker or listener. Take the opportunity to be real and connect with more folks in your industry
5 – Guest post on related blogs
Guest blogging is one of the reasons my blog is popular. But if you do it purposely for backlinks, chances are that you’ll soon hit the wall.
This activity allows you to step in front of an audience built and maintained by someone who trusts your reputation and value of what you represent. Generally, if you portray the backlink drive in your guest blogging pitches, you will constantly face rejection.
If your guest posts are crafted to provide real value to the blog owner’s audience, while you may end up with the backlink, the obvious benefits would be your branding.
Personally, I have had outstanding benefits featuring on relevant blogs as guest author. While the blog owners have become awesome friends who constantly tweet and promote my articles, the clicks and traffic from these articles keep coming in. This article by Nico Prins from Launch Space on guest posting lays it out well.
I understand how difficult it is to submit to popular blogs especially if you are a beginner. That’s why my recommendation is to begin with blogs within your reach. Give yourself time and keep pushing. Don’t give up on rejection. Work hard to improve your skills and steadily, you are going to start hitting bigger audiences.
6 – Engage with your social media subscribers
When it comes to Social Media Marketing, numbers seem to be the most attractive side of the coin. This has deceived many into doing all they can to grow their follower base, and in the process, they end up with bots and fake accounts following them.
If you want to make a blog known and read, one of the things you should do on social media is be real and engage with the blog readers. Don’t just post and run. Give in reasonable time to comment on posts from those you follow, reply to comments, tweets and likes made by your followers.
When folks find out you are not just posting on your timeline but you take off time to engage with them, it inspires confidence and trust. This will always move them from the social media platform to your blog.
7 – Link out to other relevant blogs
Linking out to relevant articles is a powerful way to gain popularity for your blog. But many out of ignorance or stinginess don’t know this.
Each time you link out from your posts, not only are you give your readers additional helpful information. You also stand the chance of having someone step to that article to promote it.
In this guest post, I have linked out to a couple of useful posts on my friends’ blogs. As soon as this post goes live, I’m going to reach out to them with the post url.
Chances are for them to step over here, read and share on social media. They may even go ahead to buy from or connect with Neal. Giving out links to trustworthy blog posts won’t hurt. On the flip side, you stand a huge chance to be promoted.
Making a blog popular isn’t a matter of few days. It requires time and working hard. If you follow these simple steps, definitely, you are getting there. You may want to check out my article on 11 tips to build a popular blog in just 90 days or less
Thanks for reading.