Blogging 101 – The basic stuff you have to do
By: Aalia S.If you have a new blog you probably have posts but you don’t have many readers yet. You’re a really lucky person if
you just wake up to a thousand followers. If you aren’t that lucky, here are some tips that can help you get there.
Write great headlines
The single best way to get people to read your post is with a title that hooks the reader. The title is the first thing a reader sees, either on Google results, or your RSS feed, or whenever they land on the post from a link.
Stay relevant and stimulating
You can’t escape this one at all. It’s the rule number one for any blog. If you have a niche, stick to it. People follow you or read your posts because they care about that niche and not too much about how you spent your Christmas break. Your great title got the visitor to start reading… the rest of your post should not let them stop reading.
Use twitter to advertise new posts
It’s a great idea to tap into twitter’s PR capabilities and let the twitter-verse know about your blog posts. Put up a truncated url of your new post and a smart, short message with it on twitter. Let’s see how they resist that offer.
Comment on other blogs
Commenting on a fellow bloggers post is a great way to get clicks. Unless of course you spam! Don’t advertise your blog here, genuinely leave a comment and add to the conversation. Clicks will happen.
Facebook communities
Create a facebook community and be diligent with it. Put up regular blog updates on it. But don’t message every member about small events. It could be quite annoying. Just stick with the basics.
Link within your blog
You can create a buzz for older less viewed posts by linking within your newer posts. For instance, if you have an older post with similar content, you could tell the reader to click on a certain link to read more. You could find a widget that helps you generate similar posts at the foot of each post.
Community participation
If your niche has a community, group or website; participate in it. There might be a place where you could put up your link as well as a place to write about yourself and your blog. This can also help you SEO efforts, as a post discussing why to do something can be linked to a separate post that spells out the how.
Social Bookmarking
Use user friendly icons for stumbleupon, digg and retweet. This one may take a while to fix up on your blog but once there, it’s a big help to your blogging efforts.
As simple as that… how can anyone resist reading your blog now?
