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Thursday, October 9, 2008

10 Places to Find New Readers For Your Blog

By Thomas Sinfield

Everyone is looking for new readers for their blog! I don't care if you're getting 1 million unique visitors a day, you are still looking for ways increase your reach across the internet! So I am going to take a quick look at 10 easy ways that you can find new readers for your blog.

1. Comment Your Commenters

Usually when a blogger comments on your post it is because it is of relevance to them and their blog. So why not stop on over at their blog also, return the favour and see if you can grab some of their readers. If you are in a similar niche, chances are you will gain quite a few new readers from this method!

2. Step Outside Your Niche

I have found the goldmine for getting new readers for my blog was to step outside of my niche when commenting on blogs. Sure a lot of my readers are 'MMO' or 'blog about blogging' bloggers, but I also have a lot of general bloggers, mum bloggers and dad bloggers, who may not be as focused on making money but want to learn how to improve their blogging.

What I did to find these blogs was to do A LOT of blog hopping, where I'd visit the commenter of one blog, then the commenter of that blog etc etc, and this chain would lead me to niche blogs that I would not normally visit! Become active outside of your niche!

3. Forums

Forums are another tool for getting new readers I absolutely love! That is because it really does work. For me one blog alone is usually one of my highest referrers each month - and I am not even as active their as I used to be.

For me, being in the internet marketing/MMO/ blog about blogging niche, I focus on webmaster forums. The pick for me is Digital Point because the community is massive and they have a link to you latest blog post from each post you make on the forum! Another growing blog in my niche is BlogPremiere which also provides me with a nice amount of new traffic!

4. Google

Search engines are great ways to increase your traffic because although it takes a while to happen, when it does, it is a constant flow that continues to work for you - even when you're sleeping!

The keys to generating search engine traffic from your blog posts is:

* Optimise Your Posts For Keywords

* Put Your Keywords In Titles

* Talk About What Is Popular

* Use Keyword Tools Like Micro Niche Finder

5. Social Bookmarking

I must say this is something I tried to work out, but still havn't. However saying that, I know a lot of bloggers that have had massive (and I mean massive) influxes of traffic from social bookmarking websites like DIGG and Stumble.

If anyone has a post where they explain how to be successful in Social Bookmarking, feel free to link to it in a comment below!

6. Guest Blogging

If you are looking to expand out of just commenting on blogs and want to show readers your quality of posting before they visit your blog, then guest posting is for you. There are a lot of bloggers that would love for you to make a guest post on their blog. In fact I probably get at least one email a week asking if I will do a guest post.

A lot of bloggers are busy and would love a hand to lighten the posting load. This is your opportunity to show other bloggers readers why they need to be reading your blog also. One thing thought, do not right about you and your blog. Provide quality content that will benefit your host blog as well.

A few blogs I have guest posted on are:

* Tyler Cruz

* Carl Ocab

* Ian Fernando

* MixedMarketArts

* RetireAt21

7. Hold A Contest

This has to be one of the most popular ways for bloggers to quickly increase their readers and thast because it works! I have run as well as been apart of my fair shar of competitions and each time I have seen a nice increase in my traffic stats, comments per post, and rss feed count.

There are a lot of differnt types of contests so here are a few to get to you thinking:

* Self Hosted Contest

This is where the contest is for your blog only, and you offer prizes for things like:

o Random Email Subsribers (To boost feed count)

o Random Commenters (Boost traffic and comment counts)

o Challenge/Word Game (To get readers coming back)

* Multiple Blogger Contests

This is where you are competing against other bloggers for a prize yourself, and usually involves you providing incentives and contests for your visitors. A couple of examples of this are:

o The famous 'John Chow vs Shoemoney' contest

o Tyler Cruz vs Winning The Web

o Daily Blog Tips 'Blogging Idol'

8. Give Away Something

Giving something to your readers has to be one of the best ways of keeping them. I am sure you have seen all the blogs giving away a free product (usually an ebook) to every reader who subscribers to their blog.

The reason they do this is because people love getting things for free and if the ebook is something that interests them then they will quickly give up their email address to get it! And most bloggers know that people are usually way to lazy to take the time to unsubscribe to things!

9. Submit Posts To Article Directories

This is something I have been doing on and off since I started with internet marketing and bloggging about 18 months ago. All I can say is it works! I haev had one article have over 12,000 views and a couple more each with a few thousand view each. This is a great way to get free traffic for about 2 mintues work. I usually just submit to EzineArticles, but there are 100's of other article directories if you want to spend the time to submit.

10. Entrecard

Now I wouldn't say that Entrecard is the best source of traffic, but any traffic is good traffic right? Now you could just go search for lists of blogs with the entrecard widget to drop, but why not be a bit more efficient and look for lists of blogs that promise to return the favour?


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