How do I get people reading my blog?

Right, I have now been blogging for around 3 months and my site has still not been listed on Alexa as it is not in the top 100,000 viewed on the Internet. I have however now got a google page rank of 3 and a growing number of readers.

I am therefore going to try and explain the best way to keep readers coming back for more or to keep hooking in new readers. As I am new to the game please do share your opinions in the comments at the bottom but here goes for me.

1) Content

A lot of people say pick a niche market and I am sure this will work, however I have not gone at a niche rather gone for anything and everything. I have aimed directly at pop culture, news and well anything I find interesting. Such as iPhone Jailbreaking.

Remember your blog will be more successful the more you write. If you can write content daily this is a good start as readers will come back reguarly to read your content. Also try to write some tutorials or articles which are original content. Also the more you write the more pages will be indexed by google and other search engines.

2) Site Design

Remember it is important to keep your site design basic and simple to navigate, remembering not to other do it with large images and flash content which takes a long time to load as potential readers may get fed up waiting for the site to load and go elsewhere. I tend to work on if the site takes more than 7 seconds to load most users on the web would have moved on. So try to limit download speed.

3)Broswer Friendly

I recommend you try to keep your site to W3 standards for xHTML and CSS (although my site does not) this will help ensure the site runs in the majority of web browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. This will also help on the SEO (search engine optimisation) of your site, ensuring you gain higher ranks in the search.

4) Articles

Even if your site, such as mine is designed predominately to cover up coming stories, news and film try to write a few articles which are timeless (such as this one on the iPhone ones) if you can make these articles appear high in the google search results your site will receive a lot more visitors. This may keep your hits on your site up when there is a slow day for your blog.

5) Social Media

Social media is the big one. I have around 100 followers on twitter (some are ads and bots) I post every story and article I write to twitter to try and bring in new readers. Some times if covering news stories your post may come up in the trending topics increasing site traffic. I also share my links to new blogs on facebook as your friends may read your content and than choose to share this with Friends and Family increasing the audience you reach. There are many other ways such as:

• Digg
• Del.ico.us
• Reddit
• GBookmarks

And many more.Just check out the share this tool at bottom of blog to see many more ways to share.

6) Blog Directories

Sign your site up to as many blog directories as you feel comfortable with. A lot of these directories ask you to link back to them before they accept your blog in their directory. I am not going to lie this will help you with page ranks and hits. I however have only added my site to a few. My favourite one being Blog Catalog.

Finally - if your using Wordpress I would say use All in One SEO plug-in. This site will help you with SEO so much as you can add keywords to every article/blog you write making your blog/articles appear higher up in google search. I would also recommend the XML-Site-map plug-in. I would recommend designing a site map for your site even if you are not using Wordpress as it helps google and other search bots index your site.

Leave some of your suggestions below.

Related posts:

1. 20 things to blog about
2. No news is good news…?
3. 7 of the most useful Wordpress Plugins
4. One Hundred Posts – And Other Stats