10 Ways to Attract Readers to Your Blog

Congratulations, you are now blogging! But now it is time to take things to the next level and actually get subscribers for your blog. You are writing, that means it would be great if someone were actually reading. Right?

Like anything else, you need to let folks know you are blogging, what you are blogging about, and why they might find your posts interesting, helpful, or inspiring.

How do you let them know? The following are some things that you can do to help spread the word. 

1. Your Website: Make sure you prominently display a link to your blog.
2. Email: Update your email signature to include a link to your blog.
3. Newsletter: If you send out a regular newsletter you can make an announcement and teaser to the blog and in all future issues provide links to new posts.
4. Email Campaign: Looking for a reason to connect with everyone in your database? Think about sending them an email invitation to visit your blog and to subscribe.
5. LinkedIn: Pull your blog feed in automatically. Select ‘more’ under the top navigation and applications will reveal themselves. Select either WordPress or BlogLink and install on your profile. This will pull your blog automatically into your profile for all of your contacts to see and be notified when they get their LinkedIn updates.
6. Facebook: Offers two ways to pull in your blog automatically with their applications. First is the RSS and the second is networkedblogs. Either one will work, we use RSS as it is easier to install and set up, but there is a delay before it appears on your wall. We would love if you would leave a comment and let us know which you prefer.
7. Twitter: There are several third party applications that will feed your blog posts into your Twitter feed. If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform, there is a plugin called Auto Twitter that will automatically post to Twitter for you.
8. Ping.fm: This free service automatically posts to multiple social networks such as Facebook and Twitter (full list here). There are many similar services out there, but Ping has been around for a while and is fairly reliable. Again, we’d love to hear about which service you prefer.
9. Get listed in directories: Searches for blog content at Technorati are done every day. Take advantage and submit your blog’s url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across.
10. Make Sharing Easy: Install one of the many available widgets such as Addthis or Sharethis on your blog. These little apps make it easy for readers to email posts of interest to friends and network connections, share on their bookmarking sites and more. Also don’t forget to add in the “Like” and “Tweet” options so that people can tweet the article or share it on Facebook.

This is by no means an all-inclusive list of ways to grow your subscribers, but should give you enough to get a great start. Make sure you subscribe to this blog for more tips to get your blogging to the next level, and why not share the love by sending this post to your friends and connections using any of the ‘share’ buttons below!