Building Blog Readership One Comment at a Time

Building a readership base for your blog is the single most challenging aspect of blogging. Setting up a blog, and defining its purpose is relatively easy compared to the task of attracting visitors. This is the nitty gritty of blogging which frustrates new bloggers the most. Before I suggest a particular method to help you gain visitors, let me make sure you appreciate the role quality content plays in driving traffic to your blog.

The first thing to understand in building a readership base is you will only attract visitors if you have quality content. The type of people you want reading your blog can not afford to waste time reading stuff which doesn’t have much relevance to them.  Even if you were to attract them with poor content, they’ll leave quickly asking “where’s the beef” and never come back. That is why it is essential that you understand your audience and write simple, quick but very relevant content - and do it consistently.

However, even after you start writing quality content you will realize that it can still take some time to attract visitors to your blog. That is where you have to come to grips with the fact that you do not blog in a vacuum. You blog in a context. This means you need to join forces with others who share your interests and passion and blog together in an “ethereal-togetherness”. No blogger blogs alone. Bloggers always blog in packs!

So, how do you find other bloggers and what do you do with them once you find them? Well, fortunately this is 2008 and there are plenty of tools available to help you find bloggers in your industry or topic of interest. I suggest visiting BlogCatalog.Com and doing a search for your topic. Let’s say you wish to blog about Hawaiian tropical resorts. So do a search for your term and narrow down 10 blogs closest to your topical focus.

Then visit each blog (I suggest you subscribe to them in your reader) on a regular basis and start commenting on their posts. I mean leave relevant, thoughtful comments directly related to the post at hand. Do not leave blatant self promotional messages and never just leave your URL. Many bloggers allow you to enter your name, e-mail and your blog  URL, which become visible to subsequent readers, so you don’t have to worry about your visibility. It has been found that readers will oftentimes follow links from commenters - giving you instant traffic. Additionally, many bloggers these days have “do follow” tags for commenters which means you’ll get some “link love” and a solid SEO boost from your comments.

In due time, as you engage with other bloggers, you will find that you will always have something to write about, some blogger to link to and hopefully have them link to you. It’s not a fool proof strategty, becuase like any human relattionship, it may not work out. But from my expereince I have found that bloggers in any category enjoy hearing from their readers and building a relationship with them. So, in essence in order to build a readership to your blog you need to be faithful participant in your blog pack.

It’s a relatiionship thing.

Photo courtesy of daveypea, shared under the Creative Commons License.

Tags: blogs, comments, readership