Blogging tips to get more readers

Blogging can be frustrating; you're writing great article after great article yet you're getting hardly any readers. What's going wrong?

Well, there could be any number of problems. That's the bad news. The good news is that these problems can be fixed.

With that in mind, here are some crucial blogging tips to get more readers.

Blogging tip 1: Don't give up

This is perhaps the most important blogging tip out there. Building up a blog audience takes time, and if you give up then obviously you're never going to get the readers you desire.

Although sheer perseverance on its own is not enough to build a blog audience, it is a crucial a part of the recipe for success.

Blogging tip 2: Make sure you're posting regularly

This is particularly important in the early stages of your blog. By setting a blog schedule and sticking to it, you'll effectively be telling people when they can expect a new post.

If you don't post for weeks on end, people are likely to think you've given up and you won't be able to build a regular readership.

You can learn about planning your blog and creating a content calendar in this guide.

If you're short of content, check out this guide which contains 50 blog post ideas.

Blogging tip 3: Make sure you know what your readers want

Sometimes it can be tempting to blog about anything that comes into your head when you sit down to write.

But that approach is unlikely to appeal to readers, especially if you're blogging for your business, or are looking to blog as a business. (If you want to know how to start a blog that makes money, read this guide.)

In order to attract regular readers, you need to focus your writing on a limited selection of topics. If you're blogging for business, you should focus on topics that will be of interest for your potential customers (for example, the GoDaddy blog focuses on digital marketing and small business topics).

If you're starting a blog that you're hoping to make money from directly, then you should pick a niche and cover that topic.

You can learn more about deciding what to blog about in this guide.

Blogging tip 4: Conduct keyword research

If you're looking to attract readers via search engine optimization (and you should be), then it's vital that you conduct proper keyword research.

Just guessing what keywords your audience might be searching for on Google based on their interests isn't good enough - you need to be certain that people are searching for those terms.

After all, you don't want to spend hours and hours crafting content for keywords that no one searches for, or for keywords that aren't relevant to your business.

You can learn about conducting keyword research in this guide, and you can find a checklist aimed at helping you increase your Google rankings here.

GoDaddy also offers an SEO tool which can help you target the right keywords.

Social media is a great place to generate a following for your blog, but you can't just tweet out links to your posts and expect people to find them.

You need to interact with people to build relationships then, once you've shown that you have something of worth to offer, people will start to interact with your posts. (Although you should always avoid heavy self-promotion.)

A good place to start with social media is by following this guide to work out which social network you should be using.

While this guide offers more in depth tips on using social media to complement your blogging efforts.

Blogging tip 6: Build an email marketing list

Getting people to read an article on your blog is one thing, but getting them to keep coming back again and again is another matter entirely.

Often, this isn't down to the quality of your blog posts, but rather how difficult it can be to find a website again after you've visited it once.

If someone has accessed your blog via a social media link, then they might not be able to find that link if they want to return to your blog a few weeks later. If someone finds you via Google, then they might not be able to remember the search term to find you.

To encourage people to return to your blog, you should build an email marketing list. That way, people who like your posts can sign up to get them delivered directly to their inbox.

To start building an email marketing list, you'll need a tool like GoDaddy Email Marketing.

You can use this guide to learn the basics of email marketing.