Blogging Primer - Part 1: Building Readership

Today I am going to begin a series on blogging that, I hope, will help people who are beginning this journey of pseudo-journalism and self expos‚ become successful in their particular genre. I say genre because it applies to any blog, whether a blog like Little Green Footballs or Instapundit Glenn Reynolds that focuses on political issues, whether right or left, or Chaplain Lewis or a Baghdad Dweller that looks at the war effort from different perspectives or even Johnny Gulag or Root Prompt which are technical in nature.

This series will take a look at some of the elements involved with successful blogging. It might even tap a little into some of the technical things that happen that no one knows about without lifting the hood, but which are important to understand in concept at least.

Today we look at one of the more abstract and intangible aspects: readership. What does it mean? How do we get it? Where do readers come from? These are important to understand because readers are what keeps us blogs alive and unfizzled.

1. Word of Mouth - Most Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, in 2005, have access to the internet. They may not have it everyday in their own homes, but they have it at work or visit internet cafes, etc. That means that you can tell your friends, family and, most importantly for blog growth, other bloggers you know of your new blog. You’d be surprised how many people actually have an interest in what you have to say and would go out of their way to find out - if they only knew you wrote.
2. Other Blogs - The most effective way I have found to promote a blog, and that costs no money at all, is reading other blogs. The blogosphere is literally filled with other people like you who are covering the same topics you are. Find them. Read them. Comment on their entries. Link to their stories. Contribute to them and they may contribute to you. There’s a key difference, however, between contributing to someone else and merely commenting with something to the effect of “Hey, I wrote about this on my blog…go see it” (with a link). Bad, bad, bad. We call that comment spam and it’s frowned upon.
3. Trackbacks/pingbacks - Perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts among bloggers, newer and some older, are trackbacks and pingbacks. Without getting too technical, trackbacks are a method of one blog notifying the other that, “Hey, I’ve quoted you in case you’re interested”. Many blog entries will provide a trackback URL, a specially formed url that can be used when writing an entry to send a notification to the source. This is not a URL you would use to link to an article but depending on the blogging platform you are using, there may be a method to include trackback URLs in your entry. On the flip side, pingbacks are very similar but require no interaction from you. Not all blogging platofrms support pingbacks. WordPress supports it and Textpattern was working on something very close last time I checked. Pingbacks can more easily be understood as “auto-discovery” of blogs that have linked to them without using trackback.
4. Consistent Content - One of the rules I have for blogroll links here at Technosailor is that blogs have to be updated at least once every other week. This is minimal. Preferrably, the bloggers I link to will be posting content every few days and even more preferrably, every day. Everyone understands that people have lives outside of their blogs and sometimes take vacations or lose the motivation to blog and need to step back for a short period of time. I’ve done it. Most bloggers do it now and then. But if you look at some of the most successful blogs, content is flowing every day or every other day. It keeps things fresh. It makes readers want to come back everyday and find out what you have to say today.

The methods above will get people in the door which is an important first step. But it won’t keep them there. Next time, I’ll talk a little about content creation and keeping your reader.

Of course, all of these things take time and don’t happen overnight. The biggest quality of a successful blogger is persistance. Developing readers takes time and just because you show up on the internet with a blog, no one knows about it until they find out about it. The magic comes when people start finding out about it and helping you let people discover you is what this series will be about.

Tagged as: Blogging