Blogging Tips | Developing Your Blog’s Readership

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Anyone can start a blog, but attracting new visitors and giving them a reason to come back again and again can be something of a challenge. Internet readers are a fickle bunch, and what interests them one day may not be enough to bring them back the next. If you work on developing your readership, though, you will be able to keep them coming back again and again.

Developing readership isn't the same as attracting visitors to your blog. A visitor will see your content and can take it or leave it. A readership, on the other hand, will come to your blog whenever you put up new content because they feel like you really have something to offer. They will come to your blog because they either loved or hated what you said before, and they expect you to stir the same emotions all over again. They will, in fact, come to your blog and leave comments because they feel a certain sense of community with you and the other readers who regularly post comments. In order to build a solid readership you need to:

Establish Personality and Position

Who are you as a blogger? Are you funny? Serious? Do you often use pop culture references, or are you trying to be more academic? Your personality can and should shine through in your writing because a readership will identify with a person more than they will a thesis statement. After reading a few of your posts, they should know what to expect from anything else you put up. This isn’t about predictability, though, it’s about consistency.

Your position on subjects, products, and anything else should be just as clear. You don’t have to stand on your high horse and shout at the world, but your readership should know that they can turn to your blog to validate their own beliefs or to get riled up over what they see as your misunderstanding.

Understand Style, Structure, and Internet Tendencies

Inflammatory headlines and pictures of kittens will only get you so far. You need to provide quality content in order to keep your readers interested. How you say something is just as important as what you are saying something about. This means you need to have a good grasp of the written language and know how to use it. Spelling errors and grammatical mistakes will detract from a message, and if a reader has to look at a sentence twice to try and puzzle out the meaning, you can consider your readership reduced.

Structure is just as important as style because you need to make it easy for your readers to spot the articles they will like, and for them to pull the important information out of it immediately. This means using small paragraphs, breaking up the flow with subheadings, and having a very clear introduction and conclusion.

Just remember, your readership is just as likely to read your blog on a phone as they are a computer. They could be anywhere, and they could choose to play a game of Angry Birds or see what you are saying on your blog. Most Internet readers are looking for convenient distractions and tend to glance at things more than read, but if you can work on your style and structure, and develop a personality that will attract regular visitors, you will soon have the dedicated readership you need to succeed as a blogger.

PRMarketing.com is a PR and online marketing agency that does everything from content marketing mowing your lawn. We might even do your dishes. Because a clean kitchen makes for clean marketing.

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