If You Blog It, Will Readers Come?

A common belief, I think, is that once a blog is up and running, lots of readers will flock to it. After all, why shouldn't they - a good topic, great content, and Google searcheable. Truth of the matter is that readership will grow slowly, and you can help it grow faster. I was getting about 2-3 readers a day on my own and needed to increase awareness.

My personal preference is to grow it organically, i.e. get readers who are interested in your blog content. Here is how I approached building readership:

Joined a blog aggregator. My first step was to join pfblogs.org an aggregrator for Personal Finance blogs. This enabled me to get 5 to 10 additional readers a day that weren't previously aware of my blog. Interestingly, my readership from pfblogs.org hasn't changed much. I was getting about 25 readers per week in September, 2006. In January, 2007 I am also getting about 25 readers per week, even though my total readership has increased 10 times.

Submited content to several Carnivals. Next I started submitting article so Carnivals. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, Carnivals are aggregations of post submissions from bloggers on a certain topic.. These submissions are vetted by the Carnival host and the selected posts are included in the Carnival posting.

This increased my readership signifcantly. Through Carnivals, my daily readership went from 10 per day to 30 per day. There are 962 Carnivals (as of 1/21/07) from which to select at the Blog Carnival site.

Visited other blogs on my topic. Check out other blogs in your community. Comment on their topics and add perspective, confirmation or new data to their post. Most blog authors will respond and some will visit your site. Over time, My Wealth Builder has become part of a community of Personal Finance bloggers which frequently read each other's articles.

Posted content frequently. Besides regular readers, a blog gets readers who are searching for a specific topic. I believe that a blog gets positive search results if the blog has a high number of posts (over 100) and a high frequency of publishing. Publishing once per day is probably the minimum needed and more than once a day is likely better. For reference, in September, 2006, I was publishing about 4-5 times per week, with 30 total posts,and had 16 referrals from Google search. In December, 2006, I was publishing once per day, with 100 total posts, and had 603 referrals from Google search.

With higher posting frequency and more posts, it seems Google's search will give priority to one's site. For example, if you Google "Mortage Mistake," My Wealth Builder is the second site returned in the results (on a 1/21/07 search).

Some bloggers use Blog Exchange communities. I have not used these and do not plan to use these communities. In these systems, bloggers get "credits" for clicking on other's blogs which will lead to one' s blog promoted for clicks. While this gets traffic, I believe it is low quality traffic which may take a lot of effort to manage and may not be sustainable (for me).