Don’t let your readers feel alone
I’m beginning to find its difficult getting people involved, and I am going through the experience that most bloggers come up against when they first start a new blog – but we have to carry on promoting our blogs and be confident.
According to Technorati they are 55 million blogs in existance, but I wonder how many of them 55 million are just sat idly on the internet, because the blogger has given up because he/she has no readers.
So what’s new?
Well, if you blog about my blog then I’ll add your name and website/blog on the Project contributors page, just drop me an email. I kind of stole this idea of Chris Garrett who wrote a nice blog post thanking his readers for commenting – nice touch.
Whilst the project hasn’t told us much so far, it has proved that you have to be an active blogger to get visitors and new regular readers. As you can see by this chart, last Wednesday is when I spent a ton of time on promoting the blog and this meant that my stats jumped to 250 unique visitors for that day.
A good way to monitor how many people are going to become more regular readers is by your RSS feed through Feedburner – this has jumped up to 47 readers, so I need to ensure that I am writing unique, and interesting content for those readers to stay with me.
Leigh mentioned a good point about not many bloggers reply to comments. It’s very important that you reply to comments – if I left a comment on a blog and no one replied then it would be unlikely that I would re-visit that blog, no matter how interesting the content is. I want to communicate with the writer and ask questions and leave my own opinions – I don’t want to be talking to myself..
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Filed under: Blogged Out Project on March 20th, 2007
Keep it up. You are right about all the abandoned blogs out there but I think the key to keep in mind is momentum - blogs start slow but all of a sudden snowball, it is easy to be disheartened but success can be just round the corner
Thanks Chris.
That’s a good point - the travel blog I write on took 12 months to become popular and get good amounts of traffic, but if I had known how to promote a blog back then it would of probably been a lot quicker.
Darren,
When we discussed this last week, I realized how important this is. You are absolutely right- as a reader and a writer I am looking for dialogue, not monologue. This is a shared experience. If it wasn’t, we would write on static web pages.
Leigh
Despite my blog name, I try not to let my commenters feel abandoned, too.