Increasing Blog Viewership

The number one question I get from fellow bloggers is “how do I increase viewership?”

What is your current Viewership? How much do you want to increase it? Why do you want to increase it? These are questions that I typically respond with. Finally I decided to sit down and explain how to do it. Consider this the bloggers manual on blogging.

VIEWERS

Let’s analyze the Big 3 types of viewers.

The Avid Blogger:(Blog to Blog)

The avid blogger is constantly posting and browsing blogs. They are looking for something interesting to read, or something that will spark an article for them. They will not stay on your page if the content is boring or the layout is hard for them to navigate.

If The Avid Blogger with a high viewership links to your blog in a post you can expect a spike in viewership. They will generate new viewers it is your job to keep them.

The Social Network Friend: (Social Network to Blog)

These friends get your posts via Facebook and Twitter feeds they will likely read some of your post, some will even comment although some of your comments will NOT appear on your blog. They will give you feedback directly from the social networking site that they found your blog link on. I count these as baseline viewers, often repeat visitors.

The Searcher: (Search Engine to Blog)

These viewers you get from different search engines. They are often looking for specific information on a specific subject. Unless you have related posts relevant to the topic they searched about you can expect them to view that blog post, and no others.

 

Now that you understand the different types of audiences write to and for them.

 

CONTENT

More is not better; it is quality that counts. The subject must be of interest your audience. An example I have a personality blog based on the Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator and I get less views on than my blog about politics.  The subject you write about widens or narrows your field of potential viewers.

Quality is a combination of content and the fine details. Overlooking the finer details of your blog can turn your viewers off. Edit your post before publishing.

Review you blog and delete ugly posts (we all have them).
There are not many people who will take the time to go through the mess of data in unkempt blog.

 

TIMING

It is all about timing.

What time of day do you post your blogs at? This is extremely important.

Members of your audience have lives too. If you live on the west coast as I do, do not post you blog at midnight and expect your audience to be awake. Do not post your blog at one in the afternoon and expect your audience to be home from work (you are not reading this at work are you). Resist the urge to post your blog immediately after writing it. Save it in a drafts folder and if your software allows you to schedule it so you publish your post at a designated time.

 

TAGGING/LABELS

It is important to understand tagging/labeling and label you post correctly. Doing so will increase the chances of drawing The Searcher, and The Avid Blogger into your posts.

Without these two audiences you will find that you will soon hit a cap in your viewership, with these two audiences you can expect your viewership to increase.

 

 

 

The formula for increasing viewership on your blog is: Audience + Content + Timing + Good Labels/Tags = Increase in viewership.

 

The Types of Blog Posts

Bloggers when you are blogging you will enviably get the following type of blog posts.

The Instant Viewer.

These posts are the ones that get a lot of hits right after publish, often dealing with up to the minute issue, they not get a lot of new visitors over time.

The Classic.

The post are often a post that you didn’t think were going to be successful. The Classic builds up the post hit count consistently over time. These are you pieces of art.

The Buried one.

Never gets viewed, no repeat visitors, dead on arrival. Buried due to lack of interest, bad tagging, or bad post time.

The Home Run.

Gets the initial hits like the Instant View, but has the longevity of the classic. These are post that are not only highly successful upon initial post but create a constant stream of new viewership.

What type of Posts do you get most?

Don’t get Buried.

A Bloggers view on Blogs

It is painful in many ways, often I will start a post and then delete it. My draft box is full of half written papers that I may or may not get back to. I never know if a post is good enough. I always worry if my grammar is correct; often catching grammatical errors after posting. I can spend hours on a post that only one or two people will read, or sometimes I spend five minutes on a post a hundred people read. The hour long struggle post are most of my posts, other posts they seem to write themselves. 

I sit down and I type, rarely if ever hitting the delete key. The words are there, they are dancing off my finger tips. I do not struggle for the next word or next sentence. The struggle that I now endure is one to keep up with the thoughts in my brain. To make sure I capture as many of those as fast as I can. It is a race, mind versus body. A battle the body is doomed to loose.The body struggles to keep pace with the mind, and poof it’s not 4 hours later and the post is done, and you are wide awake and exhausted. 

When to turn your blog into a .com

Blogger Brian Andre` Kirton asks  “I was wondering when bloggers know when it was time to turn it into a .com that’s ‘the big question’!”

Brian It depends on the purpose of your blog and your financial resources, but I am assuming you want to monetize you blog and make money from it. I say if you can afford it, immediately.

The first thing to note is if you want to monetize your blog  you will need a hosting package from a third party, not the WordPress hosting pakage.  Godaddy offers cheap domains with hosting packages the yearly cost is roughly $80.00. It also offers single click installs of the WordPress Add-In.  Godaddy is hit an miss with its service and support. I have used them for years with out problems, then ran into an ftp error that took 3 months to resolve. Or you can use Blogger and instantly monetize it. I should note that blogger published posts don’t appear as high in a Google search as do the WordPress posts, I have mirrored sites on blogger and rarely do any of my post appear on a Google search, but my WordPress ones do, and they are normally in the top two pages. Ironic if you consider that Google owns blogger now.

You will then need then need to get advertising. I suggest starting out with Google-Ad-sense as it is free to setup or you can go down the route of selling advertising space directly. The direct route is more profitable as it is not a pay per click, but you will need a huge viewership in the 10’s of thousands to be able to sell direct advertising space.

When to turn it into a .com? Is still the question, If you are planning the monetizing route, and can afford to suffer an $80 per year loss, I would say immediately. Why? Because when you change blog URLs you will inevitably loose viewers and viewers are what makes you money. Think of it as a media based business model, profit is driven by viewers, you don’t want to waste all your time increasing viewership on say this platform when you could be building up your viewership on your .com. You must view your blog like any other media company, and at first all you are doing is looking for your blog to decrease the yearly cost of your blog, Then you look to turn a profit.

Hope that helps.

Blog Audience and Viewership

Toady I hit a milestone, 1000 visitors. I has been a year long journey to get there, hopefully it will not take that long to hit 2000 views.  My most popular post has been “Why Not to date me the male enfp“; however, simply adding one more subject has increased my number of views per day from an average of 6 to 25.In the grand scheme a things that is not a huge viewership but mathematically the percentage increase is astounding.

The subject that I decided to write about was blogging. Why did I decide to write about blogging? Because I am on a blog and the one thing every blogger is trying to do is increase their views per day so I knew I could draw a larger audience. Everyone has there own reason they want to increase their viewership, ranging from monitizing their blog to the feeling of success they get when they have a large number of readers and comments.

Some friendly tips on increasing your blog viewership.

1)Always post to your facebook account – Some of your friends will inevitably read your writings.

2)Follow people who follow you- This is the law of reciprocity, if you follow a blogger that is following you, you will get more views per day. Second it gives you more information, and in my case has sparked more than one idea for a blog post.

3) Write about topics you are interested in.

4) Use the appropriated tags – Nothing worse than getting lost in a search engine, the best way to check your tags is to do a Google search and see how high or low your posting is on the results page.

5)Post at the appropriated time of day for your audience. My original audience was the United States, but I have picked up a decent following over the pond as they say.  So if I want to reach my original target audience I post during the day, if I want to reach my over the pond audience I post late at night or early in the morning.

6)Track your audience, ask your audience for feedback and show appreciation for your audience, the nicer you are to them, the nicer they will be to you.

7)Have a purpose for you post. Don’t get discouraged as your viewership numbers spike from high to low, there are days that I receive 40+ visits and there are days that I receive 0 visits.

Good luck in your blogging, may the words be with you.

Blog Viewership

Does the time of day that you post you blog affect how many views it will generate? Absolutely, the reason being is unless your viewers are subscribed to your blog it will get buried as there is always another blogger posting on the same subject you are. Even if they are subscribed to your blog it still may get buried by other subscriptions or personal emails in your target audiences inbox. 

The best time of day depends on your blog audience, if you are targeting the United States as is mine, the best time to put up a post is between 5 .a.m PST and 9 P.m PST. That is pushing the edge of the envelope on each end. People often do not look or poke around your site and read the past posts. Publish your blog posts when you audience is awake.

So if you decide to write and awesome blog post make sure you publish it at the proper time, and the proper time is not necessarily the time you finish your post. If you post at better times in the day you will increase your viewership.