Often authors ask me, “How do I build a better blog following?”  Unfortunately, you can’t build a million followers instantly. It’s a concentrated effort of building a strong foundation and crafting great content that will ultimately make your site a success. That said, here are 10 tips for authors and bloggers who would like to build a better blog following in the coming year.

#1- Be Consistent. The number one tip I have for building a better blog following is consistency. Blogging for 10 posts for 10 days is great, but if you don’t blog another post for 3 months, your message and readership is wasted.  If you want readers to continually look at your site and engage, then you need to offer a consistent and relevant feed.  Sit down and ask yourself how many posts can you feasibly commit to with your schedule. If you know that you only have time to write on Saturdays or evenings, then sit down and stockpile some posts while you have time. Schedule them out for days, weeks, or months in advance.

#2- Host Others in Your Field. When you can only commit to posting sporadically, a great way to draw more of a reader base is to host others in your field.  Since I work with a lot of authors and speakers, I encourage authors to blog with each other. This serves two purposes. First, it gives you fresh, interesting content (and you don’t even have to write it!). Second, if you host products similar to yours, it can actually help your credibility. Let’s say you write Christian fiction, but you only have one book. If a reader has read the book you’re hosting, they might pick up yours since you have similar interests, or if they have read yours, then you give them options for some new authors they might like, and you still keep their interest. Also, authors usually will promote any site on which they are guest blogging. Can your site use the extra publicity? Do you want to connect with authors who are looking for blogging opportunities? I have compiled a list of them here.

#3- Link Up. Linking up with outside blogs and website can help you to create new traffic on your own site. You will often see spammers trying to leave links to their sites in comments on other people’s websites. While that is a bad idea, the correct way to link up to reputable sites is easy. There is a plug in on WordPress that was removed in an older install. It allowed you to list your links by categories in your sidebar. This is a fast, easy way to link to other sites of interest for your readers. While this specific plugin hasn’t been updated in a long time, it is still compatible with the current WordPress version and works well. There are also other plugins that have specific advantages/uses.

#4- Integrate Your Blog & Your Media Profiles. So you have built this beautiful site. It’s lovely. But you have had only 10 views total this month. How do you fix that? Integration to social media is an integral part of getting your blog off the ground. While sites like WordPress.com and Blogger have their own distribution channels ,WordPress.org and other self-hosted sites do not. One of the tradeoffs for having 100% customability is that it generally comes with a clean slate. You have to build it from the ground up. A quick, easy solution for authors and speakers who would like to host on your own is Jetpack. Jetpack is the meat of WordPress.com’s neat features rolled up in a compatible function for WordPress.org users. It offers about a dozen features, but one of the best is Publicize. Publicize will allow you to automatically post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumbler and Google + without having to remember to do it each time.  Although other plugins do this in fancier ways for developers, Jetpack is kept current with updates, is consistently compatible with WordPress, and is easy to use. That makes it ideal for authors.

#5- Add Social Media Sharing Buttons. So you are posting to your social media automatically. That’s great. But now how do people share this with their friends? Since people are generally lazy,sharing your site has to be simple, visual, and quick. Plugins like Shareaholic are a great tool. They give your readers the chance to share these items quickly.  There are tons of these free plugins on WordPress, but this is one of the best I have found. It is clean, easy to use, and customizable. It offers you the option to have a vertical or horizontal bar as well as customize the layout and buttons. It also offers several additional free features.

#6- Offer a Subscribe Button. In a world where people get emails more than mail, direct access to an inbox feed is a powerful tool. Even if people want to delete an email, they will at least read a bit of it. How many times have you been cleaning out your email only to get involved in a message you didn’t intend to read? Harness the power of talking directly to your interested reader base by offering a subscription button and RSS feed button. What is an RSS feed? Well, I don’t want to get into that too much here, but it is a feed where people can get your posts directly when they put it into a custom reader service. (More on that later.) The long and short of it: it’s cool and Blogger and WordPress both support them. (WordPress RSS links are usually the domain/blog title/feed or close to it.) The subscribe button and the RSS feed are two different things, but both are important to add to your site. The subscribe button is another way to get the feed, but it sends it directly to the reader’s email address. There are many plugins that can do this for you; however, Jetpack, listed above, can do it as well if you activate the subscribe button. (You will still need to add the RSS button on your website as this doesn’t automatically do that for you).  If you need help doing this, please contact me. I would be glad to help you.

#7- SEO Your Posts & Pages. SEO is one of those dreadfully hated words. Some people have no idea what it is, and some just hate it in general. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is how well your blog or website communicates with the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Each search engine has its own special algorithm that is constantly changing to keep ahead of us all. The algorithms determine if a blog post or page should be seen in a search result and how high up in the rankings it should be. Your goal should be to get as close to #1 in the search results for your keywords as possible. This is another one of those topics I can expound on for a while, so there will be a post about this later on as well. The long of how you can make your site more SEO friendly quickly for the not so SEO inclined is to use a All-in-One SEO solution like WordPress SEO by Yoast. This all-in-one solution is easy to use.It  will tell you what you are doing wrong,  and it gives you a pretty error-proof, color-coded system. For those who are more SEO savvy, there are other more in-depth plugins and options, but my research indicates that this is the easiest one to use for authors and speakers who are busy and need a reliable, easy-to-use SEO solution.

#8- Don’t Overwhelm Your Readers. Don’t overwhelm your readers is right.  This is a prime example of overloading your readers. This post is FAR too long. Why can I get away with it? Simply because I am writing for a specific audience. My audience is Lighthouse authors and others who need immediate tips to help them create a better blog following for this year. Generally speaking, long, drawn-out posts with no images are significantly more likely to have a faster click through rating than a shorter, better-composed post that is visually appealing. My typical rule of thumb is to keep a blog post’s reading time under 1-2 minutes. (Yes, I am well aware this one is likely to take 5 or 6 minutes to read.)

#9- Recycle Older, Not Dated Posts. One and done? Not necessarily.  When blog posts are not date specific, they can be reused or recycled if you are creative. There are also some plugins that will do this for you. Just because you used a topic a year ago doesn’t mean that it isn’t still relevant or interesting now. I often tell my authors not to date their blog posts. The reasoning is simple. You’re putting an expiration date on your blog. Who do you know that is going to go through the archives of a blog?

#10- Ask for the Sale or Connection.  In retail and in sales, one of the things that is always drilled into an employee’s head is to ask for the sale. People are generally more inclined to do something if you ask them to do it. It is like that sign you see at McDonald’s asking you to donate to the Ronald McDonald House or some other charity. When it is just the sign posing the question, do you actually do it? No, probably not often, admit it.  However, when the person taking your order asks if you want to round your order up to a dollar and give the proceeds to the Ronald McDonald House, do you do it? Yeah, you probably do. (For the grumps still saying no, you might be one of the exceptions).  The difference is that the person asks for the donation. It is the same with your site. At the end of your post, ask readers to do the action you want them to do. It can be to come back and visit, to sell something, or to visit a friend’s site. There are plugins like PopupAlly that will allow you to ask readers to follow your blog or sign up for your newsletter after they have read the post. If you are selling something or asking them to visit another site, make sure you make it easy for them to do so.

I hope you find these tips useful. You’re welcome to share them with other authors or bloggers.