1st Step to Growing Your Blog Readership

Blogging…it’s exploding into quite a phenomenon these days.

Blogs are really great tools to add to your social interaction.  They can be used for all sorts of things, from promoting your business, to voicing your opinion about a current event, or simply to keep your friends and family updated on family affairs and vacations.

Any form of advertisement, whether it’s a TV ad, radio ad, newsprint ad, internet pop up (we all love those don’t we?) or a blog, is only as good as the amount of views it receives.  That is clearly demonstrated by the difference in price for the various types of advertisements.  For instance you might pay $50 for the week to run a classified ad in your local paper or you could pay upwards of $3 million to place a 30 second TV commercial on this year’s Superbowl broadcast. 

Today there are literally millions of blogs.  According to Pingdom’s latest statistics, there were more than 152 million blogs at year’s end 2010.  With this many blogs available to read, how does the average blogger drive traffic to his/her blog?

There are loads of ways to drive traffic to your blog and opinions vary across the board on the best ways to do so.  There are several methods that I use but the first and in my opinion (IMO) perhaps easiest method you should try and consistently use is to create backlinks.

What is a backlink?  According to Wiki, “Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain from another web node.  Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).

So how do you start creating backlinks to your blog?  Here’s where the opinions start to vary and hopefully my readers will supply some feedback on their techniques.  You can use any number of free or pay per use programs on the web which will create these for you.  Some seem to work (www.yousaytoo.com is one I use) better than others or you can start creating your own by simply reading other authors blogs and posting comments on them.  When you leave a comment, be sure to leave your name as the author of  your blog appears (I use “The Business Outsource Guy”) and most importantly, leave the link to your website where your blog appears under the URL field.  Once you've followed these simple steps, congratulations! You've created your first backlink to your blog.

It takes some time to get the backlinks going but if you follow your blogs statistics (and you should be!), you will gradually start seeing the hits rise on your page, indicating you’re expanding your reach and growing your blog.

Try to spend some time each day, reading blogs and posting comments and in a very short time, you’ll begin to reap the benefits of your new blogging strategy.

Have other ideas on creating backlinks or promoting your blog that have been successful?  Please let us know how so we can all reap the rewards