Tips for Building Your Blog Audience

A blog is not just a creative outlet. It's also a tool for building your brand. Whether you've developed a great product or you are the brand, a blog can help people get to know you. It's a great marketing tool that is relatively inexpensive yet extremely valuable. If you've been thinking about starting a blog but aren't quite sure why people would want to read it, here are some tips that can help you build the confidence you need to become and remain a successful blogger. 

1. Use A Catchy Title

You want your blog to have a title that is easy to remember and also memorable. It should also reflect your content or area of expertise. If you're not good at coming up with titles on your own, consider using a blog name generator that can provide you with suggestions and ideas.

A blog name generator can help generate unique names within the scope of your blog's main topic. For example, if your business is an art supply store, you may want your blog to feature topics around how to use art supplies. You would select the category, "Art," supply a keyword or two and run the search. Within seconds, there will be thousands of great titles to choose from. 

Once you have come up with a good title for your blog, it will be easier for people to talk about it. Word of mouth is one great way to build readership. 

2. Create Great Content

Perhaps the most obvious path to growing your readership is to create great blog content, but you can have good content with the wrong writing style. Whoever creates your blog content should have a good grasp of grammar rules, punctuation, and spelling. Otherwise, your content won't be taken seriously or as authoritative. 

Choose to write on topics you have experience in. As you write, get to know it even better by researching it thoroughly. If you don't know what you're talking about, it will be obvious. If you take the time to create great content, you'll gain loyal followers. 

3. Publish Consistently

There are two reasons you should be consistent with publishing content for your blog. The first is so your readers don't forget about you, and the second is so that search engines can reward you. 

Being a regular contributor in your domain makes you an authority in the eyes of your readers. If they are interested in the topic, they'll want more, and they'll come back for more. 

You also make it easier for your potential audience to find you when you publish content consistently. Simply having a blog improves your search engine ranking, but when you blog regularly, it improves it even more. 

4. Optimize for Search Engines

The best way to optimize your blog so that search engines index relevant content is by making your posts keyword-rich. To do this, you need to be conscious of the words you are using in your posts, titles, pages and links. Choose words relevant to your content, and words people can use to find content like yours. 

You don't want to overdo it and make your posts sound unnatural, however. If you do that, not only will the quality of your content suffer, but the search engines will identify it as spam and pass you over in their rankings. Utilizing keywords takes practice, but it's not difficult. The payoff could be tremendous. 

5. Make Your Content Shareable

Every time you create a new post, share it on your social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easy to share among your readers and it gives you free promotion. Also, include shareable buttons with each post, so that if your reader finds your post through a search engine, they can easily share it on their feeds. 

There are numerous ways to promote your blog, but it has to start with a great title and great content. If you can do both of those, you've won half the battle. The rest is easy.