3 ways to reach more readers with your blog

Every beginning is difficult, and so is starting a blog. Building an audience for your blog is not a matter of course. Because no one is automatically going to know that you have a blog, let alone what it is about. However, there are different ways to spread the word about your blog. We are going to give you a few tips to reach new readers and make sure they continue to follow your blog.

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1. Publish to social media

Social media are the perfect environment to find new readers. There are two ways to share your content on social media.

Distribute your content yourself

You can, of course, manually post a link in your account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. after each posting on your blog. However, it is much easier to use tools that do that work automatically for you, such as IFTTT (If This Then That) or DLVR.IT.

Just link your WordPress to your Facebook or Twitter account, and the service will automatically post a message to that account every time you publish a new posting. You can usually choose between publishing every new posting automatically, or just a new posting with, for example, a certain tag, or belonging to a specific category. The basic service is free of charge in both cases.

Let your readers distribute your content

These tools, however, only allow you to reach your own followers on social media. That is why you should also do something on another front: encourage your visitors to share your postings on their own account. This will create a snowball effect that will help you reach new readers for your blog!

Several plug-ins are available for WordPress, including Shared Counts. Once installed, all you need to do is click a simple button to share your posting. There are buttons available for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. If you add such a button to your WordPress, the number of times a posting has been shared will appear next to the button. 

2. Encourage your readers to subscribe to your newsletter

Having your readers come to your website every day to see if a new article has been published is not an easy task. That is why it is really important to use a newsletter: when your readers subscribe to it, they will automatically receive your postings in their mailbox. This is how you can turn the "pull", whereby readers have to search your website themselves, into a "push", whereby the content is automatically brought to them.

For newsletters too, there are various plug-ins for your WordPress blog, such as MailChimp or MailPoet, which create and send newsletters automatically. You can decide to send the entire text of your posting to your subscribers, or just an intro, so that by clicking on "read more" your reader can actually visit your website. 

3. Increase the loyalty of your readers through more interaction

Committed readers are loyal readers. And you can increase your readers' commitment by involving them more closely in your articles and by allowing them to comment on those postings. So, make sure to enable comments in your WordPress blog. Reader A will post a comment, to which reader B will respond. And reader A may even come back later for a new reply, and so on and so forth.

We recommend that you use a WordPress plug-in where your readers can be notified when other people reply to their comments. But make sure you have a good spam filter, such as Akismet, because comment fields on blogs are a favourite target for spammers.

Comments on your blog increase loyalty and help you get more views, but they also make your blog rank higher in search results – Google just loves pages where people interact. And that, in turn, will allow your blog to reach more readers.

Would you like to start your own blog as well? Combell will make your blog completely ready for you; all you have to do is dress it up and start writing texts.

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