How can I get more people to read my blog?

Sometimes it seems like there’s more bloggers than readers: Lots of people have blogs and spend a lot of time writing for them but they don’t have any readers. It’s been like that since blogging became popular in the mid-2000′s, and even before that when people had online diaries (the predecessor to blogs) in the 1990′s.

There’s many reasons for this. Many bloggers are not interested in making money and just want to share what they know or enjoy with people who might be interested, so they don’t spend much time promoting their blog (maybe they share it with their Facebook friends, but that’s it) even though they want people to read their articles. Others simply love writing and don’t mind if nobody reads their writing. But if you have a blog that you use to make money, you need to make sure that people actually read it. One of the best ways to get more readers is to know who’s talking about your articles and your niche on social media. That’s why I’m sharing a few ways that you can use social media monitoring tools (tools that are used to monitor what people say on social media sites) to get more readers.

Social media monitoring
Social media monitoring tools like Alerti, a full-featured SMM suite with an iPhone app, are designed primarily for marketing and advertising professionals to track public response to their campaigns across multiple social media platforms. This means that they can be used to figure out what people are talking about on social media sites. Now, think of ways that knowing what your niche is interested in can help a blogger? If you knew more precisely what your niche liked, how could you use that to gain more readers?

Know who’s reposting your writing
Your most highly targetable audience is frequently the people who repost your articles on their social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, plus their blogs. If you can get a lot of people who frequently repost your articles, you’ll get a group of folks who are easy to target with an affiliate marketing program, such as a newsletter. What you should do after you find out that a lot of people reposted the same article is write another article that appeals to this group of people. That will make them more likely to become regular readers. Furthermore, people in their social networks are likely to be demographically similar and thus more likely to be interested in your niche than the average person, so you’ll probably see more people similar to the ones who reposted your article in the future.

Find out which pieces are successful
There are plenty of other bloggers in your niche and you’re competing with them for a finite amount of readers. Sometimes you might write a better article than them, and other times they might write a better article than you. If one of their articles is getting reposted by certain demographics, you could write an original article with a similar angle and microtarget toward that demographic. But the only ways to know if that demographic reads it are to 1) look at comments on individual blogs (which is very unreliable since a lot of comments are masked linkspam) or 2) monitor what people say on social media sites. By knowing if people are reading someone else’s article and sharing it with their friends, you learn about what a certain demographic within your niche audience likes and can adjust your writing accordingly.

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, an online marketing and PR firm based in San Francisco. Influence People does blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.