How to Find Readers for Your New Blog the Smart Way!

No matter what will be the reasoning behind people telling you that blogging today is no different from blogging ten years ago, it’s not true. Usually, the people saying this are the ones that want to sell you another blogging gimmick, an online course or are simply the ones that have been around too long to understand that blogging today is just not the same as it was when they started their journey.

Of course, I am not perfect either. I have written plenty of blog posts around the question of how to find readers for your blog, the conventional way. Mostly, it requires googling around, finding old and popular blogs, and trying to imitate them while copying their keywords. Then, you go on spamming your blog’s links all over the internet, hoping that people will click through. There is definitely more to the process, but you get the point. In my defense though, when I wrote about these techniques, they were a lot more effective than what they are today.

So you may ask, what has changed? What’s the problem with imitating other blogs and their posts? If they were successful in writing about what they write, can’t they be an inspiration to us? The answer is yes, but it is also no. Did that answer your question? I think probably not. So let’s dig into the issue a little deeper.

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Finding readers for your blog the standard way

First of all, let’s quickly recap what it means, at least in my eyes, to find readers for your blog the standard, conventional way.

Finding a source of inspiration in other blogs

It’s not a secret that before you create a blog, you need to make plenty of research into the niche that you are going to pick. Your niche will be one of the things that will eventually define whether you can become a successful blogger or not.

Choosing the right niche will guarantee that you will remain enthusiastic about your blog as time goes on. It means you will be excited about blogging even when difficult times arrive. Moreover, a well-picked niche means a profitable niche with plenty of interested readers.

On the contrary, if you pick the wrong niche that you aren’t fully interested in, it will eventually get you nowhere. As you write and you see that no readers are attracted, you will quickly get fed up and will abandon the project just as fast as you took it on. And don’t forget, no readers means no way to monetize your blog down the road.

So once again, pick your niche wisely. Here is a post on how to choose your niche the right way.

In a nutshell, to find a great niche it’s good to have a look at other blogs on the internet. Are the blogs with the niches you are interested in attracting many visitors? How well do they rank in Google’s search engine results? How much interaction do they have with their readers in their comment section?

Also, go through those blogs’ social media accounts. Do they have pages and groups on Facebook? How many followers do they have there? What do those blogs do differently that makes them stand out (or not stand out) from the rest? Use this free tool to carry out initial research. Not all websites are available there, but you might be just lucky enough to find what you are looking for. There are, of course, also paid tools that are a lot better with data.

All of the above said should be taken into account first. It’s a good starting point. However, those other blogs should only be used as a source for inspiration and research. Copying their blog posts and using their keywords is hardly effective these days for new blogs. There’s simply no room for your blog amongst them if you are planning to compete with them using their strategies. Their blogs have been around for long.

Keywords

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very large part of the game when it comes to how to find readers for your blog. If you don’t apply SEO to your blog, forget about it. SEO is easy to grasp, but hard to master. It’s just something you must do in order to be a successful blogger. My advice to you is to read a few guides and articles on SEO, and to download this free plugin that will help you to effectively apply SEO in your blog posts. I am using the plugin as I write this post.

Keywords are a major part of SEO. By picking the right keywords, you will create blog posts that people are actually interested in and that rank well in Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). In other words, a well-researched keyword will rank you high in Google, but only if the blog post is of high quality. Blog posts with popular keywords won’t automatically get you success. You still need to be able to deliver quality content in order to attract readers.

What is a keyword (keyphrase)? “How to lose weight”, “how to make money online”, and “iPhone 14 review” would be examples of popular keyphrases. The last one, of course, is popular for only as long as iPhone 15 is not around.

I, just like many other starting bloggers, at first made the mistake of copying other blogs’ popular keywords. Then what happened? Absolutely nothing. Those popular, highly demanded topics have been covered a gazillion times online by all kinds of bloggers. And because my blog was just at the start of its path, posts with those keywords were nowhere to be found in the search results of Google. Other than finding out what keywords not to use, it was a waste of time. Instead, the goal, as I later found out, was to focus on long-tailed keywords, which I talk more about in this post.

Promotion of your blog to an audience

Let’s imagine that you have finished writing another article for your blog, a quality article. Now it’s time to promote that article to the world so that as many readers can find it as possible. Writing the article is not enough, you must also market it, which is another time-consuming task on its own.

Many bloggers, answering the question of how to find readers for your blog, will tell you that you basically need to spam the internet everywhere possible. Of course, they will tell you to do it in a non-spammy way. Nonetheless, if you are trying to really cover all social networks, other blogs’ comment sections, forums and all kinds of websites that you believe may add benefit, you won’t get anywhere. There’s simply too much to cover, and you will be all over the place and nowhere at the same time.

The more of the internet you are trying to cover when marketing your article, the less quality there will be to it. You will end up spamming people and you will receive an opposite effect. People will avoid your website when seeing your links in random places. You will get exhausted from the process.

For this very reason, it’s important to extract only your favorite two or three social networks and a couple of internet sites where you think people may have an interest in your blog’s niche, and then focus on them. “Less is more.”

So how do you find readers for your blog once the article has been published? As already said, choose two or three of your favorite social networks and start linking to your article there. To make it more exciting, add a little comment or story to the article instead of just copy-pasting the link. This way people will read your short bit and might get interested enough to click through to the rest of the article.

The same goes for promoting on other websites. In my case, I focus on Quora and Reddit.

Both on Quora and Reddit, I first try to find questions related to my newly written blog post. I then try to add value to those threads by answering questions in a meaningful manner. At the end of the answer, I add a link to my full article.

The approach stated above is many times more effective as opposed to just spamming with links. Spammy links don’t attract anyone to your blog, they will most likely be removed anyway for violating spam rules and eventually will get you banned from the platforms. Focus on fewer websites, fewer answers, but make them interesting enough for people to care to click through to your blog in order to get more info. This is the right approach, So once again, less is more.

The new way of attracting traffic to your blog

One thing to keep in mind is that most of what I am writing about in this blog is meant for new blogs. Those blogs that have existed for a long time and are already getting plenty of traction don’t need to follow my recommendations at all. See, they already rank well for many topics and therefore don’t need to worry about the things you need to worry about. Whatever they put out there, Google will rank higher than it would rank you, simply because those blogs are already “big and famous”.

You can compare the above to a large chain of pizza restaurants pushing out of business your small family pizzeria just around the corner. All the bigger guys have to do is open another restaurant and people will go there simply because they are already familiar with the name of that chain. People know what their pizza already tastes like and most likely is of good quality. You, on the other hand, to stay in business need to make a product much better than theirs.

Focus on the message rather than the keyword

To find what keywords are trendy, you can use either Google’s search bar to do some research, use this free tool to do some analysis on statistics or use a keyword research tool. Most keyword research tools are not free, but if you want to have success with blogging, I highly recommend that you invest one, at least a cheaper one for starters. I use SEMScoop.

1. The idea is to find a keyphrase that is somewhere in the middle of the scale. It shouldn’t be too popular with hundreds of thousands of monthly searches, but it also should have at least a few hundred monthly searches in order for it to be worth writing about. This way you make sure you aren’t competing with the giants.

2. Pick a keyphrase that is long, also known as a long-tailed keyphrase. Instead of “how to lose weight”, you could go for, “how to lose weight for a woman in their 50’s”. This is a lot more specific and will mean that the keyphrase will most likely attract that target audience, just because there aren’t many other blog posts on exactly that, if any.

3. Don’t create false, misleading or “click-bait” titles around your keyphrases. Don’t promise people in the title things they won’t see in your article. If your article is about a certain diet, then write about that diet.

You may initially get a lot of clicks on a title telling 50-year-old women they can lose belly fat in one week, but that won’t get you anywhere simply because you are not honest. No one likes false information and no one likes to be lied to. These types of blog posts will cause people to arrive at your article at first and leave almost instantly once they find out your information is incorrect/dishonest.

Even though you might get many clicks at first, the fact that people come and go from your website instantly will actually do you more damage than good. In SEO analysis this coming and instant leaving of readers form your blog is called bounce rate. The more people leave your website right after arriving at it means the higher bounce rate. A higher bounce rate will warn Google and other search engines that your website does not actually interest people and will rank you down, so be aware of this.

4. Before, bloggers would say, try to have your keyphrase repeated throughout the article as many times as possible, as this will guarantee that the search engines will “understand” what you are writing about, and will therefore rank you higher.

Today, however, this is no longer precise.

First of all, repeating a keyphrase too many times will make your text look awkward, especially if the keyphrase is so long that it just doesn’t make sense or carry any value to those sentences where you are trying to cram it into. Less is more.

Secondly, search engines today have become so sophisticated that they analyze your article in such a way that they understand what your article is about by scanning the entire article as opposed to just seeing the same keywords and phrases being repeated over and over. It’s the context of the whole article that they scan, not separate words.

That being said, keyphrases still play a major role in your article. If you have no keyword or keyphrase being emphasized, it will be harder to rank in Google for any topic.

Use keyphrases where it’s natural. Do it in titles, in the body of the text and in the subtitles. Additionally, search engines also take into account the synonyms of your keyphrases (i.e. “how to lose weight” -> “losing weight quickly” -> “methods of losing weight”, etc.). Using synonyms of keyphrases will not only give your article a more natural look, but you may also unknowingly end up ranking in Google for those synonyms that you used. Instead of (only) ranking for “how to lose weight”, you may actually rank for “methods of losing weight” as well.

Your article must have a human feel to it, not as if it was compiled by an algorithm of popular keyphrases.

In the world of blogs today, keywords still play a major role. However, it’s the message behind each article that is valued. By people, but also by Google.

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Focus on the message

Finally, the last, but also probably the main point which I want to emphasize in this article on how to find readers for your blog is the “message” behind each article that you publish for the world to see.

Certainly, not every article will be perfect.

Although I always recommend having long and meaningful articles, not every article can be such. If your blog post is a recipe for a light dinner meal or it’s a quick tutorial on how to turn off a certain setting in the iOS, then you cannot create a too-long article. It will still have a meaning – the recipe itself or the steps needed to turn off a setting in your iPhone, but it will lack the number of words. That’s ok though in this case as the goal is not to bore your reader, but to as quickly as possible to bring the reader from point A to point B. No extra fluff.

On the other hand, if you are trying to deliver some information to the reader that isn’t exactly science, try to make the article a bit more diverse. Give different options, opinions, the reasoning behind them, use your own and other people’s experiences as examples. This way your article will be of more interest to the reader and will give a better picture of what you are actually trying to get across. These are the types of articles that can be longer.

For example, the post you are reading right now was not intended to be long, but as I kept writing, I saw that there are more things to be said than what I initially anticipated. Therefore, the article is about twice the length.

Then, there is the actual message. As already mentioned, when starting I focused on the trendy topics and trendy keyphrases instead of being unique. All I was doing was repeating like a parrot the same things that other blogs have been writing about over and over, all around the internet. Not only these blog posts had no new info in them, but I also ranked pretty much nowhere for those keyphrases because of the extremely high competition for them. Not good and a waste of time.

Instead, I suggest that once you found an approximate topic/keyphrase that you want your article to be around, focus instead on your message. Don’t try to make everything in sync with the keyphrase, but rather be as creative as possible, putting into that article your brightest ideas and experiences. Make it interesting, catchy and fun to read where possible. And even if you haven’t repeated that keyphrase, i.e. ten times as you initially wanted to do, don’t worry, Google will still get the idea behind your article if it makes sense.

Because today so many popular topics have been covered by so many blogs, I believe that there is no other way to become a winner in your niche other than by being “different” from the rest. Use all means possible to achieve this, whether it’s your humor, information, or your specific writing style. YOUR unique message will always carry more significance to the reader than what the other blogs have already put out there, even if your keyphrase is not that apparent as in the others.

Viral blog posts are never the ones that repeat what other blogs have already done. They are not the ones to use the same old keyphrases and to cite the exact same points as the other blogs have done but in a different order. No. They are the ones that are different from all the rest on a deeper level – the style of delivering the information.

Conclusion

I have given you some ideas on how to be different in your writing and how to find more readers for your blog. How you use this info is up to you. Creativity has no boundaries, and that’s the beauty of blogging. You decide what you put into this world.

Download our FREE guide >>>7 SMART STRATEGIES TO GROW YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC FASTER!<<<

Of course, this was far from a complete article on the subject. A complete one could be the size of a thick book, hundreds of pages long. The goal of this article was simply to clarify a few simple questions on what it means to attract readers to your blog today.

Nonetheless, you can see that even though some of the techniques, like SEO, still must be used in order to have a successful blog, some things have evolved and are no longer as straightforward as they were on the internet ten-fifteen years ago. Namely, no spam online, no copied or misleading and click baity titles, but long quality articles and (long-tailed) keywords that are as unique as possible but are still demanded by internet readers.

This was it for today. As always, if you have any other questions on how to find readers for your blog, feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment down below. I’ll be happy to answer those questions as well.

Thank you for stopping by and good luck!

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How to Find Readers for Your New Blog

Finding readers for your blog the standard way