Increasing Your Audience

In today’s world of widespread content and websites, it is becoming more and more difficult to increase your audience and reach the number of people you ideally desire. It seems that whatever you do, there is always something more that could have been done to reach even more people. Many people think that they are not trying hard enough, but it isn’t all about trying hard enough – a lot of it has to do with doing the right things at the right time!

Keep Content in Mind – Write Educational and Interesting Content

The whole idea of writing quality, educational, and interesting content can be easily explained with an example. If you write content that your current audience isn’t really interested in, how can you expect to increase your audience? So, it follows that your content must be interesting enough to your current audience for them to share this content with others – thus giving you a good chance to reach more people.

Aside from making your content educational and interesting to your audience, you should also remember to give. Clay Collins suggests that giving your audience something good and tangible, such as information others are charging hundreds of dollars for, will make your audience realize you are someone that they should really pay attention to. Give your audience free education, and find another ways to monetize this – other ways than actually charging for this education.

If you are having trouble determining what kind of content would be good educational content, you can ask yourself this question: what kind of posts would I share? Also, you can think about the posts you have liked and shared in the past, and try to write your own content drawing the inspiration from these posts.

?Action Item: Publish one educational post. Just think of it as the first step to writing educational content.

Create a Customized Opt-in for Every Blog Post

Clay Collins also says that you should really think about giving your audience the chance to have your content on their hard drive, and to do this easily, practically, and quickly. There will be times when people just don’t have the time to read your post but really like the idea and would like to possess it. In order to attract people to these blog posts, you should create some kind of giveaway for your next blog post, as this should increase your audience very quickly.

Action Item: Create a customized opt-in for individual posts on your blog and provide people with the chance to download your post onto their own computers and keep it forever.

Reply to All the Comments You Receive

First of all, you need to show your audience that you care about what they have to say. Without this, why should you expect anyone to leave a comment in the first place, right? In addition to showing that you care, you will also start conversations with some of the commenters, which will in turn create a great give-and-receive attitude on your blog.

?Action Item: Answer all of the comments you receive on your blog, as this will not take away more than 10 or 15 minutes of your time daily.

Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

This is a crucial step many people forget about, and not completing this step will keep your blog away from SERP’s (search engine results pages). You have to submit your blog to search engines, essentially letting them know that you are here and you want to be listed in their search results. Remember to do this with all major search engines, or at least the ones you deem important for the success of your blog.

“Action Item:” Submit your blog to all the major search engines.

Find Your Audience

Finding your audience actively instead of passively is very important, and you can do this by participating in forums, especially paid forums, and Facebook groups. According to James Schramko, forums (both paid and free, but especially paid) and Facebook groups are a killer way to find people of common interest, like the subject of your website.

Action item: Join a forum, Facebook group, or an online community of any kind where your potential audience is hanging out, and start mingling!

Utilize the Immense Power of Social Media

There are many things you can do to take advantage of social media in order to increase your audience, and here are some of the most important ones:

• Share your own blog posts on social media sites such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, as well as share other people’s related posts.
• Syed Balkhi says to use Google+ to post a status with a link to your content, as this will get indexed by Google, improving your overall online presence and rank is SERP’s.
• Balkhi also suggests posting YouTube to post videos, as it is much easier to rank high for videos than for written content.
• Add a video description with keywords, link to your blog posts, and put a link to the video toward the end of the description.
• Always reply to video comments.
• Try to add at least two related videos at the end of the video.
• Always suggest viewers to “like” the video, as this often reminds them to do so after watching the video.
• Use social media sites to connect with other people, engage in conversations, get to know other people on social networks, offer your help, etc.

?Action Item: Start using Google+ to share links to your content and create a video to promote yourself on YouTube.

Add Links to Your Blog Posts

When you are writing a blog post, it is a good idea to add a link to an older post if you are talking about it of referencing it in the new post. You should also add links to blog posts written by others if you are referencing them in your own posts. This makes it easier for people to understand your point completely. You just need to keep in mind to always make the link open in another window, as you don?t want your audience to leave the original post when they click on a link.

Action Item: Write a post that contains at least one link to one of your previous posts and one link to a blog post written by someone else.

Do Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is great, as it gives you a chance to get great inbound links, resulting in an audience increase. With guest blogging, you essentially tap into another blog’s audience and attract them to your own blog. So, have your VA compile a list of blogs related to yours, as well as a list of potential ideas for those guest blog posts. Then, send emails to the blogs on the list, asking them to guest post and offering at least two or three post ideas you would write about.

Action Item: Get a list of blogs and topics created and start sending those emails.

Comment on Other Blogs

Increasing your audience is all about establishing a strong online presence, and commenting on other blogs will attract other people’s attention. But the comments need to be good and thoughtful so to capture other readers? and the blog owner’s attention.

Action Item: Find a few blogs that are interesting to you and related to your blog, and comment on these blogs two or three times a week.

Set Up a Subscription Option

When you have a blog and want to build a solid audience, you will need a lot of people coming back for each of your next post – and this is next to impossible if you do not make it easy for them to do this. People are busy and they may forget about your blog unless your name appears in their inbox or reader every day.

Action Item: Put a subscription option on your site.

Add links to your Email Signature

All of your email connections should have a chance to access a link to your blog easily, and this can be done by putting a link to your blog, as well as your social media pages/profiles in your email signature.

Action Item: Add link to your blog & social media to your Email signature.

Get Email List Subscribers

You should set up an opt-in on your blog, allowing your audience to receive something of value for signing up. The giveaway can be a free e-book, a free download of any kind, or anything else that seems interesting and useful.

Action Item: Create something to give away. Set up your opt-in and add it to your blog.

Do Promo Swaps

Neil Patel has had great success doing promo swaps. Promo swaps are an easy way of driving more traffic to your blog/website, and it is done by finding a website that is related to your own but not a direct competitor. Here is how promo swaps work:

• Swap Tweets : When two companies share tweets about each other to their Twitter followers.
• Swap Facebook Posts : Just like swapping Tweets, each of the companies would share a post related to the other company on their own Facebook page.
• Dedicated Email Swap : Each company will send an email about the other company to all of their email connections.
• Sponsored Email Swap : Whenever a company sends out an email, they put a link to the other company that says “Sponsored by” plus the name of the other company.
• Ad Space Swap : Each company places an ad on the other company’s blog or website.
• Pre-Roll Video Swap : Each of the companies advertizes the other company in their video ads.
• Giveaway Swap : Each of the two companies offers a giveaway from the other company on their website or blog.

Action Item: Choose one of the above mentioned swaps and try it out!

Have a Product & Do Affiliate Programs

Danny Inny suggests creating an affiliate program for one of your products. The whole point of affiliate marketing programs is having other people sell your product for a cut of the profit. In order to take advantage of this program, you will first have to create a product and then create an affiliate program for your product. Remember that you always have to be there for your affiliates, as the better they do, the more you make and the more popular your product is.

Action Item: Create a product and create an affiliate program for it.

Increasing your audience doesn’t have to be hard or complex. Start with just one of the suggestions above and see how it helps drive more of your target audience to your site. Let me know which of these gives you the greatest success!

Tags: affiliate program, audience marketing, comment, content marketing, email lists, email signature, guest blogging, increase audience, optin, products, promo swap, social media, subscribe

Categories: Business, Marketing

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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