Now that you’ve tapped into the WordPress.com community, it’s time to start reaching out to fellow WordPressers and pulling in the crowds by publicizing your content far and wide.
You may have found your Stats page by now, and if your feeling a bit lonely, don’t worry! It’s totally normal for new blogs to get few visitors and comments. As you continue updating content regularly and learn how to use all the social features available on WordPress, you’ll begin to draw a larger audience and increase user engagement. Patience, dear blogger: With hard work and time, your traffic will increase. (And even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean you’re not an awesome blogger — as long as you’re enjoying your blog, you’re successful.)
There are a multitude of ways to spread the word about your blog, so let’s jump in.
“Success is dependent on effort.”
~Sophocles
This unit is a biggy, so here’s a heads up: We’re going to discuss comments, links, social media, blog subscriptions, polls — and last but not least — stats.
Stage One: Utilize comments
One of the biggest differences between web publishing and traditional publishing is the access the Internet gives you to your audience. While you’re welcome to write to the editor of a newspaper or book, the conversation is a lot more direct on blogs, and it’s a lot faster to get started.
Comments are a great way to start engaging your readers and building relationships with them over time. When someone leaves a thoughtful, insightful or interesting comment, it’s common for the blog author to respond in some way. From there more people might add their own comments, and what started as a static piece of content becomes a dynamic, spiraling conversation you might never have predicted.
Generally speaking, it’s considered bad form to delete comments just because they’re critical of your point of view, so long as that criticism is constructive. In allowing different perspectives into the conversation, you show yourself to be open-minded and transparent, and this is particularly important on business blogs.
If someone crosses the line or doesn’t seem to be adding anything to the conversation, though, you might decide that you’d rather not publish their comment. Over time you’ll figure out what you’re happy with, and what you aren’t. Some people work on the principle that “if you wouldn’t say it to my face, or in my living room, you shouldn’t say it in the comments of my blog,” but each case is different, and this is of course up to you.
There are no rules as to the kind of conversations you encourage, but engaging with your readers via the comments very often helps you to build your audience, as well as a feeling of trust and having been heard from the people taking the time to read your content. Remember that if you’re uncomfortable with comments on your blog, you can turn off the feature in your WordPress.com discussion settings. You can also turn comments off for specific posts.
Stage Two: Share link love
Sending your audience away can be a great way to bring them back. It sounds counterintuitive at first, but providing links to other interesting sites and blogs can help to cement your relationship with your site visitors.
Sharing links to other sites in a “blogroll” provides your readers with some recommendations for other content that they might enjoy.
If you’re visiting an unfamiliar town, you might ask your hotel receptionist if they can recommend any great places to eat, or sights that you should check out during your visit. Providing a short list of recommended links in your blog’s sidebar is just the same, and often people will be glad to learn about something new that might interest them.
Link to the type of content you enjoy yourself, and chances are that someone else will find it useful. In turn, over time, you might find that other blogs recommend your content to their readers, and win you some new readers.
Either way, sharing “link love” powers the web, and the connections that people make as they move from one site to another.
Stage Three: Get the word out with social media
No blog is an island, and if you use services like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you might want to make use of some simple tools that will bring your followers from there to your blog posts on WordPress.com.
Baked right into the post editor is a feature called “publicize” that lets you send out a standard or customized Twitter “tweet” every time you put out a new post. That can help in bringing your Twitter followers over to your blog to check out what you have to say there. There’s also a Twitter widget that you can add to your blog’s sidebar to let your readers see your latest tweets.
You can also add the latest updates to your blog to your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so that when people visit your profile they’ll be able to see what you’ve been creating over on WordPress.
Stage Four: Make it easy for your visitors to stay updated
The Blog Subscriptions Widget is a sidebar tool that lets your readers sign up to receive an email each time you write a new blog post.
What it does: A reader types their email address into this tool, clicks the button and — presto! — they start receiving new posts from you in their inbox. They also can unsubscribe at any point after signing up.
What are my options? You can customize this widget quite a bit by adding your own custom text to each part of this widget.
- You can add a customized title — such as “Want New Posts by Email?”
- You can add optional text beyond the default text (which is “Click to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email”) and you can alter this message depending on whether your readers are logged into WordPress.com or not.
- You can add whatever brief bit of text you like for the subscription button, such as “Subscribe Me!” or “Sign Me Up!”
The Blog Surfer is a tool that can make it easier for you to keep up with your friends, family, and contacts who have blogs here on WordPress.com, particularly those with private blogs who you can’t subscribe via RSS.
Readomattic lets you read through your favorite blogs, tags, top post categories and even friends on Twitter all in one place, straight from your dashboard. It’s like an RSS reader without all the hassle. More on how to use Readomattic.
And speaking of RSS feeds, your blog automatically comes with one.
Stage Five: Engage visitors with polls
In the fast-paced world we live in people don’t always have time to leave an elaborate comment on a blog post they’ve just read, even if it inspired or interested them. Luckily, there are other ways that you can quickly grab the attention of your readers and find out a little more about them.
Polls are one of the easiest ways to reach out and get some feedback from your readers. They’re colorful, easy to respond to, and lure people in with the promise of finding out what other readers answered. That makes them a great addition to blog posts where you want to get an idea of what your readers think about a topic, the post itself, or anything else you can dream up.
Polls are easy to customize and have all kinds of different options, so whether you’re just looking for a “yes/no” answer, like “did you find this post helpful?”, or for a more intricate cross-section of responses, WordPress.com has you covered.
To create a poll or edit poll settings, locate the Polls menu in your dashboard.
Stage Six: Monitor your growth
While creating content can be rewarding in and of itself, there’s a certain thrill involved when you find out that your audience is growing, and the work you’ve put into your blog is being talked about out in the world.
WordPress.com gives you good ways to keep an eye on how your blog is faring, and makes it simple to get a bird’s eye view of your audience and what makes them tick. It also provides more focused information about what’s happening on the other side of your blog on any given day.
Knowing how many people are reading a given post, where they came from, and who’s talking about it elsewhere on the web can give you some useful pointers as to what’s really working out for you, and what content that isn’t grabbing people quite so much. What you do with that information will depend on your interests and attitude toward it, but it certainly can’t hurt to be aware of the buzz you’re creating, and the content you’ve created that brings audiences in time after time.
To get the lowdown on your stats, visit the Blog Stats page in your dashboard.
The graph at the top displays your blog’s total views for day, week, or month, depending on which tab is selected. Here you can also find out what your most popular posts and pages are, discover if anyone is referring you, see which search engine terms are bringing you the most traffic, and find out if any external links are bringing visitors to your blog. Here are stats from a blog that’s been around for a long time, so it has a lot of traffic:
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