How do I get more people to read my blog? Step 4 – Getting strangers to spread the word

This is the fourth in a series of articles to help you get more blog traffic.

If you have been following the series you would already have read how to boost the search engine traffic to your blog, how to get other websites to link to yours, and telling friends, family and followers about it. Now it’s time to get other people to tell their networks about your blog.

Getting strangers to spread the word about my blog

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just post some content on your site and then get loads of people you don’t know to tell their friends about it? Well, it’s Social Media again!…

Do you use social sharing icons on your website posts? These are the icons that visitors can click to share your article with their own followers if they like it enough. If your content really is good, and it is relevant to other people (why would you post it otherwise?), then you should allow them to easily share it. If you don’t have these on your site, there are some decent plugins (search for something like ‘social sharing plugins’ if you use platforms such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal). Ask your website designer if you’re having trouble.

Twitter is also useful here – if you tweet about something, and there is space left at the end of the tweet, try adding something like ‘Pls RT’. A few kind souls will see it and might re-tweet it for you. There are a few things to bear in mind here, though – out of courtesy you should also extend the favour when you see one of their tweets (if you think it would be of interest to your followers), and you shouldn’t ask for everything to be re-tweeted. Here’s something radical..

If you’re actively tweeting your own interesting content, why not try re-tweeting a few Tweets that your own network have posted? You might find that they then come looking for your tweets… and re-tweet some of them!

Important — people that don’t know are only likely to share your content with their networks if there is a good reason for them to do it. As we have already discussed, this is more likely to happen if you do something for them first (such as liking or re-tweeting them). However, you will still need to make your content useful enough or interesting enough to others. So, spend time building great content! One great post is worth more than a dozen lame ones.

That’s the last of our short series helping you to get more blog visitors. Having got more visitors to read your blog, the next big challenge is getting more of them to interact with it – this means getting comments, and is the subject of a series of posts we’re working on right now… and coming soon!