If you’ve had a blog on your website (or your website is a blog) you’ll know that it can be quite a challenge to actually get people onto it.

We’ve been getting quite a good amount of people on our blog and here are some of the things that we’ve learned on the way.

1. Commitment

Sorry. There may be some exceptions to the rules, but most blogs take time to build a readership. So the first bit of advice is to commit mentally to the process of building your blog. It will pay off as you build your reputation in your market.

Don’t try and use the excuse that you don’t have enough to blog about, i’ve heard that a thousand times, but there is always something you can get excited about with your product or service. If there isn’t, maybe you should change what you do.

2. Content is King

There are over a billion blogs. So unless you have something great to say you’re unlike to build a readership. Great content is useful and unique. You should be asking yourself ‘what does my target market struggle with that I can help them with’. Don’t forget that your blog is part of your marketing mix and if you can demonstrate on your blog that you can fix people’s issues, they will keep coming back for more.

3. Interact with Readers

When someone takes the time to make a comment on your blog, it makes sense to interact with them. All you need to do is thank them or answer a question they leave.

If people can see that you are bothered about what they think, they’ll come back. They may even tell other people, which is free publicity for you.

If you are going to do this, I would suggest putting a bit of time aside each week to go through them. If you answer each comment as it comes through, you’ll get VERY distracted.

4. Keep it Regular

Frequent posting is not only good for your readers, it’s a good way to tell Google (and other search engines) that it should be taking note your blog and rank your posts. Again, you need to keep the content high quality, no-one will want to sift through a load of rubbish to find the good stuff.

5. Search Engine Optimisation

Finally. SEO. When you write your blog posts you may want to consider how Google will rank them. Writing an article that gets found on Google is a great way to build a new potential customer base that you may not have normally had.

Think about the title of the post. Are people searching for that particular question?

Also, if you are using WordPress to blog, you’ll be allowed to ‘tag’ your post. You should think about the keywords that people may use to find your blog.

I’m sure you have ideas as well, why not leave them below?