Building a Blog Fan Base

1.4 blogs are created virtually every second on the internet, that’s around 120,000 blogs a day. Many won’t be updated for the next week, most won’t get more than 500 visitors a month. Some will stay live for as long as 6 months, till they are finally shutdown and only a handful of the rest will actually get popular. What sets these handful of blogs apart from the batch of 120,000? They built themselves a Fan Base.

Building a blog is the easy part. Keeping it going and getting the attention of web surfers can be quite an uphill task.

Building a Blog Fan Base

• Freshness is always a welcome breeze. Give your blog a personal touch, DO NOT just be OK with a free theme, customize it. Personalized banners, a logo and maybe a catchphrase should convey your message. I use a free theme but I’ve done a fair bit of customization to it, only wish I had time to do more.
• Announce to others what you’re about and why you write what you do. Its like a political campaign, you have to voice yourself. Your About page is a good place to start. After that you may want to include a brief 1 - 2 sentence write up after your posts or a small snippet in the sidebar, just enough to intrigue them to find out more.
• Never rest on your laurels. Keep your momentum going, success likes to stick around when it feels appreciated. Once you start thinking - “Yeah, I’m at a comfortable level” swish you get swept away by the person behind you. Your readers are your success, make them feel like you are always trying to do your best. They’ll appreciate it.
• Boasting is a good way to quickly lose you what you just gained. Case in point is writing a post about the after effects of a slashdot, digg or similar traffic influx. It’s OK to say that you got your story published but it’s better to hear it in the tone of an honor, not a triumph. In depth data on your traffic levels, how many people clicked ads etc… are put offs for the hundreds of people that have just signed up to your RSS feed.
• Arrange yourself to be available to reply back to comments that need it. If you get a trackback sending a thank you email or commenting on the linkers blog is a good way to make more friends…and fans.
• Seed yourself in the psyche of people to come to you for specific type of information….always! If you talk about a lot of general stuff then narrow it down so that they know what they can reference you for. Examples are Mashable for new startups, Problogger for blogging tips and so on…
• Energy! Make sure you have lots of it, blogging can get tiring. It’s perfectly alright to take a break once in a while, just make sure you have a backup person to help you out for the duration.

I hope these tips come of some help to you in building your blog fan base. If you would like to read more on blogging then I would like to suggest one of my articles called how to increase blog rankings.

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