I don’t get any visitors to my blog and what to do about it
I had an interesting conversation this week – in fact this conversation, or variations on this topic are common in my world.
Authors are frustrated with the lack of traffic to their blog.
The “I don’t get any visitors to my blog” conversation. The picture above perfectly described the feelings. The ‘what the hell’ grumpy comments that I field on an almost daily basis.
In fact if I had a picture to represent this, I would picture a little boy or girl on a busy playground with their arms crossed, pouting, with the caption of “No one will play with me.”
Blogging is hard work
Developing an audience takes time
Both of these are truths – more so today than when I first started blogging.
The ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy doesn’t really work in today’s blogging world. Yes, if your site is set up properly, you will attract a certain amount of organic traffic that will gradually build over time – but not overnight!
The reality is that you need to go out and find your audience. Encourage them to come and visit.
Let’s call this networking.
Just like in a business environment, you network to increase your circle of influence. To increase the number of people you can communicate with – to increase the number of people you can share ideas with.
Starting out my blogging career as a book blogger was a great experience. What book bloggers (and many other types of bloggers) learn quickly is how to expand their audience. There are memes (group activities), there are Follow Friday activities, there is a huge list of activites and at the base of it all is chatting about the subject that we love – books.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most authors are not taught to network. Either they don’t come a ‘day job’ that requires networking, or they buy into the camp that feels that authors don’t blog. Or, it doesn’t occur to them to apply the concepts that they learn at their day job to their author job.
Regardless – I’ve come to the conclusion that my next book is going to be on networking…and then next few weeks of posts are going to be about Networking.
Before you start networking your blog, you need to envision where your audience will be. The answer to that will be dependent on what genre you write. So…your homework for this week will be brainstorming ideas as to where your audience can be found. If you are really unclear, sign up to my newsletter (http://bakerviewconsulting.com/helpful-hints-waiting/) and one of the things that I give away is a book that helps you understand the demographics on each social media.
A direct action that you can take today is to open a free account at http://bloglovin.com
Once you have a free account, you can hook up your blog feed – as a hint, your feed is likely http://yourdomain.com/feed where the ‘yourdomain.com‘ part is replaced by your domain’s name.
The next step is to find some blogs to follow.
When you click on the ‘Find Blog’ link you are presented with all sorts of choice. Each entry will tell you how many followers each has via BlogLovin’ and a little snippet of the latest post. Click on the ‘Follow’ button for each one you are interested in. There is an app for your mobile device and perhaps you can spend your commuting time or your daily coffee break commenting on blogs or just finding some new friends.
Oh…and remember – make friends – don’t ask everyone you find to read your book 
