How To Get More Readers For Your blog
I gave this speech at HOD Toastmasters International club on Thursday April 4th 2024 and a member of the audience asked me if she could have a copy of my speech. I didn't have a wwwritten speech, just bullet points, to keep myself on track, and make sure I covered the essentials and amusing stories. So I told her I would write a blog, and here it is. Dennis, who was appointed to be the Evalautor of my speech recorded it. So here it is.
How many of you (in the audience) have written a blog? Only one out of ten, so it is new to you so I shall begin at the beginning. Why would you start to write a blog?.
A blog is written log on the web, a daily record of thouhts, actions, descriptions or instructions. The two extremes are the business blogs, which tells you nothing about the writer butpraises a product which the writer wants you to buy. They want the maximum number of readers, and buyers, The more readers, the more potential buyers. The more readers, the more the writer will be paid by advertisers. The extreme opposite is the writer who has nothing to sell, no readrs, writing to record their own thought, a diary so they can re-read later. You can use a blog for all sorts of things. You could write family recipes, record your hobby, your holiday, show your children growing up, or write the first draft of a novel.
I wrote a novel and found the problem with using a blog for it is that you have to follow it every day to get the flow. This is confusing for a new reader, or yourself if you come back to it a year later. If you start by reading today, and then look at yesterday, and so on, you are reading the novel in reverse order.
You might start a blog as a hobby, then when you gather readers, or gain confidence, you ahcnge the style or improve it and turn it into a business, or use it confidently to write another blog for a business.
If you are writing a personal blog, for yourself, your family, or a hobby, I suggest you start with blogger.com which is easy to use. They have a template. You just need to decide on a title, picke the layout, start writing and if you have one, add a picture. You could take your theme or favourite post from Facebook as a starting point.
If you are selling products, running a business, you might be better off using a more complicated system which lets youselect the shapes of pages, and fonts and do more complicated things, and add buy now and sign here and so on. (You can also get commercial firms to run a blog for you) For example, if you were selling cosmetics, you could run a blog on look more beautiful. Every blog post would end with a product, such as buy this cream for your skin, or this fruit for your health.
If you already have a miling list you might have readers straight away, or a sign about your blog in your shop or on your products.
However, if you are just starting your first blog as a fun experiment, your first blog has no readers in the first five minutes, unless you have mentioned something imortant, such as your eye witness account of a g into a plane crashing into a train or giving birth to ten children in ten minutes.
You can go onto the statistics page and see how many readers you have. When you write your blog post first thing in the morning obviously the first secodn after you have finished writing it the number is zero. Your thought is, how can I make this popular and attract readers.
At this point you have to consider, two people, the writer and the reader. What do you want to get out of? What will the reader get out of it. Where I had dinner last night might interest your children or your mother. Where to eat the best Italian food in the world, and get free drinsk at weekend, will attract more readers. So you might want to change your title, or change the whole subject matter or emphasis.
My son is in Search Engine Optimisation. I started writing my first blog on travel to tell eidotrs and people promoting destinations what I could say about destinations, resorts, and individual museums, hotels and restaurants.
I asked my son for advice. He said, one photo at the top is not enough. Look at the top selling blogs. They have two or three pictures, sometimes a picture to illustate the idea in each paragraph. So your title Spain for sun, sesa and sand, has to have a map of Spain, a sunset picture, a view of the sea, and a sandy beach picture, ending with a buy now or link now to the package tour of airline, or several. You should be plannin your whole, year, as a committee might to for a year of Toastmasters meetings. Plan for people taking holidays Christmas, Easter, and summer February is Valentine's day, roamtic destinations. Easter might be skiing, midnight mass, tours to the Vatican, and chocolate musuems and factory visits. Through the year you have national days New Year's Eve around the world. Events like boat races, horse races, car races, football and tennis, and animal shows.
How will you find enough subjects to write a blog on clothes or travel every day. I just need to walk along my own high street to see restaurants, shops selling suitcases, parking restrictions, bus routes, taxi services. The supermarket has food and drinks from around the world., seasonal decorations and seasonal products. I did a blog post when the clocks changed to British summer time.
What about clothes. How do I find 365 subjects without spending a fortune.I can take a photo of myself in what I am wearing now. I have red sandals. I can write about sandals for travelling. On my travel blog. Wearing a red outfit on my clothes blog. What about my navy jacket with pockets? I can write about clothes with pockets for travelling. I can write about different colours of jacket on my dress outfits blog. dressof the dayyangelablogspot.com
I could copy my entire blog post from one website to another. But my son warned me that Google might not pick up the second website. It thinks its the same website, or that I have copied another website. Even if its not plagiarism, Google reckons a reader doens't want to read the same thing twice. So I need different phtos. Soe everywhere I go I take two photo. From two differnet angles. One close up, another from a distance. That wasy I can do post with different picures. I can change the title. One post is on Seasides in Span. ANother is the best Spanish sandy beaches.
I look at my blog statistics throughout the day. I had 7,000 readers of my blog post in my travel yesterday. If it gets to lunch time and I have fewer than 3,500 readers, I either change the title or write another blog post.
A friend of mine from another Toastmasters club in the UK, Harrovians, told me I should put links on other media. So I put a link to my blog on Facebook. Then on LinkedIn. Than on Pinterest. Then on Instagram. My readership shot up. Of course, you ought to be doing that every time. But even when I forgot or was too busy, I still seemed to benefit from a permanent increase in numbers. Either I ahd acuired regular readers, or people kep reading the links in my profile on LinkedIn and other places.
If you are starting a new blog, take a look at my blogs. If you have any questions come back to me. I can write a blog post for you with the answers.
posted by Angela Lansbury Author at 2:01 AM
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