Blogging 101 – Growing Your Visitor List

 Blogging 101 – Growing Your Visitor List

By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting (Pty) Ltd 

I started writing blogs purely for my own enjoyment.  It was a way for me to engage with the creative part of who I am.

As I became more confident though, and as more and more people joined the list of people “following” me – I quickly realized how blogging could be turned, not only into a marketing exercise but also a source of revenue generation.

Clearly, I needed and wanted to grow the list of people following me and in order to do this, logic tells me that I have to, not only entice new visitors but also convert visitors into dedicated readers.

This is obviously a ‘two-pronged approach’.  To entice ‘new’ visitors I would need to write about something that they were interested in and in order to do that, I expanded the topics that I write about.  I also started driving readers to my website by using Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn,  and it worked.  The number of visits to my website increased and the average amount of time spent on the website also increased.

Enticing visitors to become dedicated readers is also not that difficult.  If you are giving people ‘more’ of what they want, logic tells you that they will be back for more.  So giving people what they want rather than what I think they need is very important (incidentally this is how this particular series on blogging started, someone asked for it).

Tag onto the end of that - I asked people to let me know what topics they wanted information on or by using the day to day life experiences with problems and issues that I encounter, I research and write about these individual requirements and share what I have learned.  You would be surprised at the number of similar experiences people in the world of SME’s, Startups and Entrepreneurs, share and strangely enough we always tend to think that we are the only ones going through this.

The length of time that people spend on my website reading my blogs evidence that people are in fact reading what I write and it evidences that the visitors are becoming dedicated readers.

So my message today is this – find out what your readers would like to read about and do something completely different . . .  give people exactly what they want!

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or http://www.viljoenconsulting.co.za