New to blogging? 5 ways to find new readers and build an engaged audience

As more and more people venture into blogging this year, I’ve noticed an increase in questions related to getting noticed as a new blogger and finding new readers. Here are some of my tips to finding new readers and how to turn them into an engaged audience.

1. Know who you want to attract

My first tip is about finding your ideal audience and understanding why they would follow you. Knowing exactly who your audience is and why they would read your blog, will help you in so many ways. Essentially you should be able to describe your blog and who it’s for in a couple of sentences. You may also want to look into niching to set you apart from the hundreds of other similar blogs out there.

Once you know this, work it into everything you create. Starting with the copy on your blog and your branding. Does your blog clearly tell people what topics you cover? Does it explain who exactly your content is for and why it’s for them? What will they gain from it? Your messaging is so important!

The next focus should be on your site’s usability and the user’s experience. Getting people to your site is one thing, but we need them to stick around and become loyal readers. Is your blog user friendly and easy to use? Do your audience have a good experience on your site in terms of the functionality, usability and design? And are you creating sharable content that they’ll want to come back to?

2. Build relationships within your niche (and utilise social media)

You’ll hear a lot of people within sales and marketing say that people don’t care about your brand (or in this case your business or blog), they care about people. That’s who they want to engage with! You’re going to have to put in some work if you want people to invest their time in your blog. Reach out and connect with both the authority figures within your niche and the audience who are interested in your niche.

Follow a few experts in your niche who are discussing similar things to you. Connect with them, follow them on social media, read and engage with their content, comment on their blog posts and share any content of theirs that you think your audience will find useful. Pitch to other bloggers within your niche about contributing to their site, doing guest posts or working on something together.

Figure out where your ideal audience hangs out. Maybe it’s one of the popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok or Twitter. Or do they go to Pinterest or YouTube when searching for something? Do they spend their time on Reddit, or prefer to scroll through Facebook. They could even be on a forum ASKING for content like yours. Or they may be attending events or conferences in your area. Wherever they are, find them and start connecting.

Join topical Twitter chats and Facebook Groups and get involved, as these can both be incredible places to connect with others. You could even experiment with Facebook or Instagram Ads to get your content in front of new people.

When people know of you and what you do, and you have a good relationship with that person, they are far more likely to put your name forward or recommend you.

3. Create content – write frequently and consistently (and invest in SEO)

Valuable, sharable content is going to draw people in. Having a blog that is frequently and consistently updated makes it easier to get people to read and share your content, to start a discussion and to come back.

When creating content, remember to link to related previous posts you’ve already written AND to quality content on other sites that is relevant to your post. The people you link to will likely notice and your readers will find it helpful to have other resources available to them.

Going back to my first point about finding your audience, you also need to think about your niche and unique selling point (USP). Think of a way to put a spin on what your core content is so you can stand out from the crowd. That might even mean adding some different experiences – like adding videos, live videos or a podcast to your blog posts for example.

Try optimising content for search engines while you’re at it to help gain organic traffic from search engines, this is definitely more of a long term investment but one that will pay off.

4. Be clear with your call to action

Add a call to action to each post you create. Ask yourself – what do you want people to do once they read your blog post? Should they leave a comment, share to social media, follow you on social media or join your newsletter? Make it super clear and ask them!

If people share your content with their friends or their own audience, then you have the opportunity to gain new readers. You could encourage social sharing with a couple of share icons on your blog post, or maybe some Click to Tweets within your content.

5. Be patient

Ask anyone who has had their blog since early 2000s, it takes time to build an audience. Most of them will even tell you that they wrote posts that nobody read for quite some time. When it comes to blogging and SEO, you really do have to be patient. It takes a lot of time and work to grow online, but it will happen for you!

Summary

By focusing on your content, your site and your audience, you’ll see a growth in traffic and loyal readers. My biggest tip is to simply get involved! Think of other bloggers as peers rather than competitors. Create consistent valuable content and work on building a community using your blog to help connect people with similar interests.

That’s a quick overview on gaining new readers, but this is definitely something I want to dive into more. If you have any tips to add, leave a comment below and let me know about them!