Building an Audience
One of the most difficult aspects relating to the initial stages of professional blogging is the task of building and maintaining a core readership to follow your regular blog posts along with any guest posts and any freelance assignments you happen to take on. Your core readers will sustain your blog and will help you secure additional writing opportunities, especially when the sites you write for see that your work will consistently bring in additional traffic. Building an audience is difficult, however, and it may take a great deal of patience on your end before you have a base of readers who keep coming back for more each and every day.
When I first started out as a blogger I found it very difficult to go around promoting my work in an effort to get more eyes on my website. Over time I realized that you have to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion from time to time, but it is possible to promote your work in a way that does not feel like begging. There are several strategies you can use to promote your work, and I will discuss these strategies in greater detail in later chapters. First, it is important to understand why you should build an audience and how you can begin to do so through a simple focus on the quality of the work you produce.
A Loyal Readership Is Key to Sustained Success
You will be amazed to discover how quickly the Internet can forget about you. I had a popular site link to an article on my blog in the first month I started out and had over 30,000 pageviews in a single day. I tried to capitalize on this traffic by adhering to the guidelines I had created for myself by adding a new post each day.
The following day my site was down to 3,000 pageviews, and the day after I was back down to 500. It was demoralizing at first, but then I realized that I picked up a lot of returning visitors to the site from those 30,000 views. Each time a popular site linked to something I had written or anytime I wrote a guest post I noticed a slight uptick in my core audience.
As my core group of readers began to swell, I noticed that I was getting a lot of site referrals from social media and from shared links. Eventually I had a large readership that was interested in reading anything that I had written regardless of whether it was something I posted to my site or if it was something I contributed to a different site. My patience in building a core group of readers opened up a lot of doors for me professionally, and my readers are often a wonderful source of topic suggestions (just make sure you give them credit if they come up with a great idea for you to write about!).
So building an audience and being patient in doing so are clearly important. But how do you go about doing it, and what strategies work best?
Strategies for Building an Audience
I know a lot of writers who had no trouble at all in building an audience, but there are countless others who struggled mightily while employing every strategy imaginable. The time it takes to build an audience will depend a bit on your social circle. If you are something of an extrovert and have a lot of social connections it should not be too hard to build an initial audience who will refer others to the work you are doing. If you are an introvert and keep to a small social group, you may find that it takes a bit more time to build a core audience. Either way, a patient approach that utilizes the following strategies will ultimately yield a sizable readership:
Out of all of the aforementioned strategies, it is most important to consistently produce quality work. Whether you convince one person to read your work or 1 million, it will not matter very much if the work they read is not consistently outstanding. No amount of promotion, advertising or even begging will keep readers coming back if they cannot appreciate and enjoy the work you are producing. Keep your primary focus on the writing and take a long-term view when it comes to your readership.
It is undeniably discouraging to write post after post without seeing a significant uptick in traffic, but you should not give up so easily if this is the case. It can sometimes take some time for a blog to get noticed by the right people, and while you should be doing all that you can to get readers to your site, it is sometimes simply the case that you have to exercise patience in building a readership. If your blog is struggling along with just a hundred views per day for weeks on end, think of it this way: How would you feel if you brought your work to a public reading and the room was packed with 100 people each and every night just to hear you read your work? You should be thrilled to have such an audience and you wouldn’t even have time to individually thank them for being there!
Be grateful that you have a forum in which people can access your best work. There was a time when I was complaining about how much work I had put into a low-paying assignment when a friend reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut had said to his son Mark after he made a similar complaint: “What would it have cost you to take out a two-page ad announcing you can write?” Keep things in perspective and be patient when it comes to building your audience. If your work is good and you care about your subject, you will build an audience that will read your work for many years to come.
Quality Work Should Always Be the Primary Consideration
There are many byproducts of impatience, and many of these byproducts sacrifice the quality of your writing and your standards in exchange for pageviews. While 1,000 pageviews in a single day is, mathematically speaking, greater than 100 pageviews in a day, if the work is not up to par those readers will not return. Many bloggers, especially those who are just getting started, quickly learn the strategies to impatiently boost the number of visitors reading their work. These are the strategies you should avoid at all costs:
These strategies will get people to read your work once, but you will quickly lose respect and very few people will take your work seriously in the future. If you use these strategies and manage to build a solid readership, you can be sure that someone will bring up something that you wrote in the past to make you look bad. Write with integrity and write what you believe in. Even if it takes more time to build a large readership it will have been worth the effort to ensure that you begin your career with your reputation intact and your integrity firmly in place.
You never want to write with an ulterior motive, so ensure that the goal of your writing is not based on how to attract more readers or how to grab a lot of attention in a short period of time. Produce work that is consistently outstanding and your readership will ultimately grow in a significant way.
Engage Your Audience in the Comments Section
Some writers feel as though they are above the comments section and do not ever bother to venture there, and there is certainly a case to be made for avoiding the comments section. I feel, however, that engaging your readers in polite conversation is an excellent way to establish a loyal readership base. The key here is to make sure that you are thoughtful in your responses and that you maintain a sense of professionalism at all times.
It is exceptionally valuable for readers to know that not only does your site offer access to your work but that it also offers access to you, the author. This is an opportunity to engage your readers in intelligent discourse and to clarify anything that your post may have left unclear. Your readers will appreciate being able to speak with you directly, and they will certainly appreciate it if you are kind and respectful no matter the circumstance.
If a reader asks a silly question, simply answer it as best you can without insulting them by criticizing the question. If someone is critical of something you wrote, thank them for the feedback as politely as possible. They did, after all, take the time to respond to your post, so take the time to respond to them and win them over with your kindness and your open mind to critical feedback.