How to get people to read your blog

This is a guest post by Jim Murdoch. His website is here, his blog, The Truth About Lies, is here, and you can read about his three books here

Footfall comes before sales

When I first started blogging about four years ago and still finding my feet I posted a blog called Twenty-seven dictionaries in which I listed all the dictionaries that I owned. Of course what with the internet I’ve hardly consulted any of them since I wrote that article. The world sure has changed. The thing about words is there’s usually a word out there for every occasion: kyphorrhinos – having a nose with a bump in it; ginglyform – hinge-shaped; cruciverbalist – one who loves doing crossword puzzles. Just type any one of those words into Google and you’ll get a definition in about a fifth of a second. The problem with dictionaries – and by extension the problem with the Internet – is that a lot of the time they only work when you know the answer.

Let me explain: what’s a word to describe a person who holds stubbornly and mistakenly to their old ways? We’ve all known people like that but what do you call them? Type that into Google and you will struggle. The answer is a mumpsimus and the definition is “someone who sticks obstinately and wrongly to their old ways.” If you type that in you’ll get the right answer. As good as Google is, it has its limitations.

The same goes for us. If I type ‘Jim Murdoch’ into Google I generally come up at the top of the first page in about a third of second. But what if you’ve never heard of me? And there are hundreds of authors out there you will never have heard of all of whom will write exactly the kind of stuff that someone wants to read. But those someones don’t realise that the authors they have been waiting their whole lives to read are out there despite the fact those authors have websites and blogs on which they post interesting content on a regular-but-not-so-regular-as-to-become-a-burden-to-their-readers basis, are on various social networking sites, and tweet religiously on the hour every hour.

If you build it…

In the film Field of Dreams Kevin Costner’s character is told, “If you build it he will come.” A lot of people think much the same when it comes to promoting themselves online. Of course it takes a bit of time to get known, so they give it a bit of time, and then a bit more time and then a bit more and then they realise that no one’s coming. Okay, so one or two are coming, but not the droves of readers desperate to hang on their every word. They’re not coming. Assuming they exist – every writer needs to hang onto that belief – one has to ask why they’re not coming. The reason is as obvious as the nose on my face. They’re either not looking or they’re looking in the wrong place.

I discovered Richard Brautigan in a charity shop in Saltcoats. That’s where I happened to be and that’s where someone had handed in four of his books, three of which I bought purely because I liked the covers. I wasn’t looking for him. I knew nothing about him. To be honest I don’t hear much about Richard Brautigan these days on- or off-line and it is perfectly feasible that I would never have stumbled across him to this day had I not been in that shop on that day. A fluke. A fortunate happenstance.

Here’s another. I’ve written two novels about a man who gets to spend three days in the company of the personification of truth. One reviewer said of the first book:

“Murdoch’s writing style reminds me of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett’s humour but at the same time it has its own sense of quirkiness.”

You can find out more here. Now, I don’t know how many people will read this post but I would imagine all of you, or certainly most of you, will have never heard of me before. What have I done? I’ve gone to where you were looking, stood in front of you and marketed at you. You weren’t coming to me and so I came to you. That’s how it works. The bottom line is that a book with a character called Truth written by a guy people (okay, one person) has compared to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett has got to have a potential audience of thousands if that book can be got into their line of vision.

Writing articles is a great way to get to address a new audience. It’s time consuming though. Even making meaningful comments on other people’s blogs for the backlinks takes time. So I do other things none of which bring me thousands of extra visitors every day but they all bring me some and, as you will see, over time the numbers mount up. You see I can promote my latest book or blog post on Facebook but most of the people I know there already read my blog and I read theirs. What we are looking for is fresh blood. So, after every article I write I do the following:

Ping your blog

I use a variety of ping tools to let search portals and other services know when my site has been updated.

Doing this encourages these services to crawl your site more often. (Being crawled more often doesn’t necessarily improve your search ranking, but it will help ensure your whole site has been “seen”, and that your search listings are up to date.) I use several of these: Ping-o-Matic!, Feed Shark, Pingler, EZE Directory, BulkPing.com and BlogBuzzer. There are more and I have no particular loyalty although BlogBuzzer will also send tweets on your behalf.

Use social news sites

I focus on four at the moment but I’m always on the look for new ones. The four are BlogEngage, Dropjack, Reddit and Digg. It takes a matter of seconds to log in and enter the details of your latest post. I tend to write what I know I’m going to use in Word and then simply cut and paste.

Use bookmark-sharing sites

I focus on two here, Delicious and StumbleUpon (which, of all the above, gets me the most hits). I’ve just started using BlinkList but I’m not sure what effect it’s having (if any) yet.

Use blog carnivals

These come and go. It depends on your site’s focus which will be of any use but I use two regularly, the book review blog carnival and just write.

Use other people’s blogs

Depending what my post is about, I’ll submit a link to News & Notes from Poetry Worlds and Ron Silliman’s blog. These are only useful when I have a poetry-related article but a link on Ron’s site can mean another 100 hits.

Use online magazines

At the moment I only do this with Zimbio. It’s another form of pinging in that all I do with it is replicate my post there, but it’s quick and easy.

Use free advertising networks

For a while I was on Entrecard and it did increase my hits but not the time spent on the site – people were visiting for a couple of seconds and then vanishing – and so I quit. (More of that in a bit.) That said I did make some good contacts through the scheme and found two people I now regard as good friends. CMF Ads is also one that’s quite popular. These sites need you to put a discreet ad on your site. I have mixed feelings about their effectiveness in the long-term but they are worth looking into if you don’t overdo it.

All the above may sound like a lot but I get it done in about thirty minutes. The point is I’m going where other people might be looking and hoping I can pique their interest. This is where you need to understand how people use the internet. Think about how you use it because that’s probably how other people are doing it too. All they may be seeing is a title and a few lines of text. This is where tags are so important because it’s things like that – don’t get me started on how to use SEO (search engine optimisation) to your advantage – that get used to filter the content that people look at.

What else does Google do? It is a giant sieve. You type in poetry and poetry-shaped holes appear and poetry-related blogs drip through.

These are the Top 5 hits from my blog:

1. The Last Station – 4,125, (average time on page 5:13 minutes) – 405 in the last month
2. When I Was Five I Killed Myself – 3,922, (average time on page 3:49 minutes) – 224 in the last month
3. Why I hate love poetry – 2,526, (average time on page 3:41 minutes) – 55 in the last month
4. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – 2,029, (average time on page 4:11 minutes) – 36 in the last month
5. The Mimic Men – 1,855, (average time on page 4:36 minutes) – 64 in the last month

Four book reviews and one article on poetry showing just how having the right keywords in your title can make all the difference. Of all my visits 50% come via Google, 10% from direct sources and 40% from referring sites. StumbleUpon accounted for 6,400 visits. Ron Silliman for 2,507. When you start looking down the list you see that sites like BlogEngage sent me 132 visitors although even a small number like that should not be sniffed at because you do not know who any of those 132 people may be and one may very well be your ideal reader who never even knew he or she was looking for you.

None of the above is a replacement for the fundamentals: staying on topic and posting quality content on a regular (certainly no less than weekly) basis. But it doesn’t hurt either. My total hits in the last four years amount to almost 195,000. In the first six months, without any promotion of any kind: 2,850. I rest my case.

Hits in themselves are only a measure of a certain kind of success – what in the real world we would talk of as ‘footfall’: the number of people visiting a shop or a chain of shops over a period of time. Just because people visit your store doesn’t mean they’ll buy anything but let’s face it, your shop will have a much greater chance of snagging a sale once the customer has crossed the threshold. They may not buy anything this time but if they see this is a fun place to shop and the shop assistants aren’t breathing down their necks then they may well come back another day. This is where content and the look of your blog or website come into play but that’s really a topic for another day.