Readership?

[Mike French]

I have recently started a new blog ( listed under Tales from the Tree under United Kingdom on Blogger hub)

The aim of the blog is to gather a readership which pushes roll out of the chapters from the new book The Dandelion Tree, by interacting and commenting on the blog site.

My question is:

Does anyone have any tips on how to attract readers rather than people that will just hit the site for a moment, in the game of I'll visit you to try and get my hit rate up myself, but I'm not really intersted in your site.

Thanks
Mike

[Nafcom]

Add your blog to [url]http://www.technorati.com[/url] as they are THE blogsphere and then your blog can be found easier, also add it to all kinds of bloglisting sites.
A good one is BlogDumps at [url]www.blogdumps.com[/url]

[jugolam]

Try mybloglog.com. You can start a new community there. You also can make your readers feel appreciated by showing their pictures in the widget. Sorry for the bad english. :P

[Getty72]

Hello, this is a very good question. I have found that by visiting blogs of a similar nature (perhaps writing blogs in your instance) and leaving positive comments on their posts, will attract some people. That's where the snowball effect starts. Some of them will visit your blog in return and and contribute - also people who read their blogs may also be interested in visiting your blog and will click on your username above the comment that you have left.

Another option is to add links to others' blogs - they then frequently add links to yours - giving you more exposure. Anywayz - good luck in your quest, I am sure you will be very successful!!!!!!!!!!!

[jugolam]

getty72, if i comment in you blog, will you the same in my blog?

[teatreebergamot]

It's hard work. You need to find your particular book readers, so it's no good posting about your blog in a forum dedicated to money for instance, or in general forums.

First you need to find if there are any other book blogs out there. Try Googling "book blogs" or "British book blogs" or "Uk book blogs" or some such variation (and use other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos etc too as they may give different results). Don't just look at the first page of results - really trawl through the first fifteen pages of search results to see if you can find other book blogs (I know it's time consuming but it's worth doing). Try searching for reading groups and book clubs too.

Then make contact with these blogs through their comments section. Make a friendly comment, ask if you can exchange links with them (to build your Google page rank). Make sure you read these blogs frequently as they will probably have tips about how to make contact with other book blogs and how to get readership.

Try to find online chat forums where they discuss books, and post there, putting your blog URL in the signature. That should bring you traffic too.

In order to build Google page rank you need links - preferably from other blogs, but links in signature postings at forums count too. Once you have worked to build your Google page rank (which will take three months, as Google put newbies into the "sandbox" at first), you will start to get hits from people doing Google searches, especially if your page rank is a 4 or above. That's the real McCoy - people actively searching for the subject you are writing about and clicking through to you. But it only happens if you are on the front page, so work at developing those links, and work at producuing good content on your blog.

Goog luck!