Everyone is looking for new readers for their blog! I don’t care if you’re getting 1 million unique visitors a day, you are still looking for ways increase your reach across the internet! So I am going to take a quick look at 10 easy ways that you can find new readers for your blog.

1. Comment Your Commenters
   Usually when a blogger comments on your post it is because it is of relevance to them and their blog. So why not stop on over at their blog also, return the favour and see if you can grab some of their readers. If you are in a similar niche, chances are you will gain quite a few new readers from this method!
   
2. Step Outside Your Niche
   I have found the goldmine for getting new readers for my blog was to step outside of my niche when commenting on blogs. Sure a lot of my readers are ‘MMO’ or ‘blog about blogging’ bloggers, but I also have a lot of general bloggers, mum bloggers and dad bloggers, who may not be as focused on making money but want to learn how to improve their blogging.

   What I did to find these blogs was to do A LOT of blog hopping, where I’d visit the commenter of one blog, then the commenter of that blog etc etc, and this chain would lead me to niche blogs that I would not normally visit! Become active outside of your niche!

3. Forums
   Forums are another tool for getting new readers I absolutely love! That is because it really does work. For me one blog alone is usually one of my highest referrers each month – and I am not even as active their as I used to be.

   For me, being in the internet marketing/MMO/ blog about blogging niche, I focus on webmaster forums. The pick for me is Digital Point because the community is massive and they have a link to you latest blog post from each post you make on the forum!
   

4. Google
   Search engines are great ways to increase your traffic because although it takes a while to happen, when it does, it is a constant flow that continues to work for you – even when you’re sleeping!

   There is no need to pay for SEO services, the keys to generating search engine traffic from your blog posts is:

   • Optimise Your Posts For Keywords
   • Put Your Keywords In Titles
   • Talk About What Is Popular
   • Use Keyword Tools Like Market Samurai

5. Social Bookmarking
   I must say this is something I tried to work out, but still havn’t. However saying that, I know a lot of bloggers that have had massive (and I mean massive) influxes of traffic from social bookmarking websites like DIGG and Stumble.
   
   If anyone has a post where they explain how to be successful in Social Bookmarking, feel free to link to it in a comment below!

6. Guest Blogging
   If you are looking to expand out of just commenting on blogs and want to show readers your quality of posting before they visit your blog, then guest posting is for you. There are a lot of bloggers that would love for you to make a guest post on their blog. In fact I probably get at least one email a week asking if I will do a guest post.

   A lot of bloggers are busy and would love a hand to lighten the posting load. This is your opportunity to show other bloggers readers why they need to be reading your blog also. One thing thought, do not right about you and your blog. Provide quality content that will benefit your host blog as well.

   A few blogs I have guest posted on are:

   • Tyler Cruz
   • Carl Ocab
   • Ian Fernando
   • MixedMarketArts
   • RetireAt21

7. Hold A Contest
   This has to be one of the most popular ways for bloggers to quickly increase their readers and thast because it works! I have run as well as been apart of my fair shar of competitions and each time I have seen a nice increase in my traffic stats, comments per post, and rss feed count.

   There are a lot of differnt types of contests so here are a few to get to you thinking:
   
   

   • Self Hosted Contest
     This is where the contest is for your blog only, and you offer prizes for things like:
     • Random Email Subsribers (To boost feed count)
     • Random Commenters (Boost traffic and comment counts)
     • Challenge/Word Game (To get readers coming back)
   • Multiple Blogger Contests
     This is where you are competing against other bloggers for a prize yourself, and usually involves you providing incentives and contests for your visitors. A couple of examples of this are:
     • The famous ‘John Chow vs Shoemoney’ contest
     • Tyler Cruz vs Winning The Web
     • Daily Blog Tips ‘Blogging Idol’
8. Give Away Something
   Giving something to your readers has to be one of the best ways of keeping them. I am sure you have seen all the blogs giving away a free product (usually an ebook) to every reader who subscribers to their blog.

   The reason they do this is because people love getting things for free and if the ebook is something that interests them then they will quickly give up their email address to get it! And most bloggers know that people are usually way to lazy to take the time to unsubscribe to things!

9. Submit Posts To Article Directories
   This is something I have been doing on and off since I started with internet marketing and bloggging about 18 months ago. All I can say is it works! I haev had one article have over 12,000 views and a couple more each with a few thousand view each. This is a great way to get free traffic for about 2 mintues work. I usually just submit to EzineArticles, but there are 100′s of other article directories if you want to spend the time to submit.

   Andrew Hanson wrote a great post about success in article marketing – where he tells us of a friend that has had over 200,000 article views! Read it here…

10. Entrecard
    Now I wouldn’t say that Entrecard is the best source of traffic, but any traffic is good traffic right? Now you could just go search for lists of blogs with the entrecard widget to drop, but why not be a bit more efficient and look for lists of blogs that promise to return the favour?

Well hopefully that should keep you all going for a while! Those are my 10 tips to get more readers, but I would love to know what you do. Especially if you have had success in social bookmarking!

Well after the success of last sundays question, I am giving you all another chance to give me your thoughts on a topic! Sounds fun right?

Well I am sure the majority of us all stuggle with getting things done, as it never feels like their are enough hours in the day. So today we are going to look at the race against time! And what we can do to make sure we get all the things we plan done.

So I’ll throw it out there:

What do you do to win the race against time and get everything done you plan to do in your day?

Looking forward to hearing all your thoughts!

Wow! I can already feel the glaring eyes of all my readers, but give me a chance to justify myself! I have been blogging for over a year now and reading blogs for even longer that that. In this time it has given me a great chance to watch how bloggers act, react and interact, and there are a few things that I have noticed that are common among most bloggers – that may not necessarily be good.

Here are 5 attributes that most bloggers have that annoys me!

1. They Think They Deserve To Be Popular
   Now don’t get me wrong. Everyone deserves the opportunity to be heard – that’s freedom of speech. But to think that you can just rock up, create a blog and the next day be getting 1,000′s of visitors is something that seems to be becoming all to common among new bloggers. They see the likes of Chow, Cow and Co and expect to get straight to their level, as they never saw the hard work that was put on by these ‘pro bloggers’ to get to where they are.

   To be successful at blogging you have to put in the hard work with quality posts and being active in your niche! AND YOU NEED TO BE CONSISTENT! Blogging success doesn’t come over night, but it will if you stick around long enough!
   
   

2. They Can’t Handle Criticism
   How many times have you seen a blogger lash out at one of the comments on their blog? Does anyone else get the feeling that a lot of bloggers cannot take constructive criticism? Now I’m not talking about personal attacks. I’m referring to people leaving comments that are their own opinions which just happen to be the opposite of those held by the blog author.

   Why is it so hard for us to understand that not everyone is going to agree with us? That is the beauty of such a diverse world! How boring would life be if everyone agreed about everything?

3. They Are Followers
   I’m not saying don’t change when you realise your blog is heading in the wrong direction. But I see a lot of bloggers totally changing who they are and how they blog just because a ‘pro blogger’ is doing or saying something.

   I would like to think that as bloggers we are the ones setting the pace, we are being creative and unique. Why are we so busy following the latest trend to make use of our freedom of speech. I remember when pretty much everyone would make a post about how much John Chow was earning the day after he released his monthly earnings. Now I know that it is a great encouragement to find out that this money is able to be made blogging, but does everyone need to stop writing quality posts to blog about how much someone is making?

   Be your own person. Blog about what you’re thinking. Take new territory! That is what blogging should be. Leave the rehashing for ezine articles!

4. They Don’t Harness The Power Of Networking
   Blogging is the perfect arena to really profit from networking. Why is it that so many bloggers don’t take ahold of the opportunity? In blogging their are so many ways for us to network and build our blogs together. To use each other as steps to building both each others blogs. We can:
   • Comment on other blogs
   • Link To Each Other In Our Posts
   • Use Social Bookmarking Tools
   • MSN
   • Help Other Bloggers Out With Problems
   • Suggest Ways For Each Other To Improve

   Think how much more successful all our blogs would be if we truly caught a hold of the power of networking?

5. They Give Up To Easily
   I was looking at Marks Top100 Bloggers list the other day and sure the top couple are still the same, but it seems like a whole heap have just disappeared and a new flood have come through. What happened to all the ones that left? I find that a lot of bloggers get flustered when they find out that blogging isn’t as easy as it seems. When they are posting everyday, commenting too.

   It could be cause it all gets too much. It could be they run out of ideas. Maybe they don’t see the vlaue since the money isn’t rolling in. Either way a lot of bloggers quit right before it seems like their blog is about to explode.

This blog post was one of those write before you think posts I recently talked about, and now looking back I can see that I am or have been guilty of all of these points at one stage.

What do you think? What is it about bloggers that drives you up the wall? I’m sure we all would love to hear your thoughts!

When Jason has written suh a killer post! :P

I don’t usually do this, but I was doing my regular rounds of blogs yesterday and when I hit TheUniversityKid.com I came across Jasons latest article called:

Step By Step Guide To Promote Your Own Webmaster Products

He shares a fantastic way for bloggers to make money selling their own products and it has really challenged me to look at ebook creation and list buildling.

I highly recommend you head over their and check it out, and I’ll have a full post ready for you tomorrow!

I don’t know if any of you were like me but when I first had this thought I had to stop and think about it for a second. How many of us call ourselves bloggers yet cant even really define what a blog is?

I mean when my friends ask me what a blog is I usually say something like:

• It’s like having a diary but online for everyone to read
• Just a place where I can write my random thoughts and see how many people are bored enough to read them.
• Something I do online to make money

Ok, maybe I carried them on a bit, but do you see where I am coming from? I mean what does BLOG stand for?

So I decided to do a bit of research on the topic. I mean if I want to call myself a blogger then I should know what one is right? So I went to google and entered

‘What does blog stand for?’

And it seems likes it’s not just me who wanted to know what it really meant! After seeing that alot of people were asking the question, I was quite confident that at least one of the search results would have had a decent answer. I WAS WRONG!

Every single answer to the question: ‘What does blog stand for?’ came back with the same result…

It is an abbreviation of Web Log (weB LOG for those of you who are a little slow :D)

I mean seriously I already knew that much, but the answers never seemed to take the question any deeper and the people asking the question seemed satisfied – but not me! I decided to keep researching to find myself a definition now for ‘Web Log’.  So as usual I went straight to the source of all knowledge. GOOGLE!

And from my search I found a great way to get multiple definitions of any word. In the Google search box type ‘Define:[insert word here]‘

Anyway using this method here are just a few was a blog (or web log) is defined:

is an online diary used by an author to share information on a particular subject at regular intervals. – www.broadband-guide.org.uk/jargon-buster.html

A web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author. - sam.dev.uen.org/core/edtech/glossary.shtml

Also known as a blog and is normally a personal Web Page that allows the public to read a personal journal for an individual. As of late businesses and entrepreneurs have been using them to create paying web page businesses or market their wares and services – www.leadsales.net/adtermsexplained.htm

What I m reading from this is probably the same as a normal person could have worked out by just observing, but here are my thoughts on ‘What does Blog stand for?’ and more importantly ‘What is a blog?’

• Blogs were initially created for the sole purpose of providing an avenue for people to ‘journal’ their thoughts online.
• Initially created for individuals
• Meant to be updated regularly
• But now as humans always do, people have worked out how to make blogging into a form of business as well. Meaning that while some bloggers still blog to share their thoughts a new breed of bloggers are blogging with the intent of building a business.

Those are just my initial thoughts from those definitians and I am not saying that either blogging to journal your thoughts or blogging for money is wrong – I am just trying to define it!

Feel free to shoot my deductions out of the ground as you share what you think a blog is!