Increasing Readership

No, this isn’t going to be a post about the sad state of reading in the good ol’ U.S. of A.. What I refer to when I say readership is of our website, the good ol’ Bacon and Tofu Dot Com.

Since the end of last year, we have been trying to make a concerted effort to post more often to our blog. For the most part we have been successful, without many week-or-more breaks without a post. Still, we haven’t seen a huge increase in visitors to our blog.

What gives?

I have several theories on why this might be but I think the biggest reason is the scope of our blog: it is mostly tailored to friends and family who know us and might like to keep tabs on us. Alas, a lot of the people in that demographic either aren’t into it or just don’t get the whole blogging thing. This leaves us with an interesting dilemma. Do we continue to tailor our posts to the few people who we have targeted and are web-savvy enough to get to it, or do we make some changes and try to expand the number of people that might be interested.

While pondering this, I have been commenting on various blogs in hopes of wooing a few of them over to our site. In a few cases, this has worked but for the most part I still think there isn’t enough here to entice them to stick around and sign up for our RSS feed.

For those of you who do have blogs, how close of an eye do you keep on your visitor stats and how does it affect how/when/what you post?

- Sat

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Posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • Right, so probably the best way to get more readers on your blog is to start reading other people's blogs. If you become a regular reader and start commenting, other readers of the blog might follow your links back here. And if the blog owner likes you, they may add you to a list of links on their page. (FYI, you guys are already displayed in my blogroll.)

    I do keep a pretty close eye on my stats, using sitemeter, though there are lots of other services out there as well. Actually, your web host probably provides a stat tracker. The cool thing about this is that you can find the referring URLs that lead people to your site. A lot of my visitors come by way of web searches, and I think it's because I mention specific products/bands/TV shows/places/etc. in my blog. For example, when I was shopping for a laptop and later for a phone, I mentioned the exact models I was looking at, and people searching for information on those products are finding me. I also write a lot about TV shows and mention the episode titles, character names, etc., and that leads a lot of people to my blog. And, I link to a lot of other sites, and when the owners of those sites find out, they may link back or at least drop by for a visit to see what I said about them.

    These are just my tips, but there's lots of information out there about getting more visitors to your site. Good luck!
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