Get to the Po!nt

A Blogger's Guide to Building and Maintaining Readership

In a post at The Lonely Marketer, Patrick Schaber, who just celebrated his first anniversary as a blogger, talks about his criteria for choosing the blogs he reads. "When I first got involved with social media, I was subscribing to anything and everything," he says. "A while back I purged and got down to a manageable amount of daily blog reading."

With so much engaging content available, he's frequently tempted to re-expand his reading list. To help him decide what to read, Schaber developed a list of blog must-haves.

Here's some of his advice for drawing readers like him:

• Provide unique, actionable content. "To be honest," writes Schaber, "I don't care if you've been blogging for five years or five minutes, if I feel I'm going to leave a site having learned something new, count me in." He gives extra points for highlighting recent content in a sidebar.


• Post frequently. This doesn't mean that you have to blog every day—a few each week will do the trick—but if multiple weeks pass between each post, readers will stop checking in.


• Maintain focus. Nothing says you have to restrict yourself to a single topic, but you'll confuse readers if you hop randomly from subject to subject without explaining why.


• Add visual interest. You'll notice that many bloggers include an image with each post. Follow their lead. "So much of social media is visual perception!" says Schaber.

The Po!nt: Good content is good content. Even the busiest people make time for their favorite blogs.