I found a great article entitled 27+1 Tips for Building and Maintaining a Blog Audience at SponsoredReviews.com. If you own a blog and are trying to increase your blog audience, then this article is a good place to start.
The article is divided into three sections: Fundamentals, Building Your Audience and Keeping Your Audience. Fundamentals are such things are finding your niche and finding the right domain name and platform. Don’t forget the design! That is also an important aspect. Many people are turned off by designs that are too busy or are hard to read.
The second section – Building Your Audience – has great advice from making sure your are consistent to using basic SEO principles to using advertising. One way that I have found to build an audience is to participate in other blogger’s memes and carnivals. I particpate in the Thursday Thirteen meme and the Postie Carnival regularly. I also participate in other memes on occasion. You must not only post, but you must read and leave comments on other’s blogs in order to build your audience. A word of caution. Don’t just make your blog one big meme! Make sure that you have other quality posts to keep your readers coming back.
The third section – Keeping Your Audience – has interesting tips as well. You need to stay topical but at the same time timeless. Remember, people will read your archives. Read comments posted by visitors. Posts lists and items that are helpful to your audience. Since I work at home, I try to post tips and tricks that I have learned about working at home. Organization, time management and business basics help me keep readers coming back. I have also started by own meme – Question of the Week. I post a question each week for work at home women and then post their responses on my blog. This helps build and maintain my readership and at the same time helps those that are participating!
Read through the list and try and implement as many as possible. Keeping up with a blog is a difficult, but rewarding task!