Learning to blog for yourself while still captivating an audience… is it possible?

Word Count: 375

November 26th, 2007 | Alan | Blogging

As bloggers, many of us hear this phrase from time to time: “Blog for yourself. Don’t worry about your readers, they will come naturally” or something like that. There’s one problem with that phrase, however. Readers won’t come naturally if they don’t enjoy your blog. Now, I’m not trying to imply that if you don’t have the readership that you want, you don’t have a good blog. That is simply not the case. I’ve read plenty of awesome blogs that have only 2 subscribers and no comments on any of their posts. The thing is, you do have to blog for your audience every once and a while. If you blog for your audience, then they’ll be more likely to actually read your other posts. Once your readers discover that they like your writing style and the stuff you write about, then they will come naturally. Readers will enjoy your blog if you put the time and effort into it to make it of good quality, but sometimes you have to give them a bait post so that they realize that they enjoy your blog.

This is just something that I’ve noticed, because as I’ve been doing just a few slight things differently recently, and my traffic has jumped up considerably.

As a side note, if you do sponsored posts, I would recommend trying to keep it at least at a 1 sponsored to every 2 non sponsored ratio of sponsored posts. Sponsored posts are a great way to earn money with your blog and to increase your knowledge and writing/review skill, but new readers tend to get scared away by a blog with a lot of sponsored posts. If you have a season reader who knows that your sponsored posts are still entertaining, that’s a whole different story. You just have to remember that not everyone knows that your sponsored content is just as entertaining as your non sponsored content. (or, at least you should try to make it be so)

There are some things that I mentioned above that I myself need to improve on. However, I think these are some things that anyone can apply to their blog to bring in a little more readers and bring a greater sense of pride about their blog.