So how can you use social media to increase readership of your blog?

Let’s look at a few key points on how to achieve this.

1. Be an expert on your subject matter.

A successful blog is usually focused around a particular subject.  Sure, it’s ok to throw in the odd different post to keep it all interesting and fun however you will notice that successful blogs usually are focused on a particular topic. Be an expert in your subject area.  People will come to you looking for advice.

2. Always use unique content.

Whilst it may be tempting to scrape or “borrow” content from someone else’s website, doing so can damage your blog’s brand especially if you are trying to become an expert in your field.  Think about it… Why should someone read your blog which has been copied from elsewhere?

3. Be sure to encourage discussion from your Audience.

Whenever you post a new update to your blog, focus on getting people to comment on your blog post.  How do you do this?  Try being a bit controversial.  People can have some very strong views on a subject and if you throw something out there which people may disagree with, this is one way to get people fired up and commenting.  Another simple way is to end a blog post with a question – Ask your audience!

4. Make it easy for readers to link to your content.

Blogging platforms make it really easy to share your blog posts with the big social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and Stumbleupon.  As you’ll notice on this post, there is a social media bar allowing you to favourite it and share with your friends.  Write good content and see how quickly a few social shares can increase your readership tenfold.

5. Promote your blog on social media sites using automated publishing tools.

One of the easiest way to automatically increase your blogs readership is to promote it yourself.  On Aussie Blogs we make available the Wordbooker plugin to automatically link your blog with a Facebook account.  What you can then do is also link your Facebook account with a twitter account.  Everytime you then make a post on your blog a notice gets placed on both Facebook and twitter.

So what do you think?  Do you have any other ways or suggestions on how to use social media to increase your blog readership? Let us know in the comments section below!

Here’s what most people do when they decide to start a blog:

1. Sign in to a blog site

2. Pick a really cool name for their blog

3. Write a welcome post telling the world that they are going to blog about their every day lives and how it’s going to be the best thing ever

4. Never blog again.

So why does this happen?

Simple. They never had a clear idea what they were going to be blogging about to begin with.

Fact. Most peoples lives are boring.  If you can’t be bothered writing about your life online, do you really think that anyone else is going to be interested in reading it?

Fact. Successful Blogs are started with a clear and concise idea about what the blog is going to be about.

So how do you make a successful blog from the start? Pick a topic you are interested and be sure to pick a topic that other people may share the same interest in.  There’s nothing wrong with adding a post or here there about what’s happening in your life, in fact it is a great way to let people get to know you just that little bit better and engage with you on a regular basis.  Blogs are essentially another form of social interaction so there’s nothing wrong with getting to know each other, just keep the general focus on a particular topic that interests you.

Why pick a topic that you are passionate about?

It makes it a hell of a lot more fun and easier to write a blog post about something you enjoy doing.  You’ll find the words rolling off your tongue.

I have so many ideas.  I can’t possibly fit them all in to one blog…

That’s the great thing about blogging. There’s no limit to the amount of blogs you can create, in fact some of the most successful bloggers have quite a few different blogs all on different topics.  Take a leaf from our very own Australian, super successful blogger – Darren Rowse, he’s got quite a few successful blogs and is arguably the most successful Australian Blogger. You certainly don’t have to take it to the same level however if you have a look around his main blog, Pro Blogger you’ll see he focuses on one topic and one topic only. He even makes a decent living from blogging!

So we’ve covered the critical mistakes that people make when creating their first blog, let’s take a closer look at how to brainstorm BEFORE you jump the gate, create a blog and disappear in to the blue yonder.

Blog about what interests you the most…

If you have a look at our Blogging Ideas page you’ll see that there is a general run down on the types of blogs you can create.

The trick is to find a topic within a topic.  This is known as a niche.  Let’s say you like travelling.  What sort of travelling do you like?  Is it camping or overseas travel.  See where I am going here?

Out of the example above let’s take Camping as our niche idea. What happens when you create a blog about a niche is twofold.

1. It allows other people who share the same interest to interact with you on a more personal level via the comments section on your post.  In turn, you’ll probably end up visiting their blog and interacting with them.

2. Search Engines love blogs about a very specific topic.  If your blog is focused on a specific niche it tells the search engines that your blog is focused on this topic and gives you a better chance of being found.  There’s other ways you can increase your visibility on search engines but we’ll leave that for another time.

Well there you have it, some sure fire tips to help you on your way to being a successful blogger.  Have you already created your own niche blog?  What are your experiences with blogging? Let us know…

Here are the 5 tried and trusted ways to increase traffic to your blog

1. Ping your blog every time you write a new post.

There are a ton of blog services you can ping whenever you write a new post. What this does is let’s the world know that you have updated your blog. Note: If you already have a blog with us, you don’t need to worry about pinging these services as we automatically do this for you.

2. Share your blog posts

Make it easy for your readers to share your blog posts by providing links for Facebook, twitter and other social networks. A good idea is to also post to your own Facebook and twitter when you have written a new post. If you have any kind of following on any of these social networks you’re bound to get more readers to your blog.

3. Update your blog frequently

Believe it or not, search engines and blogging services love it when you post regular updates. More recently, Google has come out and said that they are starting to focus on putting more fresh content up the top of their search results. Don’t overdo it though, if you post too frequently your readers won’t be able to keep up with your blog and you’ll have spent a lot of time writing for little reward.

4. Comment on other peoples blogs

A great way to increase readership to your blog is to actively read other peoples blogs that share like minded ideas and thoughts. Just think of the excitement you get when someone new leaves a comment on your blog posts. If you leave some valuable feedback, blog owners will usually let you place a link to your blog in the comments section. Be careful though, if you start spamming them you’ll end up on a blacklist very quickly.

5. Submit your blog to blog directories

Just like our very own Australian Blogs Directory (hint) you can submit your blog to one of the many available blog directories and blog searches available on the internet.  Make sure you submit your blog to the right category and write a meaningful description.  Blog Directory moderators usually receive many submissions per day including a lot of spammy submissions.  If you make it hard for them, they’ll more than likely reject or delete the submission.

These 5 tips above are only the tip of the iceberg  when it comes to increasing the readership of your blog.  The most important key really is to keep on posting and be patient.  Unless you’ve got the next viral video or post, things don’t happen overnight, even on the internet.  It usually takes 3 to 6 months to get a decent blog going but once you have you won’t regret it.

Do you have any tips on how to increase the readership of your blog?  Let us know in the comments section below.  Until next time …

Probably one of the most exciting features is the ability to now use your own domain name at Aussie Blogs. This is a feature that the big guys charge up to $19 per year to have and we are offering it free to all Aussie Blogs users.

So what does this mean exactly?

Instead of your web address being something like http://mygreatsite.aussieblogs.com.au you can have an address like http://mygreatsite.com instead.

If you don’t already have your own domain name you can purchase one from a domain registrar such as Go Daddy for less than $11pa.

For instructions on how to set this up, please read more on mapping a domain to your blog

Like always, if you need any assistance with setting this up, please don’t hesitate to ask for help.

Stay tuned as we’ve got some even bigger news coming soon which you’re going to love!

Make sure you check your spelling

Even though your blog should have an informal tone, you should still make sure that you check your writing. You can still be casual but make sure your work isn’t sloppy. If your blog posts have a lot of misspelled words in them, people will not think that you have any education and probably won’t take you seriously. Even if your spelling skills are not 100%, the blog post editor will usually highlight any misspelled words.

Make sure you are versatile

Whilst your blog should have a specific focus such as a painter would write about painting, you should also make sure that you occasionally touch on other topics which may not be directly related. A good example would be occasionally to post on current affairs, music or books as this will draw more people in to reading your blog. If you post about something that is popular on the Internet at that particular time you will more than likely find new people will be visiting your blog as they have been searching for it on Google.

Make sure you write blog posts regularly

After a while you will end up getting a regular group of people who will more than likely be looking for a new post every few days. If you want to make sure that your blog remains fresh and interesting, you should post often. Writing a blog post often, is something that will take very little time because your entries will be quite short. Remember, keeping your blog posts under 500 words is a good guide to go by.

Using a casual tone in your blog posts

Quite frequently, the most interesting blogs are actually not written using formal grammar rules. To the average person, a formal tone can be quite boring and people surfing the web don’t want to read boring text. If you are serious about your blog being popular and successful, make sure you write it in a more casual tone. The best way to achieve this is to write like you are having a conversation with a friend. Write exactly the way you would normally talk, not the way you think you should be talking. Make sure you use slang and other words that may not be considered formal and your blog will reach a wider audience. One essential key can be to use humour in your writing style and it will make people want to keep on coming back and read your newest posts.

Don’t write extremely long blog posts

Ensuring that you keep your blog posts reasonably short will also help you keep any interested viewers. Just like those jokes that you receive in your e-mail, people aren’t interested in spending massive amounts of time reading text. If people wanted to read a book they would do just that. In sure that you stick to your topic on hand and keep it nice and short. A good guide is to keep a blog post roughly under about 500 words. Make sure that you include pictures as they can speak 1 million words. If you find that you need to keep on writing about the topic, consider creating another blog posts that finishes your topic. Even though this is essentially creating one long post, the break in the text will in sure that readers will be less likely to lose attention.

This blog post will demonstrate how to keep your text at a reasonable level. We will continue this topic in the next post.

What do you think? Do you prefer to read short amounts of text or prefer to read the whole blog post as one?

Aussie Blogs will always be a work in progress and this week has been no different.

Help & Support

We’ve been working hard over the last few days to update our Help and Support Content.  We’ve added 3 new tutorials to Mastering Aussie Blogs.

1. Changing your blogs post page from the front page

2. Customising your posts and page titles using SEO Press

3. Using insights to automatically find related photos and content for your blog posts.

Learn more about Mastering Aussie Blogs

New Browse Posts Page

We’ve made some modifications to the Browse Posts page so that you can see in real time the latest posts made by users at any time. See the new Browse Posts Page

Until next time …

We’ve got a new tutorial today courtesy of WPMU Dev – Introduction to Menus.

For those who are looking for a bit an extra helping hand for themes which support custom menu’s this one worth a look

You can find the tutorial here – Introduction to Menus

Publishing to Facebook is finally here – or should we say back better than ever.

This is an important update to Aussie Blogs as it allows you to automatically publish your posts to your Facebook wall or fan page and engage your readers.

Read more on Publishing your Aussie Blogs posts to Facebook

We’ve tested this updated plugin over and over after some minor issues we had before and it is working beautifully.

If you haven’t enabled publishing to your Facebook account, now is the time to do so.

Publishing your Aussie Blogs posts to Facebook

In this post we’ll give you a sneak peak behind the scenes and show you why we are able to keep out 98.7% of comment spammers BEFORE they even get in the door. You’ll see how Australia’s unique location puts us miles ahead of global blogging sites. Enough of the chit chat, here’s how we do it….

1. The First Layer of Defence

We block countries which primarily have no business on Aussie Blogs except to spam.

Primarily spam comes from countries which have little or non existent laws in relation to spamming.  The following countries are currently blocked from even seeing Aussie Blogs exists:

• Russia
• China
• India

How do we do this? Whenever someone tries to access a site on Aussie Blogs, their IP address is checked against the Maxmind Geo IP database.  If it shows that the user is coming from one of these three countries, they are instantly forbidden to even browse the home page.

Now for all the activists out there, don’t think this is an act of discrimination.  We are a multicultural society and we welcome anyone from Australia regardless of their cultural background to set up a blog at Aussie Blogs. If you think about it closely, would you even understand a comment left in one of these foreign languages?

Of course this is always up for review.  If in the event these countries tighten up their digital security, we’d be more than happy to review this decision.

2. The Second Layer

We use a combination of three Global Anti Spam solutions

Many of you will not have heard about various sites set up around the world to catch spammers out at their own game.

We use a combination of Project HoneyPot, Stop Forum Spam and BotScout to stop them in their tracks.

Project HoneyPot - Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your blog. By using the Project Honey Pot system we can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Stop Forum Spam- Stop Forum Spam provides lists of spammers that persist in abusing forums and blogs with their scams, ripoffs, exploits and other annoyances. Stop Forum Spam provides these lists so that you don’t have to endure the never ending job of having to moderate, filter and delete their rubbish.

BotScout – BotScout helps prevent automated web scripts, known as “bots”, from registering on forums, polluting databases, spreading spam, and abusing forms on web sites. This is done by tracking the names, IPs, and email addresses that bots use and logging them as unique signatures for future reference.

3. The Final Layer of Defence

Akismet

For the odd new spammer that gets through our first two Defence layers we use the traditional Akismet as used by WordPress.com

This software makes a call to the Akismet servers whenever someone leaves a comment on your blog.  If it thinks they are trying to spam you, it simply puts their comment in the Spam folder on your site.  More or less like a Junk Email Folder you would use in your email.

We hope you enjoyed this sneak peak in to what happens behind the scenes and how we are building a world class, (almost) spam free blogging platform for Australians.

Any comments, thoughts, or concerns (although we’d just prefer praise)? Let us know.