Most bloggers come online, with new hopes of making it with ease just to find out that their hopes are almost dashing away, there is no achievement, there is no traffic, they are not just happy.

The way you treat your community reflects the amount of growth in readership your blog will see. Young entrepreneur Onibalusi Bamidele shares the 5 main tactics he uses to build powerful readership on his own blogs.

You have to build an audience behind your blog before can have “any form” of success. Before you can get your audience, you need traffic. Below are some great tips to get traffic to your blog and also build a loyal audience around yourself that are always ready to hear what you say.

1. Quality Content

You might be a video blogger, or maybe you post updates on your blog in text format. The mode of presenting the information you have is not what matters but the quality of information you have.

Let me ask you this question: why is it that your readers are coming to your blog and not the millions other blogs on the internet? Is it just to come and read what they have read numerous times before? Your blog should be unique; it should have what will separate it from any other blog in the whole universe.

Are you just posting on your blog to tell your readers how your relationship with your girlfriend went that weekend? Is it to tell them stories they can otherwise read elsewhere? What is the main focus of your blog?

It is always a good option to be personal, but your readers don’t always care. They don’t necessarily care about what you want either. They only care about themselves (just like any other person does) and what you can provide to them. Your readers will only stay on your blog if you have quality information for them.

2. Personality

I doubt you visit any corporate blogs, unless you still work for one. Your readers want somebody to relate to, somebody like them. They don’t want to speak to another type of company, they want to speak to YOU.

Lack of a good writing personality will go a long way to affect you. Bloggers that show little to no personality often result in casual readers, and they hardly get loyal readers. What some of your readers want in your blog is a person, not just great content. Some people find it difficult to relate with information that is not related to a true success story.

You should also have an about page that gives some basic (not too much) information about you. This has a long way to go because I saw a significant increase in traffic and subscriber on my blog when I created my about page. Be personal on your blog, you are not a company after all.

3. Frequency

So many people don’t care about this thing called posting frequency (how often you update your blog).

Some people only write once a month (which is a very risky move if you are starting out). You are not Maki from Dosh Dosh; it is very disastrous to not update your blog regularly.

Let me tell you a short story.

I have a personal blog and another blog in the technology niche that runs completely on auto-pilot. My technology blog automatically updates each hour while my personal blog is updated three times a week (with valuable content of course) manually.

The results of these two different approaches to the community on my blogs is that:

• My technology blog receives much less traffic (about 200 unique visitors this month).
• My personal blog receives thousands of hits a week.

Because there is little to no interaction between myself and my community, it’s obvious that it would receive less attention than my personal blog, where I respond to comments and inject myself into my articles.

Your readers want regularly updated content. Satisfy them with this and you will reap great rewards in terms of traffic, feed subscribers, mailing list subscribers, loyal readers, and the best of all – friendships.

4. Networking

#1, 2 and 3 are for keeping your readers; they have to be in place before you start looking for website traffic. Networking is a great way to get traffic to your blog. After having a blog, it is only you who will be the first reader.

A good method of finding people who will eventually become loyal readers is to go out and network with others.

Try to network with other bloggers and their readers by guest posting for them and also by commenting on their blog. You can also network with people outside your niche through forums and social networking sites.

It is very important to know that that social networking sites only favors those that are ready to help others and not just themselves, it is also important to promote others people’s post on social networking sites.

5. Guest Posting

Another method that can be used to generate traffic to your blog is by guest posting for other bloggers in your niche. Guest posting, if used effectively, can help you draw both traffic and loyal readers to your blog.

The problem most people face when trying to guest post is the fear of their article being rejected. Being someone who has written over 100 guest posts, I can tell you there is no way you can do without some of your articles being rejected. Some bloggers will even take ages to reply to you but your requests, but you will get used to it over time.

When guest posting, it is very important to know the type of blog you are guest posting for. What benefits does it have for you?

You can’t expect to have success at guest posting for a blog with almost no visitors a day. It is also important to not attempt a guest post for only big blogs because the majority of them might not even get to you or might eventually reject your guest posts.

Big blogs (we’re talking ProBlogger big) have some standards they want everybody to adhere to due to a plethora of other guest post submissions.

Try to make it balanced so that you won’t feel dejected if all your blog posts are rejected. Guest posting is good and it is one of the best ways to get free high quality traffic to your blog.

Editor’s Note: Learn From my Experience
I recently submitted a guest post to ProBlogger. I followed all of the best practices for submitting guest posts and wrote a very professional proposal message. However, I was declined due to the heavy amount of guest posts he already receives. What did I do? I submitted it elsewhere. And it got accepted. So it’s not the end of the world if you get rejected. - Alex

Getting traffic to a blog is easy, but building an audience is not. Using the above tips effectively will help you achieve success with your blog.

How do you build the community on your blog?

Related posts:

1. Your Audience, Your Content, Your Success.

2. 5 Common Uses for Social Networking and the effect on your target audience

3. Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

The rate at which you publish blog posts is a very important factor towards building a solid readership. Believe it or not, adding a post a random day of the week and not sticking to a consistent schedule can really have an impact on the reaction it gets from your community.

Just recently, we changed our post schedule here. That would be the third time in under a year we did that, and we have found new benefits each time we switched.

We realized that our content may not always be getting maximum visibility if we continued with our former posting frequencies, so after some analyzing and discussion – we came to the conclusion that we could achieve best results with our posts if we switched.

For new bloggers especially, determining how many times a week they want to post on their blog can be tricky as there isn’t much statistical information to work off of. But even those of us who have been publishing for months – are we on the right track when it comes to getting our posts out to the public? Could our blog be performing better if we made a simple adjustment to our post schedule?

Ever since we changed our post schedule for the third time, we have seen great results. It really got me thinking too: it took us ten months to come up with the smartest post frequency for our blog, what about others? So I want to help you guys out and share with you my ideas about choosing the ideal posting schedule for your blog.

The 3 Most Common Frequencies

I read about 20-30 blogs and I can pretty much tell when a blog is going to update because of how frequent they post. On all of the blogs I read, these are the three most common ones I see:

1. Every day publishers - People who update their blog at least one time a day.
2. Second day publishers - People who update their blog every other (second) day.
3. Day Schedulers - People who update their blog on set days (not the most creative name for them!)

So which is the best? Unfortunately there is no straight answer because there are just too many factors to consider. However, the one factor the remains the same in each of the frequencies above is consistency.

The frequency that has more posts published isn’t necessarily the most useful if it’s not consistent. So does that mean that only posting on your blog on Monday and Wednesday is bad? Not at all! As long as you can post every single Monday and Wednesday, then you have a consistent, working posting frequency.

So that brings me to my next point: is posting more times a week better than posting less? Posting more isn’t necessarily better than posting less (and vice-versa) just because you put more content out onto your blog. And maybe in some niches, quality isn’t better than quantity.

It’s up to you to decide what sounds best for your blog – posting more or posting less. Of course, you can figure things out by experimenting like we have here. But, there are even more crucial variables that you should analyze. The thing that is extremely important in measuring your success – numbers.

There are four very important numbers you need to be aware of at all times when you publish an article. Just remember to embrace these numbers and do not let them harm you.

1. Traffic sent to your blog

Use a web app like Google Analytics or a plugin like WordPress.com Stats (or just use both) to track the amount of traffic coming in to your blog from these posts.

It’s really important to track the number of pageviews a single post brings in, because if you track posts for a few weeks you can determine quite a few things that will aid you in picking a posting frequency:

• You can find out your busiest day(s) of the week: If you find out your busiest day of the week is Monday, publish your best article for the entire week on that day. More people will see it as more people are visiting your blog that day, and may be encouraged to stick around since you wrote such a great article.
• Learn what topics are the most well received by visitors: Maybe posts about SEO do better than posts about your newborn kittens. Compare a few posts in one category to a few posts in another category and see which brought more traffic.
• Discover traffic trends: For example, maybe on some days Twitter traffic is greater than other days. This is very valuable information to know, and if you can take advantage of any kind of traffic source by just knowing when it’s at its highest, you can really bring in some high numbers.

As I mentioned above, there is a great tool for tracking traffic sent to your blog. Google Analytics provides many detailed graphs and charts about your sites and it’s a tool that every blogger should use.

More on Analytics:

• Google Analytics Reveals the Importance of Branding and Content
• Google Analytics: Metrics Worth Tracking

2. Comment averages per post

The amount of comments your posts get shows how your community reacts to what you wrote. Your rate of posting really can have a big impact on how many comments your posts get.

We have found here that if you post at least once a day, you may not get as many comments as you could if you published every second day, or took a break for the weekend. This is because when you post more there is more content for a reader to analyze that there is less of a chance you will get consistent comment averages on your posts.

If you want to encourage more discussion within your community, then break down the following things about your post schedule:

• Number of posts per week - Consider the age of your blog and how many times a week you are publishing. If you are starting out, I always recommended posting about three good articles a week, then over time expanding to 5 or more.
• Length of posts - Do you write massive 1,000+ word posts like this one, or shorter, maybe 500-700 words? Compare the comment averages of short and long posts and see which has more.
• Comments per post - I would make a chart of some kind and take all of the posts in a week and find the average of comments per post. This can be a great way to look back and see how you are improving the discussion in your community.
• Quality of discussion - Do your posts get comments like “nice post” or “good work,” or do you see debates forming and questions being asked? If the discussion in your comments section isn’t anything special, you may need to make your posts more user friendly.

More on Engaging Conversation

• How to connect with your community
• 16 Plugins to Start more conversations
• How to increase commenting productivity on your blog
• Addressing those who comment: the right ways
• Addressing those who comment: the wrong ways

3. Social Media Reactions

Sharing content on sites like Twitter, Digg, or Delicious is one of the best ways to get new information. Every blogger should be active on at least two of the three links I just mentioned, not just to get new information but to share your own.

If you use a plugin like the Tweetmeme button, you can track how many times an article is shared on Twitter by other people. Learning how many times an article has been shared on a site like Twitter is important because it shows how a community outside your blog likes your post.

From the Tweetmeme button alone, we really have learned some important things that helped us improve the posts we schedule each week here.

• We learned that the best posts to get retweeted are articles about Twitter.
• We discovered that the shorter and catchier your headline is, the better it spreads on Twitter.
• If we tweet about a recent post, it will always get tweeted again if we ask people to do it.
• The more tweets a post gets, the more appealing it looks to retweet and even read.

So with this information in mind, we really do our best to make the best of Twitter. As a result, Twitter is one of our highest sources of traffic.

What’s your rate?

So, there is really a lot of information here about picking your rate of posting. I hope you guys understand the importance of how often you publish and have learned enough from this post to discover the best way of figuring it out.

Tell me – how often do you post?

I really wish our poll worked, but I am curious as to how many times a week you update your blog? And, what is your frequency of posting?

Here at Blogussion, we post five times a week Monday-Friday and skip Saturday and Sunday. Previously, we published seven times a week with a post every day, then we changed it to posting every second day with 3-4 posts a week.

Photo by CgDesign

Related posts:

1. 10 ways to find post inspiration without even leaving your blog

2. 5 quick and clever ways to publicize a blog post by commenting on other blogs

3. Debate: Posting by Obligation or Free Will? 10 Arguments

I feel that blogging puts so much pressure on us. Blogging is like high school cliques, you have to do whatever it takes to fit in with the “in-crowd” that you do things you don’t feel like doing, or like doing.

It can just get so stressful sometimes the things we have to do. How many of us think it is actually fun to build links? What about debating and researching keywords? Or even, whether or not to post on the blog today?

If you have a posting schedule set for your blog, then you pretty much have to stick with it. Blogussion should be updated once a day, and there are many days where I just don’t feel like I want to write. I understand the consequences of not writing posts, but I still manage to pull through and dish out some good content for my blog once a day because I have been doing this long enough to know what happens.

But honestly, when you really don’t want to do something, how much effort are you going to put into it? If you can’t find motivation or inspiration, how much will it matter whether or not it is quality? I commonly think “as long as something is posted, regardless of my normal quality, I will be fine.” That statement is dead wrong however.

Then that brings me to my next thought – I have to update the blog. I have to keep posting consistently. It’s a struggle quite frankly to know you have to do something you don’t feel like doing.

And that brings me to the main focus of this post. Is it worth writing content on your blog when you don’t feel like writing at all? I’m going to throw at you a couple arguments in this post debating whether or not it is worth posting on your blog because you want to do it, or because you have to do it.

Why It’s Worth the Struggle

For a variety of reasons, it’s worth the aggravation to update your blog no matter how you’re feeling. I can tell you from experience, always try as hard as you can to update your blog. It will be worth it in the end, and the sense of accomplishment can make you feel better.

1. It Will Discipline You

Discipline is something that is very important to have not just in the real world, but on your blog too. By you maintaining a consistent post schedule and keeping your goals/future in mind, you are likely to have formed a good posting habit.

That should be discipline enough for you, and if you don’t discipline yourself sometimes, then you will never get to where you want to be.

2. You Need to Keep the Consistency Going

Without that consistency upheld on your blog, it’s going to have some kind of effect on you. If your regular posting schedule is once a day, but you decided to stop posting every once in a while, it can have an impact on you for the worst. The ideas below will be presented from a pro-posting perspective.

It may be harmless, it happens here at Blogussion even, but I feel like I keep the place thriving with content more than I don’t. I can be considered lucky because laziness didn’t strike be like it does for many people after I don’t post for one day. It gets you out of whack and makes it harder to get back into the regular routine.

It’s amazing how just one day can do it, but that’s why I urge you to force yourself to do it and fight through your emotions for writing.

3. Will Give You More to Talk About

Getting through to a consistent blog frequency will make a great post on any blog in any niche. You can basically talk to your readers (who may even be fellow bloggers) and tell them what has been going on with you, why you have been struggling to come up with posts, etc.

I really think that self-reflection articles are the best articles you can write for your blog, and a problem as common as this one should do great between your readers who blog.

4. A Characteristic of a Successful Blogger

By getting through your down days and coming through with content, you have just shown off one of the best qualities you can have as a blogger. No, scratch that. You have just shown off the qualities of a successful blogger!

It always brings forth such an amazing sense of accomplishment when that publish button is hit, and I think will brighten your day once you do it.

5. Will Make a Happy Community

In the end, your readers will be happy with you. They may not know that you worked through a slump to publish a post, but their reactions towards it should be reward enough for you.

It can be quite shocking to see how much lower your traffic can be by missing out on your regular posting schedule, and that’s the result of loss of interest. The interest was lost, because your motivation to keep writing was lost. Always do your best to write at your best for the sake of a happier community!

Why It’s Not Worth the Struggle

Believe it or not, it might turn out that not publishing a post on your blog for a certain day is better for your community. The ideas below will be presented from a anti-posting perspective.

1. Will Not Produce Your Best Content

If you’re not motivated, you will not write your best. It’s not that you can’t, but because you don’t want to. If you can’t serve your community well for the day, then just don’t try to serve to them at all.

It’s kind of like the saying “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it all.” But in this case, I would say it’s “If you have nothing constructive or informative to blog, then don’t blog it.” We, your readers, would much rather hear nothing than a lame excuse for a post.

2. You Could be Doing Something You Want to do Instead

Instead of writing a post when you don’t feel like it, maybe there is something else you want to do with your time. Can it be considered justifiable if you’re not doing one important thing on your blog to just do another important thing? I sometimes feel like that, and that’s one of the reasons why this post is being published later than usual – because I had something else I could have worked on here that would be very important.

So, if you don’t want to dedicate your time to one important thing, dedicate it to the other. It will balance itself out in the end.

3. Negative Impact on You

Going back to #1 here, if you can’t get into the posting mood then you will not produce your best content! I feel like if you write something that is of poor quality, you can get hurt in numerous ways:

1. Harm Your Reputation

Would you rather be known as the blogger who writes great stuff or one who just writes for the sake of writing?

2. Fill You With Regret

After you publish something you don’t think you did your best on, aren’t you a little regretful? You basically just came up with a potentially awesome post idea, half-assed it and published it. As hard as posts can be to come up with, it’s what happened. Not exactly worth it in my eyes, just save it for another day.

3. Can Create a Dislike/Disinterest for Blogging

If you feel more negativity towards blogging than you do positively, you will start to develop a dislike for blogging. I firmly believe that many bloggers cannot keep up with their posting schedule, which causes so much stress and aggravation they close their blog down.

These feelings of laziness can eventually come to mess up your head in terms of blogging, and I think can actually lead to the closure of your blog. Besides, if you blog part time, you really shouldn’t let a blog stress you out, right?

4. Gives You More Time to Prepare for a Post

If you can come back to the computer and write a blog post after a day away from blogging, you can definitely write a post better. The better the post, the more your community will forget about your missed days of writing, right?

5. Get the Relaxation You Want

Instead of writing a post when you don’t feel like it, you can just give in to those emotions and take a day off of your blog. Sometimes you just need some rest and relaxation, and we can all understand how writing these blog posts day after day can tire your brain out.

Which Side Convinced You the Most?

I tired to sound as convincing as possible while writing each of those arguments. I will not tell you which side I agree with the most, but I can say that I believe both sides have very valid points to them.

I would love to know your take on this! This can bring up a great debate here, and I really hope we can start one in the comments section.

Related posts:

1. Pros and cons of long and short posts – The age old debate

2. A day full of guest posting

3. Debate: DoFollow vs. NoFollow Links