In a previous post I was happy the my readership increased to 3000 readers per month, and I promised to share how some of my strategy reaching my next goal: 10,000 readers per month. Here’s some of advise I got from fellow MVPs, some Internet research, and my wife, who was involved in marketing for some big-name advertising agencies…

Post regularly. It is better to post smaller amounts of content on a regular basis, than to post a lot of content sporadically. This will help you to get a reader base that is used to checking back with your blog on a regular basis rather than relying on the search engines to keep bringing you fresh readers with each post. In the past I would write very long articles that would take me a few weeks to complete. Now if I have a long article, I will break it into a multi-part series and publish each part as a separate post.

Read and comment on other blogs. While writing your own content is great, you should also take the time to read other people’s posts on similar topics to your own. Comment on the posts. Many blogging engines allow you to associate you blog Url with the profile you use to make the comment. This will attract readers in two ways:

1. People who read the other posts may visit your blog if they feel that you have content similar to the post they are already interested and reading.
2. Search engines will see that other sites are linking to your blog and will increase your blog’s standing in the search results.

Don’t mis-interpret what I’m suggesting. I’m not promoting spamming other people’s blog comments. What I am saying is that you should be active in the online community of which your blog is a part, beyond your own blog.

My wife had told to me that the best time to send out a newsletter or announcement email was on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Timing the an email that way could dramatically increase the likelihood that it would get read over sending it out on other days or times of days. I thought I would try and apply this same strategy to timing the publishing of my blog posts. No longer would I publish a post at 2:00 AM on a Thursday even if that is when I wrote the post. I would wait until the next Tuesday morning and publish the post by 9 AM local time. That way the new publication is at the top of everyone’s lists of new posts in the morning of a work day (Tuesday) when they’ve had a chance to catch up from the weekend (usually people catch up on Monday).

So how are things going? So far so good. In the past 30 days, my readership has increased to 4,300 visits. That’s an increase of 43%. I’ll keep you posted.