When it comes to blogging, there are a few time-tested techniques to grow your site and readership. One of the most useful ones I’ve found is to piggy back onto the success of an existing blog.
That’s right, I said it.
Hey, that’s why I’m here on Write to Done! It’s a blog devoted to a topic I’m passionate about that has a LOT more readers than my site does. By sharing my content here, the odds of drawing some readers to my site are pretty high.
As long as the post is good.
So I’m a big believer in things like guest posts and expanding your reach by writing for other sites in your niche. Since my blog deals with writing and personal finance (hey, a writer has to make a living with the scraps he makes, doesn’t he?), I also write for WiseBread, a top PF site.
So all’s well that ends well, right?
Not quite. You see, when you have this many platforms to show your content off, it can sometimes create some conflict about where you want your content to show up.
The Struggle
Let’s say you’re a blogger with a small following that writes about writing, and you come up with a fantastic post on five unbeatable tips on crafting a great pitch letter. The more you think about it, the more you realize this isn’t just any run-of-the-mill post – this is brilliant.
Now comes the question: where do you want it to go?
- On your own site, where it will give your small group of readers a very good piece of content and hope they’ll share with others and draw attention to it?
- Do you seek out a bigger, better site about writing and offer it up to them as a sacrificial lamb? That’s what all the guest-post FAQs say, isn’t it, to make sure the article is “your very best”? The hope is that the larger readership will go, “Wow, this dude is a great writer and this is a fantastic topic. I want more of this!” And then they go to your site and subscribe and – boom! – new readers.
- Do you offer it up to your partner site you sometimes write for, which pays you a little bit more than what you can make on your own site because they drive more traffic? This way you expose your content to more traffic and you make some extra cash, even though the odds of converting these readers to become regulars over at your site is pretty low.
As you can see, there are a lot of questions involved.
You want readers but you don’t want to leave money on the table. And you definitely don’t want to sell out.
My advice is to always think of the reader. Which set of readers is best served by the piece of content you are going to publish?
There are no hard-and-fast rules for this, but try to get into the head of the people reading the different sites and you’ll eventually figure out where it should go.
In this case, it was easy to offer this up as a guest post because I don’t really write about blogging over at The Writer’s Coin– it’s more about the process of writing fiction and the struggles of the writing life. And my partner site is about money, so it was a no-brainer to seek out an elite site like Write to Done.
If you make it a habit to keep your readers in mind when you decide where to post your content, you’ll get some good karma (and hopefully some readers) coming your way.
Now you just have to go out and write some brilliant copy. Go gett’em!
Image courtesy of Pixabay
