US flag. Italian flag.
In this blog post I shall cover posting to attract readers from all over the world:
1 What is a blog?
2 Why are you writing?
3 Private Blogs
4 Limited Readership
5 High Traffic Blogs!
6a Why Boost Blogs? 6b Make Money!
7a Hot Subjects 7b Copying Successful Blogs, Layouts, Subjects,
8 Unexpected Readers from the USA
9 Readers From Italy
10 Readers From Russia and Ukraine
11 Readers From Pakistan
12 Guest bloggers and blog tours
13 My progress
1 What is a blog?
A blog is a web based log, like a daily ship's log or diary. The daily entries are called posts. You could blog as infrequently as once a month.
2 Why Are You Writing
For whom are you writing? A ship's log creates a record of who did what, and can be used as evidence in the case of an accident or court proceedings or to report to the owner or boss. It creates a record of details which could be forgotten later.
3 Private Blogs
I have created.private blogs of not yet finished books so that I have a record of them, easy to find, can't be lost like manuscripts left on a train. (D H Lawrence lost Seven Pillars of Wisdom when changing trains at Reading station in England).
4 Limited Readership Blogs
You might write an account of your holiday or your family birthday, with photos, which would not be of interest to anybody else, and struggle even to get your family to read it more than once.
5 High Traffic Blogs
You might get huge numbers of readers of a blog on your pet squirrel wearing funny hats, or dieting with vegetables, or saving money when shopping. Blog posts get more readers with a photo and more with a video. If you are taking the trouble to edit photos and videos, insert a photo after every three sentence paragraph, check spelling and grammar, especially the names of people and places, plus adding references and links, you could easily spend three hours writing one blog post.
This is fun for an evening, or before going to work, or in a lunch hour, or if you are bored at the weekend or evenings or are a student, housewife, babysitter, house-sitter, dog walker using Siri or dictation.
6a Why Boost Blogs?
Most blog writers want to gain readers, and many blog writers want to make money.
If you are working all day on blogs, and other poeple are making loads of money from blogs, even if you did not start out writing to make money, you might be wondering why you are not getting paid for your time and the service you are providing to others. So you have a new aim -
6b To make money!
If you create a niche blog such as a diet blog or a gardening blog you might have a good idea of the people who are reading it. But you could angle your blog with more focus, or include a specific blog post on a narrower subject, such as gardening in England, gardening in the USA, or gardening in Asia, or diets for babies (which would not be read by babies but by young mothers or even grandmothers, especially if you wrote diets for grandchildren.
I write about twenty blogs. If you want to pick up readers, there are two things you can do.
1) Write the post or title with words which get more clicks. (Check on Google search words.)
2) 'Advertise' each new post on social media.
3) Advertise with a paid advertisement in a place such as Facebook.
4) Join an affiliate programme. If you link through to Amazon for a product such as a book but the reader does not buy it, you would still earn commission if they bought a fridge instead.
Privacy
You can choose a privacy setting if you don't want strangers reading. For example, if you are writing for your own amusement, or your family, or want to include people who have not (yet) given permission for their picture to be used, or if you are including pictures of babies and children.
Marilyn Monroe photo from the movie Niagara. Public domain photo from Wikipedia.
7a Hot Subjects
My son, Anthony Sharot, runs Market Appeal, which does search engine optimisation, (maximising how easily readers can find your web page using search engines brand name Google (like a switchboards) while the programme on your computer is a web browser (which presents web pages), Safari or Chrome) which are like your home phone. If you mention hot subjects such as Marilyn Monroe, Meghan Markle or Kim Kardashian, you will get more readers.
7b Copying Successful Blogs, Layouts, Subjects
My son told me to look at the most successful websites and pick my favourite and model my layout on theirs.If they have about me on the top left and I like that, and their rival has the about me on top right, I can decide which is more effective or suits my attention-getting personality. Of course I will never be a copy of them, even if I wanted to, because I have different attitudes, experiences, destinations.
American Flag.
8 Attracting Americans
When I first started writing my travel blog, and I had written posts on England, I could not understand why I had so many American readers. My husband, who is a statistician, pointed out that the population of the USA is much larger than that of the UK. The Americans were into the internet and blogging before the Brits and in greater numbers.the Americans are very pro-British. At least some of them are, enough to provide me and you with readers.
Now that I know I have so many American readers, each time I write a post I look for an American connection. In the early days, if I wrote a post about somebody in the UK, such as singer Amy Winehouse, if I went onto Wikipedia and saw that she had photo showing her performing in America, or Europe, I would ignore it. Now, instead, I think, I must add that to interest potential readers from the USA or in Europe.
Americans are in a different time zone to the UK and Asia, and those on the east coast in the USA are in a diferent one to those in California. If it is gone midnight in London my British readers may be asleep, but the Americans are awake, so a post to interest them will be more successful.
But I also think of the advertisers. Who am I promoting at the end? How will my readers reach the destination I have described? I need a box at the end with travel details. If I want to interest the tourist board who might invite me for a free familiarisation trip, I would do well to mention them. If I want to collect credit from the orgnaizers of a travel show or a tour company, I should mention them. If I want to be impartial, I should mention both of two rival companies, or the one I know and can therefore recomment.
Are you likely to cause yourself trouble if you promote something without realizing that you stand to gain? Are you misleading treaders if you recomment something you have tnot tried? It's really simple. Just be honest. Say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For example: I have not yet tried them but was attracted by xxx Or, I stayed at the five star x hotel, but if you are on a budget the y hostel is nearby.
Italian Flag.
9 Attracting readers from Italy
I wrote posts about the region of Umbria, capital Perugia (infamous becuase of Knox), then about an Italian restaurant in Pinner, North West London, which featured paintings by Modigliani.My Italian readership shot up and has not abated.
10 Readers From Russia & Ukrainians
I suddenly got a spike or readers in Russia. I could not work out why. I went back to my blog posts on the day I first attracted the russians and realised that I had written a post on languages in which I mentioned adpating your computer to type Russian and buying a transparent keyboard overlay showing the alternative keyboard letters in Russian.
When I wrote my next post on underground stations, I made a point of mentioning the Russian underground stations, especially those in the centres of high population.
Flag of Ukraine.
Why Ukrainians?
Many of them speak Russian.
11 Readers From Pakistan
Suddenly, out of the blue, I have hundreds of readers in Pakistan. Where have they come from? I look on the stats in blogger and find a link to the sources. I click on the link and find myself on a page selling army uniforms. I cannot see any mention of my blog post. Suddenly the penny drops in my mind. I wrote a blog post on where you can drive a tank, and your children can ride in a tank. I is in England.
12 Guest Bloggers & Blog Tours
Why be a guest blogger? Years ago somebody invited me to be a guest blogger but I never took them up on it. I could not see the point. It seemed to me that I was just saving them time and giving them my blog post for nothing. Now I have received many mailing shots from bloggers with text and podcasters with interview who recommend each other's books. It is a win-win siutation. If you had one hundred readers and your friend had 100, by writing on their blog you reach 200, and by recommending them on yours they reach 200. Win-win.
A blog tour is like a book tour. You take one blog post to several other bloggers.
I was inspired to write this after attending William Gallagher's two part workshop on Blogging For Authors at Writers' Summer School.
Photo taken by Christine Miller at Writers' Summer School. William Gallagher is on the left. Angela Lansbury is on the right.
My final tip.
For years I had trouble trying to load up photos directly to Facebook and blogs to Blogger from my phone.
Often it did not work. Sometimes websites refused photos with no text or only a brief line. They must have thought I had not finished the post, or copied the photo from elsewhere. If I copied my own post from blogger to wordpress, sometimes it was rejected because it appeared that I was copying somebody else's blog post. Alternatively, the search engine treated the first post as the original, and did not list the copy so the other website got no readers.
Two possible reasons. Instead you go into Facebook on your laptop and load up your photos onto your computer first. If I only want two or three photos, I find it quicker to share the photos from my phone with my phone and laptop by emailing them individually to myself with the subject matter giving the photo caption or even just the hotel or restaurant name.I move the photo onto my screen in my office later in the day. Then I just slide it across into my post on blogger.
Wordpress
Wordpress is more complicated. It allows you more options. I prefer Blogger. If you are not technically minded, it is simpler and quicker to use.
Finally, selling. If your purpose is to sell books, make sure your books are available.
You can take courses on selling on line. Everything is available for free on the internet. But if you struggle to fight against distractions at home, cannot focus, prefer to interact with people who show you what you are doing wrong, to make friends, then invest in a course. Instead of spending on a culutral holiday spend on a working holiday and learn something.
13 Are We Making Progress?
Look back on your old blog posts. If you are shocked by the fact that your earlier posts did not have pictures and links, instead update them. Link back to your old posts. Link forward to your newer posts. Rewrite the old content with a later post including new pictures, and congratulate yourself on how much you have learned.
Useful Websites
https://www.growthmachine.com/blog/wiki-strategy
https://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.com/2019/05/need-country-flag-for-free.html
About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and blogger, author of twenty books including:
Wedding Speeches & Toasts
Etiquette For Every Occasion
Quick Quotations
Who Said What When
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