So you’ve started a new blog. Good for you, and welcome as you join the other 250 million plus others of us putting our thoughts onto the web. This means of course, if we keep the number rounded, there are 28 people in this world of 7 billion who are personally yours to attract as readers for your very own.

Discouraging? I hope not; it wasn’t meant to be. In reality, your blog can be very rewarding both for you and your readers, but take it from one who has struggled at attracting lots of readership, don’t judge the value of your site by the number of people who stops by to see you in the early stages. It gets better with time and a little effort. Here are a few things that keep me blogging, and in time have produced a, while meager in relation to others, nice little group of followers, and hopefully will do the same for you.

Remember why you started your blog… often. For me, mine was started when we first moved to live on a horse ranch, also moving our church membership. Because I was no longer teaching and preparing lessons, I wanted to share bits of my studies somewhere, and this became the place. Keeping this in perspective allows me to look beyond the days of slow traffic.

Write, write, and then write some more. Here is something you must know; you will not start seeing significant and recurring readership without writing. Duh! Failure to post at a minimum of at least once a week is a guaranteed recipe for failure. This runs hand in hand with the next point though.

Don’t overwhelm your site. Everyone cannot be a Dr. Jim, and no one likes their email inbox flooded by one author. One to five posts per week will do you just fine, because:

Your content needs to be interesting, meaningful, engaging, and sometimes even provocative. Trying to produce quantity rather than quality may produce sporadic bursts of traffic but hopefully your intent is to create a returning readership that interacts with what you’ve provided. Determine early on how many posts you can reasonably produce that are worthy of someone’s time.

Admit you’re not the only blog-site on the block and that other writers have something meaningful to say also. How is the best way to do this? Visit other sites and interact with the author and other commenter’s. The reward of doing this is twofold. First, you’ll be encouraging another blogger. Second, if your comments are meaningful and engaging, you are almost assured of visits to see the content on your own site.

Put as much time in creating your title as you did the content of your post. This sounds absurd, right? The evidence is in though that it is the title that is one of the greatest attractors of visits and web searches. However, the title must be directly related to the content. Putting words in your title that have nothing to do with the content is eventually picked up on by search engines and you’ll find yourself dropped from their lists, considered spam. In short, be real.

Hang in there… readers are coming! There’s a gazillion other things you’ll learn about this blogging adventure as time goes on, such as it is a neat avenue of community activity. So, if you’ve recently begun to blog, leave us a link in the comments section so we can visit. And really, hang in there!