By James AdamsOnce your blog is successful with your initial audience, you have some important considerations to make. You want to expand your audience, but your target niche is small. You don't want to compromise your core content and alienate your existing readers, but your content is already as good as it can be. How do you maintain your integrity and still attract readers from outside your core niche?
1. Cross Pollination
The first tactic you can employ is cross-pollinating your content. Find related communities and blogs and write guest articles on their topics from your perspective. Making one of your old articles new to a particular audience can generate interest in a community you never had before. Attracting readers to your site from someone else's blog is a win-win situation for both of you: your host gets great content with very little work, and you get new traffic for both websites.
2. Special Interest Articles
You know your topic inside and out for enthusiasts of the subject matter. When writing for your core audience, you have a comfortable vocabulary and an assumed base of knowledge that lets you communicate clearly with a very specific group of people. Are all of your readers the same type of focused enthusiast? They may become that way after reading your articles, but you can cleverly attract new types of reader by creating special interest articles.
Special interest articles are basically your topic rewritten to hook a specific type of person. Making your subject relevant to other niches is the key subject; combine your niche with another one to encourage people from other communities to explore the lessons and information you can impart from your specialty. Whether it's a single article or an ongoing series, exploring your subject from new points of view will expand your flexibility as a writer and create new areas of interest for your existing readers while establishing hooks for new readers.
3. Make Your Website Community Friendly
The most successful blogs are not lone wolf operations or private soap boxes. They are communities of like-minded individuals who congregate around a shared interest, be it in an activity, a person, a location, an ideology, an occupation, or the various other topics that comprise the blogosphere. There are several essential components to expanding the community aspects of your blog.
Your website needs to be attractive and intuitive. Clearly defined, easily used tools for making comments and entering discussions are essential for building good communities. Comments need to be easily located and have minimal barriers to entry. A dedicated forum attached to your website enables an independent location for readers to interact and create a culture, and that culture is what attracts new readers from outside your core audience. Once you have community participation in your content, it becomes attractive to new readers.
4. Participate in Your Community
Your website is your primary platform for sharing content and should be your chief focus, but your community also requires your attention and commitment. This means replying to comments underneath your articles, incorporating community feedback into your day to day content, posting in your forums, and acknowledging your community's contributions to the quality of your website. You build loyalty by interacting directly with readers, and can find exciting and unexplored topics that can then be used to attract new readers from outside your core audience. Your community will tell you directly what they want and what will attract more readers; you need only to listen to them.
5. Be Flexible
If something doesn't work, don't do it. You will generate plenty of ideas, and try a lot of experiments, and you need to be willing to be honest and scientific about results. Capitalize on the ideas that get the results you want, and cultivate the discipline to drop unsuccessful ploys even when you are strongly attached to the idea. There's no shame in a failed experiment.
In short, you attract new readers by exploring new ideas from within your community and similar groups. Successful blogs are all about the culture of the community. Adapt new topics to your theme, make yourself friendly and accessible, and be wary of stagnation.
James Adams blogs and writes for an online Canon cartridges supplier based in the UK where he reviews products such as the Canon CLI-521 and contributes posts about art and design to their blog.Interested in contributing a guest blog post of your own? Check out the guest blogger guidelines.