There’s an old adage in the business world: If you want to improve something, you have to work at it some more. If you’re going to get serious about increasing your audience, you need to get from the how many read me” to the “what do they like” data, and that’s going to mean using some free tools and marketing methods.

Here’s a longer than usual list of small but useful things you can do to build your blog. We’ll start with some basic, cover-your-bases stuff and move on from there to more advanced techniques.

• Know your stats. At a bare minimum, you need to know where to find your stats in your blogging software and/or have a Site Meter badge. As RSS continues to ramp up, an absolute must, is a free or paid FeedBurner account!

• Who are you? Don’t be coy about your About page and profile if you want to garner readers. Even if you are blogging anonymously, give your readers something. Checkout Darren’s post, on How to Write Your “About Me” Page.

• Master basic social skills. Whether you love or hate social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us, at least some of your readers love them, so make it easy to vote for your posts. There’s a multitude of ways of doing this, but the easiest and the one i recommend is the ShareThis plugin which creates a popup menu when clicked, with links to all of the major social bookmarking sites to submit your content. You can see an example of this plugin at the bottom of this post. Try it out.

• RSS above the fold. For blogs, “above the fold” means before you need to scroll, and that’s where you want your RSS stuff. For example, this is the location you will want your standard, FeedBurner, or specific RSS reader badges to reside. Making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog and save clicks pays off.

• Get listed. Multitudes of blog directories are out there. Three you should make the effort to check out and get listed in are MyBlogLog, Globe of Blogs, and Blogarama. Looking for more blog directories? See Kevin’s post, 75 Websites You Can Submit Your Blog To for an excellent list.

• Get listed, part 2. Don’t forget website directories that accept blogs, such as the Yahoo Directory (paid), the Open Directory Project, and specialty directories in your industry or geographic location.

• Respond to comments. At the risk of boring you, let me say it again: Blogs are a conversation, and that means you absolutely should respond to comments. Doing so will turn first-time visitors into loyal readers. For more information on getting more comments, see Start The Blogging Conversation.

• Post on weekends. Conventional blogging wisdom is you shouldn’t post on weekends because fewer people read blogs then. By the same token, there are fewer posts competing for attention.

• Show your back stock. One way or another, get a list of your best/most popular posts onto the front page of your blog. There’s no better way of turning a chance meeting into the start of a lasting relationship with your blog. A good wordpress plugin for this is MostWanted.

• Give credit and links where they are due. Simply put, the more links out of your blog, the more people will link to your blog. So even when you can’t pin to a specific post, link to that blog or website and give credit where it’s due.

• Post when your readers expect you to post. When you post creates expectations. If you post twice a day for months then not at all for two weeks, your readership will drift away. Know what your posting goal is and keep to it, and don’t be shy sharing that with your readers.

• Make use of trackbacks. When you’re blogging about some major blogger’s post, either positively or negatively, use your blogging software’s ability to send a trackback to that blogger. You will be surprised how often the trackback recipient will comment on your posts. This technique works only if you’re blogging in earnest, not fishing for links. For more on Trackbacks see Darren’s post, Introduction to Trackbacks.

All done? Here are more ways to get more readers that take more effort:

• Make friends with fellow bloggers. That means follow their blogs, be helpful, get to know them, and comment intelligently. Don’t ask for links up front. Don’t expect instant acceptance. Don’t be irrelevant. And don’t nag!

• Use photos. The right photo triples the impact of a good post. Take them yourself, find them at Flickr already permissioned at  (2.7 million and counting), or spend a dollar each at iStockPhoto.

• Post your photos at Flickr. People are interested in seeing themselves and other people. If you take digital photos, post them to Flickr and include a Flickr gallery on your blog.

• Participate in newsgroups. While newsgroups have faded in recent years, you’ll find at least one very active newsgroups covering just about every topic imaginable. Dive right in. And don’t forget to include your blog’s URL in your signature line.

• Use Squidoo. Build one or more lenses to showcase your best blogs about a given topic, or which together form a great tutorial, or just to establish your reputation as someone who knows a thing or two. Checkout Pigboom’s post on Improving SEO with Squidoo.

• Convert old posts into new ezine articles. What’s the difference between a great post you did on a subject six months ago and a free ezine article that drives traffic to your blog? About ten minutes’ effort on your part at ezine sites like iSnare, Ezine Articles, and especially the SiteProNews directory of article directories.

• Guest post. This technique has worked wonders for me over the last few months. Offer another (more influential) blogger guest posts to keep the content rolling while that blogger is on vacation, overextended, and so on. This technique presupposes you have some sort of relationship going, that the other blogger has either asked for guest posts or seems ready for the idea, and that you have at least a few posts that would fit the bill.

• Provide answers. In just about every area, there are current questions that need answers. Think about the subjects you blog on. What questions could a little non-blog research or data-gathering answer? A good tool for finding subjects that people are currently in need of answers for is Yahoo! Answers.

So there are my 20 top tips for building the reader base of your blog. Of course, there are many more methods available to bloggers to aid them in building their blog, whats your methods do you use? How did you generate the amount of subscribers you have at your blog, and how long did it take?

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. I’d appreciate it.

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