Hm, righto, as I said on the other thread I get around 40,000 page views a month and am coming up to 600,000 in just over two years as well as having about 1,000 regular readers/subscribers and all that jazz.
I don't blog about personal stuff very often, but instead concentrate on writing articles that people who are interested in the same sorts of things as me will enjoy and link to and stuff. I also try to be fairly topical - my post on the Royal Wedding dress went out while the wedding was actually still going on and, unsurprisingly, got several thousand views within a couple of hours.
I comment a bit, but not excessively but I do try and get along with bloggers who write similar content to me about Marie Antoinette etc. I also try to always bear in mind that the vast majority of my readership is in the US and so try and deliver things that are unique and that they might not otherwise see - I'm lucky in that my old university tutor is now the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and has got me into private bits of Kensington Palace and Windsor Palace and also told me to consider myself the Royal Collection's unofficial pet blogger. I also go and feel up eighteenth century dresses at the Bath Fashion Museum and stuff like that, which readers in the US can only experience vicariously.
I think my advice then would be:
- Make your blog look as scrumptious as possible.
2. Be unique.
3. Exploit the things that are unique to you and that your readers might not otherwise experience.
4. Make friends with other bloggers.
5. Think of your blog posts as articles.
6. Have a lot of pictures.
7. At least
try to reply to comments.
8. Join forums for things that you post to your blog about (I'm in Kindle, historical fiction, history, writing, Jack the Ripper and Marie Antoinette forums and societies) and wait for the opportunity to smack people with your links.
9. Go outside with your camera.
10. Be yourself - be chatty and interesting and friendly.
11. Link your posts to Twitter and a Facebook page. I'm just starting out on Pinterest now too - I was only using it to help an artist who is making my next book cover but have been amazed at how many hits I get from it so I'm going to put loads of my Paris, Versailles and flouncy portraits on there now. :)
12. Make friends with experts/writers in your field and get them to do guest posts for you. I get a lot of views thanks to sweet talking a couple of very respected Ripperologists to do posts for me.
Hope that helps! :)
