Launching a new blog - Part 3
[Establishing credibility]
Readers are always in a hurry. They are like a typical male sitting in front of the Television with a remote control in hand. You give them a slight distraction and they’ll change the channel. If they dont find you credible enough, in the first few seconds, they’ll almost certainly move on.
Again if you consider your blog as a shop, what do you think establishes your credibility instantly for a new reader? The crowd of customers at your shop - Your readership. If your blog shows a huge number of readers, the new reader will instinctively try to spend a little more time on your blog to figure out why? And that’s when you can have him. Just like if you are new to the market, you’d almost always like to check out the shop with a large crowd of customers. Even if it doesn’t sell what you are looking for. There is some hormone in human body that gives them an attraction towards crowd.
Three things that display the virtual crowd at your blog are visit counters, visitor locators and comments.
So you need to establish credibility for a new reader to hook on. But since you’ve just started, you obviously don’t have many readers. You can still keep a readership counter at some corner of your blog. Not at the top, Not in the front row. Keep it at the bottom, or side bottom. Be sure to add it as soon as you start your blog. By the time you reach a good quantity of posts your readership would have silently grown to a few hundreds. And thats when you can display it at a prime location of your blog and showcase it.
There is another excellent utility that shows location of your readers on a world map. Now when a new reader finds half the world visiting your blog, it creates an instant impression.
And one of the most important and most meaningful thing in blogs is reader’s comments. Make sure its extremely easy for readers to comment on your blog. Many a times, I have found comments to be more useful then the original posts. But reaching a decent quantity and quality of comments will certainly take a lot of time and effort. You have to encourage your readers to comment. And one of the good way to encourage that is to comment on other blogs. If you comment on my posts, I’d almost certainly follow the link to reach your blog. Similarly, if your comment is really cool, my other readers might as well follow the link. Start Now! Comment on this post, it really takes only a minute.
