7 Tips to Grow Your Audience

Writing isn’t just about shaping your thoughts into words, or recording your knowledge and expertise for posterity — it’s about connecting with other people. Stories and ideas are powerful: They can change how we think, how we go about our lives, and who we become. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be someone on the other end of the line (or web page) reading and absorbing what you’re sharing. That’s where building your audience comes into play. Your “audience” is the core group of readers who know you, support you, and value what you have to say.

Getting to a place where you have a loyal audience — of hundreds, thousands, or even more readers — is a journey. We’re not going to sugarcoat it: Building a readership is difficult, and it takes a lot of time, energy, and experimentation. There are no shortcuts here, no easy roads to netting more views and shares. Some writers spend years (decades, even!) figuring out what they want to say and how they want to say it, and accumulating devoted readers along the way.

Start writing.

The first thing you need to do is start writing. Start small, you don’t need to write a 1000 words article, just write about something you’re passionate about. Lenght is not that important. It’s important what you write and the connection you build with the readers.

Find a publication.

Publications are very helpful for starter writers because your article has more visibility. People can follow publications for various reasons, and so you have the chance to appear in their story feed even if they don’t follow you. Appearing in a publication can help new readers discover your work. That’s a great chance.

Email subscribers.

They are the cornerstone of your writings. You can create a relationship with them because they will be alerted every time you go out with a new article. This not only increases your views but helps you create a good audience.

Headlines.

Headlines are the first thing that people see, and your only chance you have to make them click and open your article. Headlines are the most important part of your article.

Follow and clap.

Read others’ work and interact with other writers. There’s a writer in particular that helped me discover that. She’s interacted with me and followed me even if I had two or three articles. She clapped at my work several times. Without realizing it, I was reading her work and feeling a connection. So I understand how important is to interact with others. It’s not just “putting your writing out there”, as I thought at the beginning, but is being part of a community and supporting each other. The fun thing is that I found her with the follow4follow, even if not everyone approves this method. If you want to know more about the follow4follow, you can read this article.

Tags and SEO.

Before your story goes live, you have the opportunity to add up to five tags. Do not miss this chance because tags will help you make your story more discoverable.

SEO (search engine optimization), on the other hand, can help your stories get discovered by Google and other major search engines. To update your story’s SEO settings, click the “…” on your story page, navigate to “Settings” and select “SEO Settings” on the left.

Be consistent.

That’s something that can apply nearly to everything, but writing consistently will help you get more views. The more articles you have, the more the chance to be discovered. So, keep it up! About this topic, I suggest this article.

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