Any blogger knows how it feels when they hit a bit of a wall. You’ve built up a steady list of followers and have been regaling them with interesting, insightful blog posts for a good while. But like other bloggers before you, there soon comes a day when you feel fresh out of ideas. This is crunch time – after all, it doesn’t take long to lose your loyal audience if they feel like you’re no longer trying.  So here are five things you can do to improve your blog and start getting some serious love from your readers once more!

Start Stalking Your Readers

If you spend all your time on your own blog, have you thought about how that’s narrowing your vision a bit?  Try following your followers and finding out what makes them tick. See what they’re blogging about, who else they’re following and just generally taking the time to get to know them better.

Making your way through the world of other people’s blogs is a rich way to spend your time. You won’t believe how much inspiration it can provide and you’ll soon find yourself bursting with relevant, fresh new ideas for your own blog.

Give Yourself a Makeover

While you’re prowling around some other blogs, see what they’re doing to make themselves look all sexy – and pick up some tips.  If you’re using decent blogging software (or even designing your own blog) it shouldn’t be too hard to make some tweaks and step up your design.  And while you’re at it, do a little bit of poking around to see what type of font and which sizes your peers are using.  It’s crucial that your blog is as readable as possible so make sure you’re not committing some typography sins!

Speed Testing

There are speed tests you can perform to see how long your blog takes to load.  A lot of people are put off by slow-loading sites so you need to make sure you aren’t displaying something that’s slowing you down.  If you must use files, consider hosting them elsewhere (there are plenty of facilities offering this if you do a quick search – Amazon Cloudfront is just one) to save yourself some space.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you’re blogging, chances are you already have a good understand of SEO.  There are plenty of SEO tricks that you can apply to make your site more search engine friendly.  For example, you might be the king of clever wordplay, but your post titles won’t mean squat to search engines unless they highlight exactly what you’re talking about.  Certain blog softwares come with SEO help available, so make the most of it.

Market Yourself

You don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing to see a return.  If you have Facebook or Twitter accounts, start bigging up your blog and garnering some more support.  More traffic is something you should continue to strive for and social networking is one of the best ways to drive up your traffic quickly and effectively.