The tenth and eleventh chapters of Journalism Next specifically mention the importance of creating a sense of community with your readers/audience along with increasing your readership through Search Engine Optimization.
Here are some ways that journalists can grow their readership and interact with their audience:
- Comments
- Conversational writing
- Mailbag
Allowing users to comment gives your readers the ability to share their opinions and feedback on a given post, statement, or video that you publish. This way you can get a consensus on what your readers enjoy about your writing and what they feel you should do better.
While you may have a large audience of readers, the more the merrier. Through tagging, linking and tracking you can appear more in searches through Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Here are a list of ways to increase your viewership and SEO:
- Use specific tags. By using generic keywords, you will not show up among the more prominent websites.
- Link keywords in your posts. Linking words to websites with heavy traffic will cause your site to get more views.
- Keep track of where your readers come from. This will give you a better idea of what your readers are interested in.