Recent statistics suggest there are over 70 million blogs in the blogosphere and that figure is growing each day. If you are one of those blogs, how do you deliver quality content that will attract readers and also participants i.e. those that comment, or download your ebooks, or with any luck, buy your products?

Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer to this question, but here are 5 great tips you should consider:

1. reach your target market through effective keyword research.

Effective blogging invariably requires good keyword research. Blogs that cover wildly varied topics or personal rants tend to attract fewer visitors, unless of course the writing is of exceptional quality. More successful blogs focus on a niche and use targeted keywords to attract the right visitors. Consider using the free GoodKeywordsv2 tool to identify the most appropriate keywords for your blog. This will help you to better target your content to your readers.

2. Ask your readers what they actually want to read.

Writing good content is hard work and there are no shortcuts. If you spend lots of time researching and writing quality posts only to receive limited comments it can be quite disheartening. You might also be unclear what you are doing wrong or what you could be doing differently. A simple step you could take it so ask your readers what they want to read about.

There are plenty of options for how to do this. If you use WordPress there is a WP-Polls plugin that’s very easy to use, or there are various third party suppliers, including PollDaddy and Vizu that will allow you to add a reader poll.

If you already have an established list of subscribers, consider emailing a survey to them to get their opinions. This is the type of market research blue chip companies use every single day to better understand their customers, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be doing this also. A survey doesn’t have to be too onerous and you can set one up online for free at SurveyMonkey .

3. Post well written and well researched content

It goes without saying that without quality content your readers will quickly click-off without interacting with your blog. It’s been said that 1 quality post is better than 10 average posts and this is something you should consider when writing your content. In terms of writing quality content there is a lot of advice available in the blogosphere and you should consider at least checking out the CopyBlogger for some hot tips.

4. Don’t forget to interact

An easy pitfall is not interacting with people who comment on your blog. The best way to encourage more participation is to answer any questions posted in your comments and to generally engage your readers, drawing them into your community. You could also consider adding the WordPress plugin that enables people to ’subscribe to comments’ which will encourage further participation.

Take note of the posts that attract the most comments as these will be the topics your readers want to hear more about. Consider adding a popular posts page to your blog to encourage more interaction.

5. Invite guest bloggers to participate

What better way to encourage participation than by inviting a big name blogger to guest write on your blog. You will need to be fairly persuasive to get this going, but there are obvious benefits. More established bloggers will bring loyal and active readers and of course lots of traffic.

In the likely event that you can’t persuade Seth Godin or Tom Peters to guest write on your blog, you could encourage them to comment by posting link backs or interacting on their blog. Consider writing a controversial post on a topic your favourite blogger writes about and follow this up by emailing them and introducing your post. You may be surprised by the reaction you get.

So there you go, 5 fairly straightforward ideas for engaging with your readers. Please don’t forget to come back to the Marketing Blagger to let us know how you get on.