Are you an aspiring writer who wants to earn their bread and butter through blogging? Or are you a working professional who wants to use blogging as a profitable side hustle?
Or perhaps, you’ve already launched your blog and are looking for ways to skyrocket your traffic?
Whether you are a full-time blogger or side hustler, you must know how to grow your blog.
Here’s the thing — blogging is an extremely rewarding and sustainable profession. However, there are a plethora of mediocre blogs floating all across the internet.
That’s why you need a concrete marketing strategy to promote your blog and rise above the competition.
Otherwise, even the most superior blog posts will get drowned in the vast online ocean of lookalike content.
The good news?
You don’t have to spend a fortune to market your blog to attract loyal readers.
Instead, you need to use a clever mix of various digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO), guest blogging, etc.
Additionally, you can use social advertising channels such as Facebook ads to further expand your reach.
The key is to identify the right marketing techniques based on your target audience and niche.
In this blog, I’ll take you through a few effective strategies to market your blog.
But before learning how to grow your blog traffic, you must build an outstanding blog.
Table of Contents
The Prerequisites to Growing Your Blog
If you’ve already set up a blog, you can skip this section.
In the absence of high-quality content, even the best marketing strategy won’t attract blog traffic.
First things first — if you want your blog to attract plenty of devoted readers, you must publish stellar content.
In the absence of high-quality content, even the best marketing strategy won’t attract blog traffic.
Make sure your content is insightful, original, and relevant to your ttarget audience. It must provide answers to their queries or offer solutions to their problems.
Needless to say, you need a fast, visually appealing, and mobile-responsive website.
You can easily build a self-hosted WordPress website in a few simple steps. Make sure you select a theme that is relevant to your niche and add suitable plugins to improve your website’s functionality.
Here are a few more things you should ensure:
1. Focus on Your Niche
How do you ensure that every blog post you publish is relevant to your readers? A simple solution is to identify topics that are closely related to your niche.
You can’t write about backpacking and hiking one day and then switch to business-related topics the next day. Make sure you choose a niche that you’re passionate about…and stick to it.
2. Understand Your Audience
You can’t create engaging content without knowing what your readers want.
That’s why it is essential to have a lucid idea of your target audience’s needs, preferences, likes, and dislikes.
What’s more?
You must dig deeper and identify their ambitions and struggles.
If your content helps them overcome or resolve their problem, it’ll likely attract a wide audience.
3. Identify Trending Topics & News
If you want to quickly grow your blog traffic, you must stay abreast of the latest trends and developments in your niche.
Capitalizing on these trends will help you reach a broad spectrum of readers and can even make your content viral.
Whenever you spot relevant industry news or trends, you should publish a blog post putting your own spin to it.
4. Make it Visually Appealing
Do you enjoy reading blog posts that resemble an endless wall of text?
No, right?
Even I don’t.
This is precisely the reason why even the most insightful content will fail to hold a reader’s attention if it isn’t easy on the eyes.
You must understand that your readers are likely checking out your blog posts on their smartphones or tablets.
Therefore, you should judiciously structure your content to aid scannability.
Use short paragraphs and sentences as well as plenty of subheadings and bulleted lists.
Additionally, you should include relevant images, videos, social media embeds, etc. to break the monotony of text.
That’s why I always add images to my post to make it engaging.
Image via Tasmai Dave
Now that you know how to build an awesome blog with outstanding content, you must be eager to learn how to market your blog.
Let’s find out.
Tips to Grow Your Blog Traffic
“How to grow my website?” – this is likely the most common question that new bloggers and website owners encounter.
In fact, it was a question that puzzled me when I first started out too.
The answer to this is actually very simple. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula that will help you grow your blog.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take inspiration from other strategies.
As a matter of fact, you can use a combination of various digital marketing techniques to market your blog.
I myself use a mixture of SEO and social media marketing to grow my blogs and websites and it works out very well for me.
But remember that the techniques you select will depend on your niche and target audience. So make sure you know that well.
Here are are a few useful steps to skyrocket your blog traffic:
1. Make Your Blog Reader-Friendly
The key to retaining your readers is to deliver a seamless user experience. And that’s exactly what SEO is all about too.
So, you’ve attracted a handful of readers by publishing a few well-researched blog posts.
However, if your readers have a hard time navigating your website to find relevant information, they likely won’t come back.
Put yourself in their shoes and I’m sure your answer will be the same.
The key to retaining your readers is to deliver a seamless user experience. And that’s exactly what SEO is all about too (I’ll explain later).
How can you make your website reader-friendly?
Start by improving your site architecture to make it easily navigable. Your readers shouldn’t have to spend a long time figuring out how to move from one page to another.
Add a “Go to Top” button to help readers quickly scroll back to the beginning of a blog post. Moreover, you should leverage internal linking to let readers find more relevant information on your blog.
What’s more?
It is also essential to add a search button to your website. This will help your readers easily find the blog posts that they are looking for.
Additionally, it can be instrumental in retaining their attention and encouraging them to stay on your blog for longer.
This, in turn, will improve website performance parameters such as time-on-page and bounce rate, which can help with your SEO.
Likewise, it is important to let your readers easily share any content that they find useful and engaging.
Make sure you add social sharing buttons on your blog.
If you have built your website using WordPress, you will find various useful plugins for this purpose.
Additionally, you could add “Click to Tweet” links in important sections of your blog post.
You can use several online tools and WordPress plugins to generate these links link Better Click to Tweet and Ultimate Blocks.
Finally, you must ensure that your website is fast, secure, and mobile-responsive.
Nothing turns potential readers away from a blog more than a slow loading website.
It. Just. Does. Not. Work.
If you add images in your blog posts, use image optimization plugins to reduce their size.
To test your page loading speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights and get an idea of what fixes you need to make to further amplify your website speed.
Image via PageSpeed Insights
Likewise, you can use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool for useful tips to improve your website’s responsiveness.
Image via Mobile-Friendly Test
This is critical as more than 50% of all web traffic now comes through mobiles.
Make sure your website layout easily adjusts to different screen sizes. This is particularly crucial considering many of your readers will be avid smartphone users.
Handpicked Content for You:
2. Prioritize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A discussion on “how to grow your blog” would be incomplete without mentioning search engine optimization (SEO).
If you are building a blog, you must outline a rock-solid SEO strategy even before you publish any content.
Otherwise, your readers will likely never come across your blog posts when they search for a related topic on search engines.
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO is a set of specialized techniques that help drive increased organic traffic to your website or blog.
The idea is to help search engines understand what your website is about so that they can include it in relevant search results.
Better SEO can help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Note how it’s helped my other website rank for popular keywords such as “posh area in mumbai”.
Image via Google
The higher your website’s search engine ranking, the more likely search engine users will visit it. Broadly, SEO can be divided into three components – on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO involves optimizing different elements of your web page, including its content, layout, speed, etc.
On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to improve its search engine ranking.
The most crucial step in off-page SEO is to boost your website’s inbound link profile by attracting high-quality backlinks.
Likewise, technical SEO involves optimizing your site architecture and navigation.
It helps search engine spiders easily crawl and index new web pages.
So, let’s take a look at some of the major components of SEO.
Keyword Research
The first step in developing your SEO strategy is to perform extensive keyword research.
Keyword research is the process of finding the most relevant and popular keywords in your niche.
Thereafter, you have to validate these keywords and determine whether they are worth targeting at all.
Evaluate each keyword using parameters such as search volume, competition, etc.
Why should you do keyword research?
This step is crucial for identifying the keywords you wish to rank for.
Additionally, these keywords help you determine relevant topics that will resonate with your target audience.
At this stage, you can use keyword research tools such as:
The next step is to find useful keyword variations and long-tail keywords.
Try adding different modifiers such as “best”, “top”, etc. to your target keywords.
Additionally, you should run a Google search for each keyword and take a look at the “Searches related to” section.
You can also use Google Trends to identify trending and emerging keywords.
Image via Google
It is also recommended that you keep an eye on your competitors to find the keywords they are targeting.
You should also closely monitor their content and see the topics they are writing about.
Additionally, you should analyze their inbound link profile and find the sources of their backlinks.
You can use tools such as SpyFu, SEMrush, QuickSprout, etc. for this purpose.
Optimization
Once you have a list of target keywords, it is time to optimize your content.
This involves organically integrating a target keyword into your blog post.
When you’re doing so, make sure you avoid inundating the content with irrelevant keywords. Instead, you should judiciously include the keywords in critical sections such as:
- Introduction and conclusion
- Subheadings
- Page title
- Meta title and description
- Image alt text
- Anchor text
- URL
You must remember that you’re writing for humans, and not for the search engines. Keyword stuffing is a big no, no.
Apart from the keywords, you should also ensure that your content is original and free from grammatical and spelling errors.
What’s more?
You should validate the content with relevant statistics, examples, and case studies.
Also, don’t forget to add internal links to relevant blog posts or pages on your website as that can help you keep traffic on your website.
Lastly, make sure your website is fast and responsive. I mean, no one likes a slow website. Would you?
Link Building
Now that you have published all this awesome content, it is time to showcase your authority to search engines.
In other words, you need to attract authentic and high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites.
Why, you might ask?
It positions your blog as a trusted and reliable source of excellent content. Each backlink from a high-authority website is a vote towards your website’s authenticity.
This is the reason why the backlinks encourage search engines to reward your website with a better ranking.
So that brings us to our next question…
How can you build backlinks?
One of the most effective ways of backlink building is to publish guest posts on authoritative blogs in your niche.
Based on the target site, you can include a link or two back to your blog on suitable anchor texts.
While submitting your guest posts, craft an eye-catching author byline and don’t forget to include a link to your blog in it too.
For finding guest posting opportunities, you can run a search for “your niche + write for us”.
Additionally, you should monitor popular blogs in your niche to identify broken link opportunities.
Handpicked Content for You:
Site Architecture
Lastly, you have to organize your website’s navigation and architecture.
The key is to make it easy for search engine spiders to locate and index new content on your blog.
This can be done by adding internal links and creating HTML and XML sitemaps. If you’re using WordPress, you can use Simple Sitemap for HTML sitemaps and Yoast SEO for XML sitemaps.
Additionally, you should use a logical and consistent URL structure to help them understand what each web page is about.
Finally, make sure you don’t have any broken links on your website to maintain your website structure.
3. Start Guest Blogging
When you publish high-quality content on authoritative blogs, it reinforces your reputation as a blogger.
In the previous section, we have seen how guest posts help strengthen your website’s inbound link profile.
However, this isn’t the only benefit of guest blogging.
When you publish high-quality content on authoritative blogs, it reinforces your reputation as a blogger. Essentially, it helps in establishing you as an authority in your niche.
And that’s not all.
It also amplifies your reach and helps you connect with an audience that would have remained inaccessible otherwise.
So, let me explain how you can get started with guest blogging.
The first step of guest blogging is to find popular and reputable blogs in your niche.
Next, reach out to the editors or webmasters with a stellar pitch.
You can use a tool like Hunter to find their emails or find the “Write for Us” page on their website.
When you send out a request for a guest post, you should include links to your published blog posts as well as potential ideas for the guest post.
You can even suggest a topic and explain how it would benefit their blog.
Here’s a great example of a guest post pitch.
Image via Guestpost.com
Also, needless to say, you need a snappy, compelling, and unforgettable byline.
It should tempt the readers to immediately head over to your blog for more useful content.
Most website admins let you include a link to your blog in the byline so make sure you ace it.
You can even include links to your social media profiles or email opt-in form in the bio.
Additionally, you can add a link or two to your blog posts in the main content in a natural manner.
Lastly, make sure the guest post is of the highest quality. After all, it’s going to speak volumes about your credibility.
The tone, language, and visual appearance should be consistent with the host blog’s own content too.
4. Up Your Social Media Game
If you have launched a blog without a well-defined social media marketing strategy, you are likely already falling behind your competitors.
With more than 3.9 billion social media users in the world, your readers likely already use one or more platforms.
Image via We Are Social
You just have to reach them with the right content at the right time.
Social media is also a great tool for boosting audience engagement and building a loyal community of readers.
So, that brings us to the next question.
How can you build a following on social media?
1. Identify the Social Platforms
Identify the social media platforms your potential readers likely use. You can do this by figuring out your target audience.
If you’re targeting B2B businesses, LinkedIn would be a great platform. However, B2C businesses usually prefer others like Instagram.
Also, irrespective of your niche, it is also recommended that you create a LinkedIn profile to network with other bloggers and potential clients/sponsors.
2. Create Social Media Pages
The next step is to create dedicated social media profiles/pages for your blog on each platform.
Make sure you complete each profile with the blog name, URL, and a crisp yet attractive description/bio.
You should also create an eye-catching logo or profile image.
3. Post High-Quality Content
Once you’ve created your profiles, you need to start posting awesome content to grab your audience’s attention.
Simply sharing links to your latest blog posts won’t suffice. Instead, you need to upload content that is tailored to each platform.
For instance, while high-quality images and videos work well on Instagram, well-researched thought leadership articles are suitable for LinkedIn.
However, coming up with new content ideas can be a challenging task. An effective solution is to repurpose your blog posts into different formats.
For instance, you can convert a case study into an infographic and share it on Facebook and Instagram.
Likewise, you can share the key highlights of a blog post on Twitter. You can also transform it into a SlideShare presentation for LinkedIn.
It is also essential to give your existing readers an irresistible incentive for following your social media profiles.
This could be in the form of exclusive tips, insider secrets, or a behind-the-scenes glimpse of your work.
You can even host live sessions and AMAs (ask-me-everything) to increase engagement. Finally, don’t forget to add social follow buttons on your blog to make it easy for people to share your content.
4. Join Groups
It is also recommended that you join groups that are related to your niche.
Identify groups that are active and have a large member count.
Once you’re in, make sure you participate in relevant discussions with well-articulated and insightful comments.
Finally, don’t forget to include links to your blog posts whenever possible.
5. Leverage Social Media Ads
Lastly, you can skyrocket your reach by using social media advertising.
For instance, you can use Facebook ads to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
For this, you can precisely define your target audience using various parameters including their likes, dislikes, spending habits, online behavior, etc. and set the ad budget and goal.
Using social media ads can help you expand your reach beyond the organic reach and help you spread the word about your blog.
5. Join Quora and Reddit
When you think of ways to grow your blog, Q&A websites and discussion forums may not be the first thing that will come to your mind.
I mean, they’re not really websites where you’d go for promoting another website, right?
However, these platforms are often a goldmine of readers who are looking for answers to a wide array of queries.
And when you’ve got readers…
well, you’ve guessed it…
there are potential visitors.
Therefore, building an active presence on Quora and Reddit can be instrumental in growing your audience.
Additionally, it will help reinforce your reputation as a blogger.
The first step is to sign-up for these platforms and find meaningful discussion threads.
You should then contribute to relevant threads with helpful and valuable comments.
Instead of explicitly asking users to check out your blog, you could share the important aspects of your blog post in the answers.
Thereafter, you can include a link to the blog post and ask readers to check it out for more information.
This is a win-win situation.
How?
You not only get the traffic on your website, but also help others, which can cement your position as an authority in your niche.
Handpicked Content for You:
6. Network with Other Bloggers
If you are a beginner, it’s extremely crucial to forge a strong relationship with experienced bloggers in your niche.
This is something I failed to do when I started. I had a late realization and I can’t stress on how important these relationships are.
Why?
These connections come in handy when you are looking for guest posting opportunities.
Additionally, if these bloggers like your content, they might even share it in their networks.
This, in turn, helps increase your reach and acts as a stamp of approval.
I know, building relationships can be difficult, especially when you’re starting out.
An easy hack that you can implement is to regularly check out their content and add thoughtful comments.
You should also follow them on social media and engage with their content on various platforms.
7. Build Your Mailing List
Marketing your blog isn’t just about attracting a plethora of enthusiastic readers.
It’s equally crucial to retain them and build a huge community of devoted readers.
In fact, retaining your readers is even more important than attracting new ones.
That’s why you need to convert your readers into subscribers and stay connected to them with insightful newsletters and other updates.
For this, you need to build your email list.
How can you build an email list?
1. Create a Lead Magnet
The first step is to create an irresistible lead magnet that will tempt first-time readers to share their email addresses with you.
You can combine a few related and top-performing blog posts to create an e-book and use it as a lead magnet.
Alternatively, you can host webinars, virtual summits, or online courses to obtain your readers’ personal information.
But even if you don’t have a lead magnet, don’t worry.
You can very well get people to sign up for your newsletter by providing great content to them and asking them to sign up to receive more such content.
2. Place the Sign Up Form on Your Blog
The next step is that of placing the signup form all over your blog at prominent spots. You also need to promote the lead magnet on various social media platforms.
Use crisp and eye-catching calls-to-action (CTAs) within a blog post to encourage readers to check it out.
Alternatively, you can keep it simple as I’ve done.
Image via Tasmai Dave
Additionally, you can use exit-intent pop-up boxes, slide-in pop-ups, etc.
I’ve used exit-intent pop-ups on my other website TravHelper.
Image via TravHelper
Make sure you use a well-designed and high-converting landing page that showcases the benefits of your lead magnet.
3. Promote Your Lead Magnet
To promote your lead magnet even further, you can use paid search ads and social media ads and grow your mailing list.
Likewise, you can utilize gated content to compel readers to share their email addresses.
A word of caution.
You may lose out on some readers due to gated content.
So make sure you don’t try using gated content when your traffic is relatively low.
Also, if you’re creating gated content, make sure the publicly accessible part of your blog post is well-researched and engaging.
It should hook the readers and tempt them to find out what’s in store.
What’s more?
You should also create an opt-in form and add it to the homepage of your blog.
Include it at the end of every blog post as well. You can even include the link to the opt-in form in your social media posts.
Make sure you list tempting benefits that readers will receive when they sign-up for your mailing list.
It’s also essential to make your opt-in form visually attractive so that it can attract the attention.
Another great idea is to convert the homepage of your blog into an opt-in form. Here’s an example:
Image via Noah Kagan
Likewise, you can use Hello Bar to add an omnipresent notification bar to your website.
It is a less intrusive alternative to pop-ups and slide-in forms. Moreover, its placement helps you easily grab a reader’s attention.
Image via Hello Bar
4. Send Newsletters Regularly
Now that you have a substantial mailing list, what are you going to do with it?
Start by compiling your latest blog posts into a weekly or monthly newsletter.
You can even share exclusive content or an early access to your upcoming blog posts.
The key is to consistently reward your subscribers with top-notch content and earn their loyalty and trust.
8. Amplify Audience Engagement
Here’s the thing — your readers will find hundreds of thousands of blogs that publish similar content to you.
You have to give them a compelling reason to choose your blog.
Additionally, you must strive to become their go-to destination for all queries and problems related to your niche.
The idea is to increase your brand value and loyalty. This will help in ensuring that you’ll have a great and consistent following.
How can you achieve this level of engagement?
Apart from publishing valuable and useful content, you should make your readers feel valued.
An easy way of doing this is to respond to their comments and encouraging them to check out more posts on your blog.
Additionally, you should judiciously use internal linking to make your readers stay on your blog for longer.
Conclusion
Learning how to grow your blog is just as crucial as knowing how to write great content.
You can’t become a successful full-time blogger without outlining a concrete marketing strategy for your blog.
Start by enhancing your blog’s user experience and navigation. It’s also essential to follow SEO best practices to improve your blog’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
And that’s not all.
You must also build an active social media presence to create a strongly devoted community of readers.
It’s also essential to grow your mailing list using attractive lead magnets, pop-up forms, and notification bars.
Finally, you have to build a friendly rapport with other bloggers in your niche and leverage potential guest blogging opportunities to build your authority.
Do you have any questions on how to grow a blog? Share your questions in the comments section below and I’ll be happy to help. 😊
FAQ
- How can I make my blog grow faster?
To help your blog grow faster, you need to employ some of the best marketing practices such as:
1. Content Marketing – Write blog posts regularly and promote them.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Optimize for search engines to improve rankings in the SERPs.
3. Email Marketing – Build email lists and engage the subscribers to get consistent traffic.
4. Social Media Marketing – Share content related to your blog on social media regularly to get traffic.
5. Paid Promotions – Leverage paid ads to drive traffic to your blog from social media and search engines.
6. Influencer Marketing – Partner with prominent influencers in your niche to get traffic to your website. - How long does it take to grow a blog?
Growing a blog takes a lot of hardwork and consistent effort, especially if you want to grow its traffic through SEO. It easily takes 1 year before you can start seeing some solid growth in your traffic. The key is to keep posting helpful content regularly.
- Why do bloggers fail?
One of the main reasons why bloggers fail is that they fail to contribute to their blogs consistently. It takes a long time before you’ll start seeing returns of your efforts. Many bloggers fail to wait for this stage and give up before that.
Others aren’t able to monetize their blogs well and aren’t able to make decent money from them. As a result, they end up giving in.