Most bloggers hope to grow their readership and reach a larger audience. Unfortunately, most new bloggers don’t really know about the best ways to promote a blog, when they are just getting started. On the positive side, if you consistently work hard at promoting your blog, write quality, targetted content and always look after the readers you have, then you can build up a popular blog with many dedicated readers. Here are nine tips to help you do this.
1. It can take time to build up search engine traffic.
New blogs generally take several months to rise high enough up the search engine rankings to generate a significant amount of traffic. If you are blogging about a popular topic, for instance football, just think about how many other blogs and websites are discussing the same things, and how long they have been active. One of the priciple ways in which search engines rank sites is by the number of other sites that link up to them; a long established popular website will have many hundreds or thousands of links from other pages.
2. Not all traffic is the same.
No two sources of traffic are quite the same. A large proportion of the traffic coming to my blog finds it's way from social media websites, and in my experience visitors coming from these sites don't generally hang around long, and are less likely to get really involved with my site. If you focus on just the statistics showing visitor numbers, rather than length of stay and item usage, you might get the impression that your blog is more popular than it actually is. Take a look at my post Analyse Traffic With Stats Tools if you haven't already got a good statistics tool you use.
Search engine traffic is great because, as a rule, visitors from this source are actively looking for whats on your site. Visitors from similar blogs that come to you from a link are also good for the same reason.
3. Don't ignore smaller traffic sources
Not all sources of traffic will send multitudes of visitors flocking to your site, but that doesn’t mean that they are not all valuable. For example, participating in forums is likely to drive some traffic to your blog, but not tons. However, those visitors can be very valuable because they have met you or learned from you through the forum and they’ll be more likely to subscribe and become a loyal reader.
Similarly, leaving comments on other blogs will bring in some traffic, but it is rare that any one comment will bring visitors flocking to your site. This traffic is still very valuable because they are likely to click through to your site if they consider your comment to be valuable.
Don’t simply assume that traffic is measured only in terms of numbers. Smaller sources of traffic have been instrumental in building many successful blogs.
4. The importance of posting consistently.
Most bloggers need to keep publishing new posts in order to keep traffic at a certain level. Some bloggers are able to generate large amounts of search engine traffic to older posts to the point that traffic will be fairly sustained without new posts, but this is pretty rare. New posts keep subscribers coming back, keep social media votes coming in, and they keep adding new pages to search engine indexes.
This doesn't mean that you have to write a new post every sigle day, it just means that you need to publish content on regularly; as regularly as you can manage is best!
5. Maintaining consistent traffic levels is practically impossible
Although posting needs to be consistent to keep traffic levels high, that doesn’t mean that it will keep traffic levels consistent. Sometimes certain topics are hot, and you may see your traffic go up (or down) as a result. Don't worry about this, just stick to your guns and enjoy the rosy glow of satisfatcion you'll get on those days when your site usage is high!
6. Visitors are good, but repeat visitors ahould be your aim
It is of course very gratifying to see large numbers of unique visitors arriving at your blog, but how many of them will you see again? Repeat visitors are the lifeblood of blogs. Subscribers, of course, are most likely to keep coming back, so focusing on subscribers is generally a good plan.
Repeat visitors will not only help to improve your overall traffic flow and stats, more importantly they will be your most responsive visitors in terms of comments, social media votes, sales, and just about anything else. As they keep coming back and reading your blog, you will be earning more of their trust and your network will grow.
7. Links are very helpful for several reasons
Building inbound links is a priority for most bloggers, and with good reason. They drive click-through traffic from other blogs, they increase your exposure, and they help to boost your search engine rankings. Link building is often prioritized because of search engine rankings, but the other factors should not be overlooked. If you blog in a competitive niche, recognition and exposure will be critical in convincing visitors that they should pay attention to you. Getting a few links from respected blogs can help with search engine traffic, but the added credibility that you get can be just as important, especially for newer bloggers.
8. Why balance is important
Traffic diversity will help you to avoid losing a large number of visitors if something unforeseen happens. Search engine rankings are not permanent; if you rely too heavily on search engine traffic you could find yourself losing out if you cannot write for a while.
Similarly, you cannot rely for consistency on traffic coming in from social media sites. Try to remain diverse in the traffic sources you rely upon, and make sure you have enough links from other sites to keep traffic ticking over in the event that you can't write for a while.
9. Networking is critical
All successful bloggers are surrounded by a strong network of other successful bloggers. This is something that I didn’t really think much about before I started blogging, but I quickly came to realize the importance of networking.
A strong network will provide you with friends and colleagues that can be a help when you need some advice, they can provide links to your blog, they can give you social media votes, they can be an inspiration and encouragement to you, and they can even wind up being your partners in future projects. Being a strong networker is all about being willing to help others and being proactive in meeting others.
