Curating a blog is exciting. You produce content that you feel people worldwide will love, and you watch as people engage with it across the internet.
But there’s a problem that many bloggers hit in their first months or even years of activity: they simply struggle to build an blog audience. Given that there are millions of of blogs out there, it’s difficult for yours to be found in the noise, which means your brilliant content goes unseen by most web users.
In this guide, we’ll look at how you can gradually build a larger blog audience for your fantastic blog.
Social Media
Your first followers, readers, and fans will always come from your personal network. It’s here that friends and family will be most excited to keep up to date with what you’re thinking and doing. And if they find a post of yours particularly interesting, they’ll share it with the world – giving you more exposure to their friends in their personal networks.
Therefore, the tip here is to make sure your blog is linked well to all of your social media pages. Each follower could be your route to a new audience, so keep sharing your posts online to build your chance of expanding your reach beyond your friends and family.
Themes
The theme of your blog will be important in deciding which strategy you’ll employ to build your audience. Here’s an example: if you’re writing about travel, you’ll find that those most likely to read your posts are people who may be planning on going to the countries or regions you’re wiring about and photographing. These people will be typing that place name into Google, as well as phrases such as “what to do in” and “how to travel in”.
This is your chance to expand your audience via keywords. Whatever your theme, think about what you’d type into Google to find information relevant to your blog. Then, go through your blog and make small edits so that you’re including these keywords in your writing. Google is a brilliant source of traffic if you use keywords wisely.
Links
People journey across the internet via hyperlinks. The average web user is incredibly used to navigating via these handy little underlined sections of text and often finds just what they were looking for after opening a new tab via a hyperlink. There’s no reason why that hyperlink shouldn’t be to your blog and your excellent content.
Of course, building these links is another story. It’s difficult to encourage people to link to your blog independently. Instead, it’s wiser to pay a firm to help you build links across the internet – a company like Linkflow.ai will help you do this. With these links established, you’ll have yet more on-ramps for people to find and enjoy your blog.
Emails
When you send out a new blog post, you want there to be a little fanfare for your blog audience. You can’t count on people to check your blog regularly in case you’ve published a new post – they’re simply too busy to think about dropping off on your blog to see if anything’s happened lately. So sending a quick email to them to show you’ve got new content live on your blog is the best way of getting traffic to return to your site.
This is a relatively simple procedure. As people arrive on your blog, give them an option to sign up to a newsletter. Make sure to mention that you’ll simply update them when there’s a new post – you’ll not spam them with dozens of irrelevant emails. Deliver this subscribe message in a quick pop-up whenever someone scrolls down on one of your posts to ensure that you’re most likely to gain traction with this segment of your blog audience.
Paid Promotion
If you’re keen to see your clicks and traffic grow further, there are dozens of paid promotion options for you to choose from. All of these have their upsides and downsides, and some of them will be more appropriate for your blog type than others. Briefly, you should consider:
- Paid promotion options on social media, which will boost your posts and help you target certain types of demographics you feel are relevant to your blog
- Featured adverts on Google, which will place your blog high up on search results
- Paying a third party or website to feature your blog in their own articles so that their audience is shared with you
- Paying an SEO company to take care of all of the search engine optimization methods that’ll boost your blog in Google’s search results pages
All of the above depends on the kind of budget that you’re working with. If you have a little advertising on your blog, you may be able to reinvest the cash you make to build a larger blog audience. Or, if you’re simply writing your blog for the enjoyment of it, you could invest a little of your personal cash to see if your blog takes off with the help of paid promotion.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
Relationship Building
Many blogs have plenty in common with other websites and bloggers out there on the internet. There’s a healthy mutual fandom in the blogosphere, with millions of regular bloggers admiring another’s output and recommending their posts to their own readers. This is one of the mechanics that drives traffic, especially seeing as a recommendation from a blogger we already trust is likely to endear us to a newly recommended blog.
And you can do something to encourage these links and introductions by sending emails to bloggers who occupy a similar niche to your own. Linking to their blogs in your own articles will help build these relationships too. You’re setting out to establish a reputation of your own within the wider community, which you can use as a hop-off point to build more of a following and gather more readers and followers over time.
Getting your blog read by more people feels like a constant uphill battle at times, but it needn’t be this way. With smart strategies and a little investment for audience building, you can watch your traffic numbers shoot up in the months and years ahead.
