These tips are for people looking to grow their audience and their blogging web presence. If you read my post about going from 0 to 100,000 views in 30 days, you’ll see that the growth of my blog happened with a lot of hard work.
Here are 5 Tips to Grow Your Blog… FAST
1) Don’t write boring s**t (or at least keep it to a minimum)
You may not think it’s boring, but it probably is. Read over your content. If you weren’t you, would you find this interesting? funny? useful? inspirational? Does it evoke any type of emotional response, good or bad? If it doesn’t, it probably won’t get you a ton of views.
I write some articles that are boring too (some of my confessionals, some sponsored content, product reviews, etc) I keep those to a minimum. Very few “diary” type blogs or 100% “product review” blogs have a large, legitimate following. Some bloggers love their giveaway stalkers and statistically, they do count as a pageview, but you rarely see true engagement with them.
Blog for yourself but if you want grow your audience, blog for yourself with others in mind. Think “How can someone use or feel about this article?”
2) Don’t be afraid to piss people off.
(see point 1). I’m probably going to piss a lot of those blogs that write boring s**t. Sorry, Not sorry. Don’t care. This is my corner of the interwebs. I write what I want. I write how I feel. Not everyone will agree with me. That’s ok. Now YOU have to tell yourself that too.
If you have a strong opinion, don’t be afraid to put it out there. If you have a feeling it will illicit some strong responses, don’t check the comments section. At the slightest hint of a negative email or social media comment, ignore it or delete it. This is your blog. Don’t be afraid to be who you are.
In fact, the blog posts that get a strong opinion are often the ones most shared. Read the comments sections of this post if you don’t believe me (it’s the one that went viral). Unless you advocate kicking puppies or eating babies, there will be some people that share your opinion (and often times will stick up for you!).
3) Distribution with Social Media.
From experience, Facebook and Pinterest are the biggies. Here’s why. Facebook is still the granddaddy of social media, and when articles go viral on Facebook, you’ll know it. For a few blog posts, I allocated some of my adsense revenue to sponsor them, and got a good boost in followers in return. If I shared a blog post on my facebook page and it seemed to be popular, I may decide to throw a few dollars to sponsor it. I always made sure to choose my best articles to promote. With this method, The amount of organic reach vs paid reach was always higher in favor of organic. It’s just a little “boost” to get your amazing content out there to potential new followers.
Pinterest is an awesome archive for your content . Old blog posts get new life when optimized for pinterest. Use vertical photos, a catchy title, good keywords, and interesting images. Your blog posts will be viewed for years with Pinterest.
4) Longevity with SEO
Make keywords phrases your b****. JK not really. But sort of. Good SEO will bring you longlasting followers because these are the people that are actively searching for your content. Let’s say you want to write an article for a taco soup recipes. If you do a search on “taco soup recipe”, you’ll notice the top dogs of the foodie web: all recipes, foodnetwork, taste of home, etc on the first page.
So I would advise you NOT to name your article “Taco Soup recipe”. Instead, play with the words until you find a phrase that doesn’t have a lot of established web pages for the search phrase. For example, “How to do an easy, healthy taco soup recipe”. If you find Pinterest, forum pages, or Yahoo answer pages ranking in the top, then you’ve got a fighting chance with getting on that first page. Adjust your title tags, meta tags, url structure, and the keywords in your content and images accordingly.
5) Be the Answer to People’s Questions
This is an extension of the previous post. Think about what you google. Think about the questions that come up on your facebook pages or groups. If you see questions that keeping coming up, write the answer to that question.
For example, as a military spouse, I noticed people kept asking ideas for Military welcome home signs in my facebook groups. So I thought this would be a great blog post. Cut to 101+ Ideas for Military Welcome Home Signs, My 2nd most pinned image on Pinterest. My most pinned image is “What to Pack in Care Packages for Deployed Service Members”, an answer to another question. This was pinned 13,000 times!
You’ll notice if you become a great resource to people, they’ll keep coming back. Add in some personal stories, a couple of jokes, great content, hard work, and great social media skills, well… you’ve got the makings to be a blogging success.