Growing a blog in this day and age is no easy task. There is so much content online that getting noticed seems like an insurmountable task. But here are just a few approaches that will increase your chances.
Grow Social Presence
Much easier said than done. But with a big social presence you will have built a community of people that already enjoy the content you create. This means you already have a community that will enjoy your blog, and will be more likely to share it with others.
Now you see the value in social presence, but how do you build this. I'll be honest, this isn't going to be the article that is going to teach you. There is so much involved in this, and so many different ways to do it, but I hope to at least point you in the right direction.
For me there are 2 key points I focus on, and I believe are the core concepts behind my "success"
- Consistently putting out content
- Getting 1% better every time
Creating content is at the core of most social media growth. If you create content that people enjoy, they will follow along to see more of that content. But to achieve real growth you have to be consistent. Prove to your audience that if they follow you, they WILL see more of that content. Then every time you put out some content, it's like a lottery ticket with the algorithms and get a lot of views. Then if you put out content consistently it's like another ticket to the algorithm lottery.
You can also increase your odds with the lottery ticket. The better the content is, the higher your chances of winning the prize. It's difficult to go from poor quality to great quality instantaneously, but if you try to improve one aspect on every iteration, and you stay consistent, you will see huge improvements over time.
Write Great Blogs
We mentioned "creating content" to grow your social presence in the last section, and I purposely made that vague. Blogs definitely fall into that section. If you want to have a successful blog, growing your social presence through blogging content is probably the best approach.
Same rules apply as I mentioned above. Consistency and consistent improvement will bring you results. Here are just some of the aspects of your blog that you can/should improve as you write more.
- SEO
- Clickable titles
- Great supporting images
- Article structure
- Story-telling
There is a lot more to blogging than just these, but the deeper you go into the topic, the more you will discover, and the more you will learn about what you can improve. Just make sure to spend time learning about how to improve, and practicing that.
Cross-posting
This is the easiest step that you can take. Each platform has it's own algorithms, and will spread your content differently. By sharing it to all the platforms, you will increase the odds of your article to gain traction. It's like getting extra lottery tickets, for free. (not completely free as it takes some work, but a lot less work than writing a whole blog)
But there is one important thing to remember when doing this. It can destroy your SEO if you don't add a canonical URL to the blog. If google see's the same exact article posted in multiple places, it will rank it a lot lower in their search algorithm. There is a really easy fix for this, and that is adding a canonical URL to the articles. This URL will point to the "main" article. So choose your platform of choice and add the link to that article on all the cross-posted articles.
This can be a bit annoying and tedious to do for every article, but there is a handy tool at krossa.io that not only makes cross-posting easy, but has a beautiful UI for writing your blogs. On top of that each platform is slightly different, but using krossa you can be confident that it will look the same across all platforms.
Conclusion
There are obviously a lot more than just these 3 tips to grow your blog, but these are the ones that have had the biggest returns for me. I recommend you give them a shot and let me know how it goes for you and what your biggest struggles are on Twitter @tadaspetra