Thanks to the internet era, many people are attracted to make money online.
It’s pretty easy to start a blog, but getting it noticed and having regular traffic is the most difficult part.
You need to go beyond the basic plans to reach success. Here are some suggestions you should follow.
RSS Feeds Optimization
RSS feeds are among the things you should optimize to improve the chances your readers will become loyal fans of your blog.
While WordPress comes with automatic feeds, you may want to use services like Google Feedburner to give your visitors more ways to read your content. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.
Part of a good RSS Optimization practice is also connecting your feeds to your social media pages, so to automatically publish your blog updates.
Join Targeted Blog Communities
Once you know the potential audience you want to target, you need to find them and start engaging, so they may reciprocate and visit your blog.
Google’s DoubleClick forum may be useful in this situation: search by your keywords, visit relevant sites and then look at the content. You can now read, share and comment to build new connections.
Joining sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers is also effective as well, because when you answer a question which is relevant to the topics you blog, you can drop a link to one of your posts to explain it further (be sure to not spam).
Other blogging communities you should join to share your content and engage with other people are:
- Inbound.org
- GrowthHackers
- BizSugar
- Klinkk
Validating Your Site
It is one of the first steps you must take to improve your site reputation. You can use online tools like W3C (which is one of the most reputable markup validation services).
Be sure to validate your site, following these criteria:
- HTML/XHTML
- Accessibility
- Multiple Devices
- CSS
- Dead links
Images and Illustrations
When creating new content, using images and videos is another effective way to attract reader’s attention.
Share relevant media that matches your blog topics. Remember to optimize photos and videos, by adding ALT tags and description.
Don’t Just Use Obvious Social Media
A great majority of bloggers use Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but here are some others social media sites you want to test:
- Tumblr
- Tsu
- Ello
Depending on your site topics, you can pick relevant social media groups or communities and start engaging with members. These social channels may also help you develop new content ideas for your blog posts.
Once you establish a relationship with people they may follow you and start reading your site.
Your Site Look and Performance
One of the things you need to take into account when working on your blog is building a clean and tidy web design.
Site Speed is a vital factor, as Google takes into consideration the loading time of web pages to rank the web. Also, think about your visitor experience, as the average internet user does not want to wait more than a few seconds for a site to load. If your blog is too slow, this will impact not only your search engines rankings, but also will reduce your chances to get new readers.
Another thing to take into account is that your content must be visible straight away. This means that it must be seen at first (above the fold), when a visitor land on your blog. More than 80% of users do not scroll down, so if they can see at glance the content they may carry on reading.
Tracking and Measuring Your Site
You need to measure your results if you want to improve your site. Here are a few ways to do so:
- Google Analytics – If you haven’t already – create an account. Grab your tracking code and add it to your site. You can now check your traffic, by analyzing the data and set goals for conversions.
- Browser tests – check that your site design and photos have the same quality on all browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer etc.
These are just some of the good practices you should follow to grow your blog and gain new readers.
I’m sure you have your tips to add here, so why don’t you share them with us?
Please do that, by leaving a comment in the form below, thanks!
