Thousands of new websites and blogs are created every hour of the day. How is anyone going to see yours?
When you have worked long and hard to create the perfect blog to showcase your work, your writing or your worldview, you want as many eyes as possible on this masterpiece.
Since the early days of the web, developers and marketing professionals have fought fiercely to bring their content and business to new customers.
The majority of people in North America spend so much time online they should be sent to addiction rehab centers. But how can you get them to pay attention to you?
Guest Posting
In the business world we call this cross-promotion. Blog viewers want lots of content and they require a certain frequency of posting.
You can’t really post any less than once a week or people will stop coming to your site. Guest posts significantly increase your ability to post.
Guest posting doubles or triples the amount and quality of content available on your site, with little effort on your part. Guest posting allows you to create backlinks to your site, increasing your SEO value.
Having a popular and well-respected blogger from another site write content for your blog will give your work a new legitimacy.
Why not share your audience while creating a new community of loyal blog readers?
Create a Community
If your blog focuses on a specific topic, city, music genre or business philosophy, there may be other people writing on similar topics.
Build relationships with them.
The best way to make your blog stand out and to promote yourself at the same time is to start commenting on your favorite blogs.
Commenting on blogs allows people to see your point of view or maybe laugh at your jokes; then they will follow the link to your blog.
Give it Away Now
Many successful bloggers started out with tiny sites but took a gamble on increasing traffic to their site through contests and giveaways.
Everyone loves a free gift, and nothing drives readers to your site faster than a chance to win something. Find a local business to donate prizes or create an irresistible item or product that people want.
Then, offer anyone a chance to win the prize by subscribing to your site, following you on social media, commenting, or any other way you want to retain your audience.
Everyone wins when you offer something of value in addition to your great writing and interesting content.
Diversify Your Content
You are proud of your blog and the content you’ve created. Now show it off in other formats to attract whole new audiences.
If your blog is primarily text-based and full of interesting articles, now is the time to add video and audio content. It’s easy and inexpensive to record audio interviews with leaders in the field of your blog topic.
Video can be produced with just a phone these days, so you have no excuse not to make short videos and post them to YouTube or other video-sharing services like Vimeo.
Don’t try too hard to create a “viral video.” We never know which of our videos will suddenly become crazy popular.
All you can do is create content that is funny and informative and then send it out on every social media platform.
Send in tips to popular blogs encouraging them to feature your new content, and soon you will be exponentially increasing traffic to your blog.
Focus on photos
It can be incredibly difficult to constantly create content, write and edit it, film or record it, then upload everything. An easy way to increase the amount and quality of your blog content is to make a daily or weekly photo series.
Blog readers love to share the spotlight, so have them really interact with your site and send in photos. High-traffic blogs almost always focus on photos and pictures, GIFs and memes to engage viewers and bring even more people to the site.
Host an Event
Finally, you want to celebrate after all your hard work creating a popular blog. A great way to create loyalty with your audience is to host a fun meetup!
People love to meet and talk to the “man (or woman) behind the machine.” It gives your readers a sense of community and participation to meet with fellow blog enthusiasts.
Now you know what to do to make your blog a total success: host a great event, post colorful and engaging photos, explore new formats, offer contests with prizes, strong commenting and guest posting.
In no time you will have thousands of new and loyal blog readers. Then it’s time to monetize.
Image courtesy of xedos4 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Love the tips. One of the hardest things is to drop the notion that giving stuff away for free is not the right thing to do. Giving away free insights, tips and information is the best way to build your social following.
That’s a part of online marketing, Sandy! 😉
I think ‘give it away now’ is one of the best tips a new blogger can have on their blog. I just recently started my blog and introduced the Comment Money Pot, where I give the money pot to the first person that comments on my latest blog post. I increase the money pot by $1 every 5 posts and hope to someday have at at a few thousand dollars. The comment money pot not only gives back to my loyal readers, but also motivates me to consistently create quality content on my blog. I find this strategy works very well for me and can possibly work for others.
It’s actually not necessary to host an event as long as you start out your blog with a personal introduction and let people know who you are at the very beginning. Making your blog personable and interacting with people will allow you to achieve success much sooner as people love to connect with someone they know is real and not a just machine or an unknown person behind the machine.
That’s a great marketing idea, Denis.
I think relationships are very important in order to be successful online.
Thanks for your feedback and comment here, much appreciated! 🙂
I agree with you on these points, especially guest posting and giveaways. Both have helped me in the past. Thanks for sharing these tips.
Thanks a lot Tom, glad you enjoyed the post!
Great Pointers, i agree with all the points especially the idea of diversifying the content as now a day we have various publishing website dedicated to different format to publish our content like video, writing content, info graphics, image so we should try to add all these format in our post wherever it applicable and should use different platform to publish it.
Erik,
I enjoyed the article. I have been thinking of a few of the things you mentioned, but just haven’t put the thoughts into action. I am thinking of diversifying my content soon to reach a new audience.
Great to know that!
Thanks for your feedback, Cecil.