Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Building your blog audience can be difficult if you don’t have the right guidance.
It’s all too common for entrepreneurs to write on a topic about which they are very passionate, and not see any measurable increase in their readership.
Everyone has been there, don’t worry!
There are about 4.80 billion internet users and 77% of them read blogs. You might be thinking now: “If there are so many out there, how am I reaching so few of them!” Well, maybe that’s the problem. A large part of a blog’s success is selecting an audience whose needs you can cater to.
That’s why we’ve covered 10 tricks to help you build your blog audience and increase your traffic – from scratch!
Let’s dive right in!
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1. Identify Your Target Audience
The first step to building your blog audience is to know the kind of people you are hoping to address with your writing. In most cases, these are potential customers or those who are interested in your business niche.
To better understand your target audience, you research customer behavior on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Instagram, etc. On these sites, you will find discussions, inquiries, concerns, and problems that people voice about your niche.
By becoming familiar with the people who are invested in your niche, you will gain a greater understanding of the needs and wants of your target audience.
Gathering and analyzing this type of information is very useful, as it describes the kind of content your audience is interested in. With this knowledge at hand, you’ll be able to determine how to provide value for your audience.
2. Have A Good Blog Design
It’s a shame to write a valuable blog post, only to find that your bounce rate is high due to a poor user experience.
To avoid this, make sure that your blog design is professional and aesthetically pleasing: choose a simple color scheme, don’t go overboard with font styles (2-3 are usually recommended), and most of all, stay focused:
Like your writing, your blog should be goal-oriented. Among other things, this involves establishing a visual hierarchy, which directs viewers’ attention to the most significant parts of your blog page, such as a Call to Action (CTA).
To further optimize the user experience of your blog, your business should have effective customer service that allows your audience to quickly ask questions after having read your blog. Who knows, they might already be ready to convert.
Remember, a bad user experience prevents your business from building a loyal audience.
So it’s a must that you provide your customers with a blog design that gives them a good first impression and compels them to read your content. By doing this, your business can make its traffic stick and grow its audience.
3. Leverage Social Media
It would be a total shame if you create a blog post that delights your audience to the point that they are willing to share it, but they just can’t.
That’s where you come in and facilitate the sharing process. Add social sharing plugins such as sharing buttons on your blog for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
But where should you put the social sharing plugins?
Always ensure they are visible by using scrolling social buttons, those that stay on the side of your blog even when your readers are scrolling down the page.
In addition to having your audience share your blog posts, you should also do the same. Identify the social platforms that have a dedicated community and share your blog posts there.
For instance, if your blog is focused on photography, you should use Pinterest or Instagram as both platforms have a big fan base interested in photography.
It depends on your niche and what platform you need to use, but some common ones are Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Quora, and Twitter.
Just make sure to promote your content through the appropriate social platforms, and the reach of your business will extend. A bigger reach means more traffic and only with more traffic can your business grow its audience.
4. Update & Improve Old Blogs
Google loves new content. I mean I don’t blame it, if I had to choose between freshly baked bread and stale bread, I would choose the fresh bread every single time!
Fortunately, you can simply update and improve our old blogs. By doing this you can bring back the freshness to our old blog posts and make them relevant again in the Google search engine.
It’s also much easier than creating new content, so there’s no excuse! All of the following indicate to Google that your content is fresh:
- Removing irrelevant backlinks
- Adding high authoritative backlinks
- Including images
- Removing outdated statistics
- Optimizing keywords
- Fixing any bugs
Finally, treat your refreshed content like your new content and promote it! And just like that, an old blog post that was generating none too little traffic will start to produce more.
5. Build Your Email List
Gathering the email addresses of your potential customers is crucial when it comes to retaining your audience as well as generating new traffic. The most traditional method is to simply add a subscription bar to your website.
However, you can receive more emails from your audience if you make it compelling for them.
You can do this by offering them a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something of value that you offer prospects in return for their contact information. The options are varied: it can be an eBook, video, spreadsheet, etc.
But how do you use your email list effectively?
Thankfully there are email marketing services that can help you create email campaigns to generate leads and guide them towards sales.
Using these tools you will also have access to data analytics and reporting, so you can find out exactly at what stages people drop off and what seems to be working.
6. Guest Blogging
Writing blog posts for other websites within your niche is a good way to improve your social presence. It allows your business to reach new people who are not your regular readers but who are interested in your content.
But remember you must leverage this opportunity to the fullest! Ideally, you want to gain new traffic and increase your brand awareness.
To do this, make sure that you choose a website with high domain authority. Once you have chosen a proper host, you should write a guest post that is engaging and filled with value.
After all, only by writing great content will you leave a good impression on your host’s audience and attract them to your blog.
Now, to obtain the opportunity to guest blog you can contact the website yourself. Or you could use a blogger outreach network that helps blog owners connect with guest bloggers.
7. Use Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks that refer to a page on an external website. It is important to reference the website whose work they are using, for example, if they are using statistics or if they want to provide more information about a certain topic.
Your blog posts must be getting referred to by other external websites. If other websites are backlinking your content, then Google will rank your blog much higher on the search engine result page (SERP).
But how do you get quality backlinks?
To get referred by an external website your business should write blog posts that are link-worthy which means that your content is valuable enough to be worth sharing with others.
By having a decent amount of external websites backlinking your blog posts, your website will receive higher domain authority. Simultaneously, your blog’s traffic will increase organically, and your audience will grow.
8. Make Your Blog Load Fast
We are not in the early 2000s anymore, it is not normal to wait for a website to load. Nowadays if your blog doesn’t load in less than 5 seconds, you’ve lost many potential customers.
If your blog is not fast enough it will rank poorly on the search engine result page (SERP), so decreasing the loading time of your blog is a must if you want to reach more people in your niche.
There are many ways to speed up your loading time, but the most common ones are the following:
- Compress Images
- Remove unnecessary gadgets
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Limit the number of posts on your homepage
- Remove unnecessary plugins
- Use a reliable web host
9. Optimize Your Keywords
For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, your blog must use relevant and effective keywords in its writing.
Before you even start writing, you should have a list of keywords that are relevant to your blog post.
But how to find keywords for SEO?
Lucky for us, there are plenty of reliable websites that provide users with tools to find relevant keywords for SEO. The more research you do for relevant keywords the better you become at identifying keywords that would work well with your blog posts.
After understanding how to find relevant keywords, implement them as you write, but make sure that it happens naturally, you don’t want to force it because then you can get writer’s block and waste your time.
Practice and harness the skill of choosing SEO-friendly keywords for your niche, so that sooner or later you can find an increase in your traffic and grow your blog’s audience as a result of it.
10. Network With Other Bloggers
You can reach out to bloggers and build a reciprocal relationship with them. After all, you have to give something to receive something.
Just shoot them a sincere and pleasant email that shows your eagerness to grow alongside them. Show them your willingness to learn and help, and they’ll likely want to work with you.
Some benefits of networking are:
- Better understanding of your niche.
- Sharing tips.
- Social sharing of each other’s blog posts.
- Motivation for both parties.
- Better work ethic.
- Commenting on each other’s blog posts.
- Backlinking each other’s website pages.
Plus, it’s always nice to be surrounded by like-minded people!
You will be able to discuss the specific topics that are of concern only to your niche. Through these discussions, you will gain a better judgment on how to improve every aspect of your blog so that you can attract people and grow your audience.
11. Choose The Right Topics
Speaking of topics, finding the right blog post idea is another contributing factor when it comes to gaining organic traffic.
With the right topic, you’ll attract the right people. And those people can then go on to share your post with family, friends, and colleagues who might find your article interesting.
In short:
The right topic can lead to earned traffic.
Blogging Wizard knows how to choose its topics. It’s geared toward bloggers who want to grow their audience. So it produced an article that lists down on-page SEO tools they can use to improve their chances of ranking on search results.
So how do you find the right topics for your blog?
You can start by performing keyword research. For those unfamiliar with the concept, you’re going to look for words and phrases that users type in the search bar the most. The idea is for you to generate topics based on as many well-performing keywords as you can find.
These keywords have to be relevant to your niche.
Bloggers will sometimes go with trends and current events. While these posts typically perform well, there’s a risk that you’re publishing content that won’t be relevant for too long. So use your best judgment.
There are times when your audience will be the ones to tell you which topics you should explore. Listen to them. If they bring up good ideas, explore those options.
And as previously pointed out, you can look at your competitors to find blog post ideas. Go see what their readers like.
12. Writing Engaging Content
Posting engaging blog posts is great for new and old users alike. Anyone finding your posts for the first time will be incentivized to explore some of your other posts. And old fans of your work will have more reasons to return.
Erik Emanuelli’s content marketing hacks posts use annotated images, headers, and short paragraphs to make it easier for his audience to read his post.
So how do you write engaging content?
Your posts should have a good structure. They should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Paragraphs should be short to make reading more convenient for mobile users.
Make sure that you’re adding value for readers. Sometimes, it’s best to be direct to the point depending on what type of post you’re publishing. Include the right amount of images to break long sections of text and insert some context.
If you have data to show, make it presentable. Infographics are great for situations like this. But if you don’t have the resources for it, you can use graphs or bullet points to make the information digestible for readers.
And don’t forget to show your personality. Don’t write like a robot, so to speak. Talk to your readers the same way you would a friend. How much personality to show is entirely up to you. Some bloggers still exercise restraint so they don’t accidentally alienate other readers.
13. Optimize For Search Engines
Optimizing posts for search engines is very important, especially if you want organic traffic. Ranking for as many relevant search terms will bring in more people to your site without paying for advertising.
There are other benefits to using SEO aside from increased visibility on Google.
You can use it to narrow down your audience to make sure you’re reaching the right people. You also create a better user experience by implementing SEO best practices.
When a blog site gets optimized, there’s a good chance that it starts outranking its competitors.
Every website takes SEO seriously. Take Ready Set Italy’s post about the country’s legal drinking age as an example.
One of its pages ranks for over 100 keywords. That’s one of the reasons why it’s attracting hundreds of organic visitors every month.
If you want to achieve the same results, do some keyword research. See what words or phrases you need to include in your posts so they appear on more search results.
Getting backlinks from high-authority sites should also be a priority. There are link-building tactics like guest posting that can help with that.
You want to make your site responsive for mobile users. Google ranks mobile-optimized sites higher because it improves their users’ experience.
These are just some of the things you can do to get organic traffic.
Conclusion
Follow this beginner-friendly guide on how to build your blog’s audience and you will see your site traffic increase.
Applying any of the 10 tips that we’ve been over will improve your Google ranking and as a result, make your blog appear to more people.
But remember, your main goal as a blogger is to provide value and if you fail to do this then any kind of exposure will not help you.
Keep focusing on your craft and use these traffic-boosting tips to create the blog that you desire.
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