How to Grow your Blog

One of the most frequent questions I get from readers looking for advice on their own blogs has something to do with growing their blog. Whether you’re looking for more comments, more page views, or more subscribers, you are looking to draw more attention to your blog by engaging your current audience and expanding your audience. Now, let me be completely honest with you and say that this is a process that does not happen overnight. It normally takes a long time to do this and in my personal experience, you as the blog author need to be very hands on in this process or it will take even more time. I believe the consensus is from the blogging community and professionals that it should take you a year of solid attention to grow your blog to a decent following if you do a few key things regularly. So, I am going to give you some tips of some things you need to do in order to grow your blog, some you may do, some you may not do, but all of them are very important and require your sincere attention in order to work.

1. Post regularly: I am not sure where I heard this, but I was told that in order for Google to consider your blog an active, regular site that it will include regularly in search results, you need to post three times a week. This is why I upped my posting schedule from two times a week to three in the last year. Not only is regular posting good for your blog’s SEO {search engine optimization, which I will not be discussing in this series, but you can definitely research the subject online for more info} but it is also a very important part of developing a regular schedule to draw in viewers. You may get people coming to your site, but unless they see that you are posting regularly with interesting content, they won’t feel the need to return. Consistency is something I talk about a lot in blogging and it’s so important that you are consistently posting content for your readers!

2. Engage your readers: Like I mentioned earlier in this post, I am asked a lot about getting more comments. I know for some bloggers just starting out, the idea of getting lots of comments is a sign that your blog is doing well or at least moving in the right direction, but the truth of the matter is that with so many forms of social media communication out there, a comment on your blog isn’t the only or even best sign, of an engaged audience. Think about it, how often do you read a blog post and leave a comment? Most likely you read way more posts than the ones you comment on, even if you did like the post. So, how do you engage your readers without using comments? Well, social media is the answer for that. Make sure you are regularly tweeting out links to your posts, liking, retweeting, favoriting and just being completely active with your viewers. If someone online says something nice or shares a post or link to your blog, make sure you say thank you! Make sure your readers know you are alive and you can see what they are doing! This will reinforce the actions they have done and they are more likely to tweet you out to their followers or post your link to their Facebook or interact with you on Instagram! Okay, but what if you do want to see more comments? Well, the easy answer for that is make sure you are writing quality posts and asking your readers for their feedback. Have you noticed that I will usually leave some questions and prompts at the end of my blog posts asking for feedback? Yea, well before I did that, my comments section was pretty much nonexistent.

3. Reach out to other bloggers: The blogging community is so large and vast that it’s virtually impossible for you not to be able to find another blogger that you can relate to. I suggest reaching out to these bloggers and forging some social media friendships with them because it’s infinitely more helpful to have a friend who knows what you’re going through. For example, my blogging BFF is Kristen from My Life as a Teacup! We met in real life, but we mostly chat via Skype or our social media feeds and even through email because we live pretty far away from each other! I suggest connecting with a few bloggers online that you can relate to and even if they don’t become a BFF, they still add to the network of people you know online and that support can be immensely helpful. Now, just a quick common sense tip that I want to throw out there with this, is that you should probably find other bloggers who are in the same boat as you, as in they are also just starting out or have a small following. Not to say you couldn’t be friends with the worlds most popular blogger, but someone who runs a large blog may not respond directly to someone who is small and just starting out. I can only imagine the number of small time bloggers that message bigger bloggers on a regular basis asking for help or advice, so just try to stick with someone in your playing field because they are way more likely to want the relationship because it will also benefit them. Now, once you have a few blogger friends in your social media feed, don’t just stop there. Continue to reach out to new bloggers and grow your friendships and support system. Just like if you were networking for your blog or profession, you need to constantly (or should I say consistently) be talking to new people in the field of blogging!

Okay folks, that’s all! Keep doing those three things and you will find yourself with a pretty engaged audience and larger following in no time! Obviously with this, the more you do, the quicker you will grow, but it’s never an overnight thing, so plan to be spending a few months to a year on this before you see major changes!

Now for the comments section on this post, I would love if I could make some matches for blogging buddies so if you would like to meet some new bloggers (online of course) and would be open to be contacted, please leave a comment below with a link to your blog and let us know some ways we can get in touch with you like Twitter or IG (don’t leave a link to your email because that’s probably not a good idea)! I know I have a bunch of new and existing bloggers reading this series so don’t be shy, say hello and make a friend!