I’ve built a lot of blogs throughout my career. And the most difficult part about a blog isn’t the backend, the design, or even the content. The most difficult part is gaining and keeping readers. Even big brands have difficulty with this part of building a blog, but there are simple principles we can apply to blogging to help us grow our blogs.
If you’d like to skip all the reading and just see the four easy steps of growing your blog, you can view our blog growth infographic here.
1. Have a niche topic
It’s important to make sure that you’ve got a topic that you’re passionate about and hopefully know a lot about. The internet is saturated with people that aren’t passionate about topics / don’t know a lot about them, so don’t be another one of those. You can’t afford to be. You won’t get found and no one will want to listen. It will be a waste of your time.
If you’re passionate about something other than getting internet famous, you should pursue it. But there has to be a real interest or knowledge about something for it to be valuable to others. And creating value for others is what blogging is all about.
2. Don’t rush the content
This is a hard step to follow. Especially for me; I still need to try to get better at this. Most creators get pumped about what they’re working on and want to share it with the world ASAP. But I’d caution you to take a breather before posting. Go back over your content and make sure it’s your best.
This is a really important step but can be super hard to follow. Try making a sticky note for yourself to not hit the publish button right away. If you have a really hard time with this, just try spending a few more minutes on your next project. After that try spending a few more. You’ll probably notice that your content starts getting better and better.
3. Reach out!
This is easily the most important step. You need to network if your business (which a blog is) is going to be successful. Find other bloggers, vloggers, influencers, etc. that share similar interests. Think of ways to collaborate and benefit each other.
I can’t stress how vital reaching out to others is. In my early days of starting
4. Keep it consistent
Another very important step, keep posting. Consistency is one of the major keys of succeeding on the internet. So keep on going! If you need to, start putting blogging stuff in your calendar. Set a day to post and a day to create the content.
That does it for my list. These were just a few important things you should be doing as a blogger. Obviously there’s a lot more you should and could be doing, but I think these are some of the most important things.