How to Grow Your Online Blog

When you publish your first post, you might expect for comments to start flooding in from readers, but the reality is that once you’ve published a post, it probably won’t be found unless you share it.

Nowadays, social media platforms are absolutely integral for blogging. People tend to spend a lot of time scrolling through the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, so be sure to utilise these tools and post your content to these platforms.

You can post to all of these platforms, or really focus on one to build up an engaged following. Consider what you’re posting when you make this decision – for example, if you have some excellent photography to accompany your blog post, then choose an image-led platform like Instagram.

If your blog is more targeted to a professional audience, then choose a platform like LinkedIn. Here are some examples of how 5 individuals leverage their personal LinkedIn profile and make a living with their content.

Engage

Remember that it is important to engage with your audience on social media too – don’t just drop your blog post link and disappear for a week! Reshare or comment on other people’s work and you’ll soon find yourself with a community of supportive bloggers.

Quality content is the key to success – not only does it make more engaging reading for your audience, but it pays off for gaining better search engine rankings too.

Make sure your blog posts are proofread and edited for spelling, grammar and comprehension. It is also crucial that the images you pick are good quality, as this can help to draw in readers.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is absolutely crucial for a successful blog. All posts made should be optimised, using appropriate keywords, headings and structure, as well as title tags and metadata to help improve the rankings of your blog on Google.

SEO can be tricky to get your head around at first, but there is a lot of guidance out there online, and once you’ve got the hang of the basics, it will become second nature in your blog post writing.

Weirdly, one of the best ways to grow your blog is to post on someone else’s! Guest blogging involves writing content for another person’s site that is linked back to your website. This helps to improve your domain authority, which is a measure used to indicate how well your site performs in search results.

By blogging on other people’s sites about topics relating to your blog, you are making yourself more of an authority in that area.

If you are writing a blog post or sharing an image on social media that features or mentions a person or brand, then you should tag them in your post. This is especially the case for when you share the post on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

By tagging the person or brand in the post, they will be able to see it and could potentially reshare the post to their audience, thus increasing the number of views!

If you can’t see what is or isn’t working on your blog, then you can’t make improvements. By using Google Analytics to track the progress of your blog, you can see some very interesting data that can help you develop your site.

For example, if you see that most of your traffic is coming through from Pinterest and you don’t get any link clicks from Twitter, then it would be best to spend more time on Pinterest and less focused on Twitter, as it is clear which platform is working better for your content.

Similarly, if you notice that the bounce rate on your blog post is particularly high, or the time spent on each page is very low, you might need to make some changes to your blog’s appearance to make it more appealing to readers.