Blogging is a hobby for some people. For others, it is a source of income. Whichever it is, we bet you would like to grow your blog and make it successful. Like every other online business, you need to put in some effort to grow your blog. Still, with dedication and following the steps in this guide, you can grow a successful blog.
In this article, we will give you strategies to help you grow your blog, and how to make your target audience keep coming back to your blog.
Strategies To Grow Your Blog
There are different ways to grow your blog and make your posts go viral. We have compiled a list that will serve as a guide to growing your blogs with ease.
- Build a community
- Create social media stories
- Schedule your blog posts
- Have a unique blog design
- Be consistent
- Know your voice
- Invest in SEO
- Know your audience
- Know your niche
Image taken from Strikingly User
1. Build A Community
"A tree cannot build a forest," they say, so you need all the help you can get in growing your blogs. Your community or audience plays a vital role in growing your blogs. You can build a community by acknowledging and engaging your readers. Try holding a conversation with them. If you have a consistent reader, visit their blog and leave a comment. Create a welcoming environment for your audience. This draws people back to your own blog.
You can also build a community by working with other bloggers. Engage, leave helpful comments, and share their posts. This increases your chances of reaching a wider audience, and helps you grow your blog in the process. At Strikingly, we have built a community where our users share ideas and answer each other's questions.
2. Create Social Media Stories
Recently, Instagram and Facebook introduced reels and stories. That's an amazing way to tell people about what you do. With short social media reels and stories, you can showcase excerpts from your blog or share a video slide of the different amazing parts of it. This will help you grow your blog faster. Start by giving the audience a sneak peek of your blog content. If you're a fashion blogger, you can show the audience what styles of clothes you like and why. Or you can show them how to make that dress. This will make your audience eager to engage in your posts.
3. Schedule Your Blog Posts
Scheduling your blog posts will help you keep your blog fresh without active participation. These posts can be sent through your blog at different times of the day. This ensures that your readers don't miss out on your blog posts.
4. Have a Unique Blog Design
Your blog design is very important. A tardy or unappealing design can repel your audience. No matter the content of your blog posts, ensure that you have a unique blog design. This is the first thing that draws readers' attention to your website, so it can affect the speed with which you grow your blog. The Strikingly website builder has beautiful, engaging and mobile-friendly website designs you can explore. You can equally pick any and tweak as you like. The end goal is that your site audience finds your blog design appealing and easy to navigate.
5. Be Consistent
Like they say, "Consistency is key." You need to be consistent to stay relevant. Your blog posts should be up to date. Apart from making your blog look professional, it makes the audience know you're organized and updated. At Strikingly we make blog posts every single day of the week, on a variety of topics ranging from web design to business and marketing strategies. Check out our blog here.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
6. Know Your Voice
People will engage more in friendly, conversational, and relatable posts. How do you want the audience to feel? Do you want them to feel like they're in a hot-seat interview or having a friendly conversation? It's all up to you. The tone you use in your blog posts will help grow your blogs. It will be hard to grow your blog if you make the audience feel like they're being interviewed.
7. Invest In SEO
Websites' SEO ranking is now judged by mobile friendliness. To grow your blogs, you must ensure your website is as responsive as it is keyword-rich. Proper search engine optimization will ensure that your content ranks higher in searches. This will help readers to find your content easily. Include keywords in your title. You can link your posts to other relevant and top-ranking posts or pages. If you build your blog with Strikingly, you can rest assured that your website is automatically mobile-friendly. We pre-designed all our templates to be able to function optimally on any device. This helps you save money, since you don't have to build different websites for different devices. It also endears your customer to you.
8. Know Your Audience
Your audience plays a significant role in growing your blogs. You need to know what your readers like, their interests, and what they don't like. Knowing who your audience is will help you tailor your content to meet their needs. You can do this by checking out engagements on your old blog posts - which topic had more engagements and leverage on it. Check your site analytics to confirm this. The Strikingly website builder lets you integrate Google website analytics into your website. That way, you can keep abreast of your target audience's preferences.
To know your audience better, you need to know their demographics, and age. This information will help you determine what content to offer, when to post, and what your readers want.
9. Know Your Niche
This entails your area of expertise. It could be something you're most passionate about or something that is trending. Your niche could be fashion, arts and humanities, health, etc. This will help you narrow down your content to relevant topics in your particular niche. Writing about everything might be a turn-off for your readers.
How To Drive Targets To Your Blog
It's one thing to know how to grow your blog, it's another thing to consistently grow your blog by making your audience keep coming back.
With these tips and good knowledge of your business and target audience, you can create customized strategies to grow your blogs. They are a surefire way to keep your audience coming back to your blog. By applying them, you can grow your blog traffic and make more revenue from it.
- Make Navigating Your Website Easy
- Create value through your contents
- Use an email list
- Use internal links
- Optimize post engagements
Make Navigating Your Website Easy
Your website should be easy to navigate through. No one wants to be on a website where it's hard to find what they're looking for. Put yourself in the reader's shoes and ask yourself questions like, "Would I understand my website?", "Would I love to keep visiting my website?" These will help you understand the need for an easy-to-use website.
For clarity, get extra pairs of eyes to check through your website and give you feedback from time to time. Also, ask your audience for their feedback. Customer feedback is one surefire way to grow a blog.
Image taken from Strikingly User
- Create Value Through Your Contents
The purpose of reading is not just to read but to learn more. Your blog posts should give value to your audience. Your audience should be learning from your posts. This keeps your audience engaged and excited not just to stick around, but to keep coming back. You can create interesting content with these few steps:
1. Storytelling
Everyone loves a story. Storytelling is a great instrument to make your audience keep coming back. It can be a short story about your day or an exciting story that relates to your niche.
2. Short Paragraphs
Make sure you use short paragraphs. Long paragraphs might bore the reader. Short paragraphs make it easier for a reader to scan through your post.
3. Simple, Everyday Language
Avoid the use of jargon. Use words and sentences that are simple and easy to understand. No reader wants to be checking the dictionary after reading every sentence on a post.
4. Use Keywords
Use specific long-tail keywords that interest your reader. Keywords are words that a reader searches. Your keywords should be specific and target oriented. It should target a specific group of people searching for a particular subject. Tools like Ahrefs and AnswerthePublic can help you discover what people are searching for online and how your keywords are used.
Keywords help your contents rank on search engines. Include your keywords with other relevant and commonly used words in your posts. Avoid too many keywords, as this might affect the user experience.
5. Use Internal Links
Include a reasonable number of internal links in your post. This helps boost your SEO and encourages your readers to explore your blog and website. These links should lead them to open another tab so they can still access the original post.
6. Optimize Post Engagements
You can optimize your blog post engagements by:
- Offering share options
- Engaging in comments
- Using Call To Actions (CTAs)
Offering Share Benefits and Rewards
This is one of the best ways of gaining more visitors to your website and growing your blogs. Offering share options and benefits for your blog posts makes it easier for readers to share them. It does not have to be continuous. You can create periodic reward programs. This helps get your post to a broader audience. Encourage your readers and subscribers to share your posts. Read more about customer rewards in this Strikingly blog post.
Engaging In Comments
Comments are like feedback and reviews. Encourage your readers to leave a comment and make sure you engage in their comments. This also makes your readers feel seen and important. The live chat feature is another way to engage with your readers. By talking with them in real time, you give them the impression that you are always available to listen to them. This will encourage them to engage more with your posts.
Image taken from Strikingly Product
Using Call To Actions (CTAs)
Call to Actions ensures that readers engage more on your posts. One call to action is enough for a post. A simple call to action like "Share your thoughts in the comments" is enough to give the readers the feeling that you care about their opinions.
7. Create An Email List
One of the ways to make your audience keep coming back to your blog is to create an email list. Encourage your readers to subscribe to your email, and ensure you send a welcome email to your new subscribers. You can use email providers to send out emails to your readers whenever you feel like. If your readers have a problem, your email should offer solutions to their problems. You can also offer freebies to your readers via your email messages.
Now, you know the different strategies to grow your blogs and how to get the audience to keep coming back. Go ahead and build and grow your blog. Create a responsive blog site with the Strikingly website builder. See some of our amazing templates.
