From a range of activities that people of all ages enjoy nowadays, blogging is one of the most popular ones. Bloggers all over the world are working for two main reasons: they either want a platform to express their views so that everyone could read it or they want to increase traffic so they can earn money through their blog. Whatever the reason behind blogging is, you would definitely want people to read what you post or else all the content is wasted. It is for this reason why bloggers work so hard to attract traffic to their blogs.
As a beginner, you may just have designed your own blog using WordPress or similar CMS but are confused on how to expand it further. Designing a blog and posting some content is not enough but you have to get people to read what is being posted. This is essential if you wish to earn some money through your blog because agencies will only post ads in your blog if enough people are visiting your blog and reading it. There are a number of strategies that you can practice to boost the readership of your blog.
A smart combination of these strategies can help you achieve traffic goal faster. If your aim is to earn some money through your blog, it is imperative to invest some amount because you will eventually get the return. However, you may even consider investing some amount if your aim is to just reach as many people as possible. Following are some tips for you as a beginner to boost readership and attract traffic to your blog:
- Frequent blog posts: The most basic and important tip is to keep posting content on your blog regularly. Inactivity will automatically reduce your audience as current readers would not be able to find any new content when they visit the next time. As a beginner, you may decide not to pay writers for blog posts but write some by yourself every day. However, posting content more frequently does not mean that you post any random content. Make sure the content is attractive and fun to read or should be useful to the readers in some way.
- Attractiveness of the blog posts: A blog full of boring and useless content will never be able to attract much traffic because readers would know that your blog never posts anything interesting. In order to make your posts interesting and attractive, make sure the style of writing is catchy. You must use phrases in a way that adds humor to the blog posts. Come up with topics that may seem useful or interesting to the readers which means that heading is an important part of the blog post. In between the content, use visual demonstrations and infographics as well so the content does not seems dry. Visual content can keep the readers engaged and hence prevent traffic from decreasing.
- Promoting content through social media: Just posting content is not sufficient in the long run because readers would not be aware of your blog. Therefore, you need to advertise about the blog and make people aware of it so that they can visit and read the published content. One of the most useful platforms for this promotion is social media because there are millions of people all around the world who you can reach. Create your own Facebook page and share it on various platforms to get followers. Then keep sharing the content from your blog directly to that page and to your personal account to increase readership. Make sure you add social media promotion plugins to your blog.
- SEO marketing: Social media promotion might be sufficient if you do not want to target a huge global market as your aim is just to reach a few people who can read your thoughts. However, in order to attract a huge traffic, you need to do much more for marketing and search engine optimization is a necessary step. Through search engine optimization, your blog will be listed in the top search results of search engines when specific keywords are entered.
SEO requires some skills so you may need to pay SEO experts to do the job for you. This is a safe investment because eventually you will start earning money through the blog when sufficient traffic is attracted to the blog. Your job would be to incorporate specific keywords in your content to make SEO efficient.
- Option to comment and share: With each blog post, make sure you allow readers to comment and share the post. This is because readers feel important if they are able to express how they feel about the content. Use the necessary plugins while designing the blog using WordPress or any other CMS to add a social media share button after each postand to activate comments. A lot of readers end up sharing what they read only if they like it so this would lead to a great promotion of your blog which means more traffic would be attracted.
- Target the right audience: An important tip to keep in mind is that you should target the right audience during your promotion because targeting old people when your blog is about, say, rights of youth or technology is useless. Plan your promotional strategy in a way that you incorporate the audience to target. If you target the audience correctly, readership will get boosted by a significant amount.
- Make the blog fast and compatible with mobiles: Readers will usually get to your website via search engines and there are several other similar websites apart from just yours. If your website takes very long to load, readers will simply switch to another website from the search results which you must prevent from happening. So keep track of your blog speed and make it faster. Also, a lot of people now read blogs while on their way to work or while traveling. They therefore access blogs on mobile phones so if your blog is not compatible with mobile, you are losing your readers anyway!
With these guides, you should be able to boost the readership of your blog. Use a combination of these strategies wisely and you will have enough traffic on your blog to be able to post ads on it and earn money.
Author bio: Phoebe Wilson is a marketing expert in a pharmaceutical firm in Boston at Done Dissertation. She studied business administration and marketing in graduate school and holds immense corporate experience.