Every blogger dreams of having a large, engaged audience who loves their content. But the truth is, growing a successful blog with thousands of devoted readers is really hard. It takes time, effort and knowing the right strategies to focus on.
In this comprehensive guide, I‘m going to walk you through absolutely everything you need to know to attract more readers to your blog and keep them coming back for more. I‘ve learned these techniques through growing my own blogs to hundreds of thousands of monthly readers. Now I‘m passing that knowledge on to you.
By the end of this post, you‘ll walk away with a clear, step-by-step action plan for how you‘re going to grow your blog to heights you never thought possible. Let‘s dive in!
Start By Serving a Well-Defined Target Audience Exceptionally Well
The biggest mistake I see bloggers make is trying to appeal to everyone. They write about a broad range of loosely connected topics hoping that casting a wide net will help them attract the biggest possible audience.
In reality, the opposite is true. When you speak to everyone, you end up resonating with no one.
The key to building a devoted audience is to define a specific target reader and niche down to focus on serving them exceptionally well. Really get to know your ideal reader – their goals, challenges, pain points, and desires. Then tailor your content and your entire blog to uniquely meet their needs better than anyone else.
For example, instead of blogging about "health" in general, niche down to focus on "plant-based recipes for busy moms." Instead of "personal finance," you could specialize in "getting out of debt on a low income."
With a narrowly defined niche and target reader, your content will resonate much more powerfully. You‘ll become the go-to resource in your specialty. It seems counterintuitive, but you‘ll actually be able to attract a larger audience by targeting a smaller niche.
Create Truly Valuable, Problem-Solving Content
With a clear target reader in mind, your next focus should be creating the best darn content for them that you possibly can. This is the foundation everything else rests on.
Your blog content needs provide immense value to your target audience. It should educate, inspire, entertain, and most importantly, help them solve problems and reach their goals.
Really put yourself in your ideal reader‘s shoes. What are they struggling with? How can you help them in a way no one else is? What burning pains can you solve for them? Focus relentlessly on serving your audience with practical, useful content.
This requires you to have deep subject matter expertise in your niche. You need to know more about your topic than the average person so you can share unique insights. Do your research, stay on top of trends, and draw from your own stories and experiences.
Your content also needs to be engaging and compelling. Write magnetic headlines, draw readers in with a strong hook, and keep them engaged with storytelling, examples, and a friendly, conversational writing style. Use short paragraphs, images, and formatting to make your posts easily readable and skimmable.
Optimize Your Content to Get Found In Search Engines
Creating great content is just the first step. In order for new readers to discover it, your posts need to rank well in Google and other search engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your content to rank higher in relevant search results. When someone searches for a topic you‘ve written about, you want your blog post to appear on the first page of results.
Some key on-page SEO techniques:
- Do keyword research to find the phrases your target audience is searching for
- Naturally include keywords in your post title, headers, meta description, URL and throughout the content
- Optimize your images with descriptive file names and alt text
- Link internally to other relevant posts on your site
- Use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs
- Improve page load speed and mobile-friendliness
Building high-quality backlinks from other sites to your blog posts is also important for SEO. When authoritative websites link to your content, it‘s a signal to Google that your post is valuable and worthy of ranking well.
Some effective link building strategies:
- Guest post on other blogs and sites in your niche
- Reach out to bloggers and influencers to collaborate, interview each other, or link to each other‘s content
- Create valuable resources like infographics, videos, or original research that naturally attract links
- Leverage broken link building by finding broken outbound links on relevant sites and suggesting your content as a replacement
Promote Your Content Like Crazy
The old adage "if you build it, they will come" definitely does not apply to blogging. Even with the best, most valuable content imaginable, you can‘t just publish your posts and wait for readers to show up. For every hour you spend writing, you need to spend another hour promoting.
Every blog post needs a promotion plan. How will you drive traffic to this post in the days, weeks and months after it publishes?
Some key content promotion strategies:
- Share on your social media profiles multiple times, with different headlines and images
- Email your post to your email list
- Submit your post to relevant content communities like Reddit, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, etc.
- Answer related questions on Quora and link back to your post
- Repurpose your post into different formats like infographics, videos, or slideshares
- Run Facebook ads or promoted pins to your post
- Publish a guest post on another blog and link back to your post
Treat every blog post like a product launch. Create buzz and actively work to get it in front of as many people in your target audience as possible. The more you promote, the more traffic you‘ll get.
Build Relationships With Other Bloggers In Your Niche
Relationships are so important for growing a blog audience. By connecting with other bloggers and influencers in your niche, you can expose your content to whole new audiences and benefit from cross-promotion.
Some ways to build relationships with other bloggers:
- Regularly read and comment on their blog posts
- Share their content on social media and tag them
- Offer to help promote their product launches or collaborate on a webinar or interview
- Guest post on their site or invite them to guest post on yours
- Help them out if they need feedback or advice on their own blogs
- Meet up with them in person at conferences if you can
- Link out to their blogs in your own posts and let them know
Building genuine friendships with other bloggers takes time, but it‘s one of the best investments you can make. Look for ways to add value to them, make friends, and promote each other.
Engage With Your Audience and Encourage Interaction
Getting readers to your blog is only the first step. You also need to engage with them and encourage them to keep interacting with your content. Responding to comments, questions and emails helps create a loyal community around your blog.
Some tips for increasing reader engagement:
- Ask questions at the end of your posts to spark discussion in the comments
- Respond to every comment readers leave
- Do giveaways or contests that require people to comment or share to enter
- Create a Facebook group for your blog and start discussions
- Do live Q&As on social media
- Survey your audience to learn what they want you to write about
- Give readers an easy way to submit questions or post ideas
When you engage with your audience, listen to them, and incorporate their feedback, you‘ll naturally write content that connects with them more deeply. An engaged readership is more likely to keep coming back, share your posts, buy your products and become true fans.
Use Email Marketing to Keep Readers Coming Back
Outside of search engine traffic, nothing is more valuable for a blog than an email list. By collecting readers‘ email addresses, you can stay in touch with them and keep bringing them back to your latest posts.
Some tips for growing your email list and using it effectively:
- Offer a valuable incentive like a free eBook or email course in exchange for subscribing
- Place opt-in forms in multiple prominent places on your blog like the header, sidebar, and end of posts
- Send an email to your list every time you publish a new post
- Set up an autoresponder series to automatically send new subscribers your best content
- Periodically send subscribers other valuable content and resources related to your niche
- Let subscribers reply to your emails and engage in conversations with you
An email list gives you a direct line of communication to your most devoted readers. Treat those subscribers well by continually providing value and building relationships with them.
Analyze Your Traffic and Keep Improving
Finally, growing a blog audience is an ongoing process of experimenting, analyzing the results, and continually improving. You need to look at your blog metrics to understand where your traffic is coming from, what content resonates with readers most, and where there are opportunities to do better.
Some key metrics to track:
- Page views
- Unique visitors
- Traffic sources (search engines, referral sites, social media, email, etc.)
- Most popular posts and pages
- Email subscriber growth rate
- Social media follower growth and engagement rates
- Pages per visit and bounce rate
Look for patterns and insights in this data. If a certain topic is getting the most traffic, publish more posts about that. If a promotion strategy isn‘t working well, try a different approach.
Gathering qualitative feedback is important too. Periodically survey your email subscribers about what they like and don‘t like about your blog. Pay attention to the comments and questions people leave. As you learn more about your audience and what they want, you can better give it to them.
Have Patience and Keep Showing Up
More than any particular tactic, the real key to growing a blog is continuing to show up and put in the work over a long period of time. There are no overnight successes. Most of the big bloggers you look up to have been at this for years, publishing great content week after week.
Commit to blogging for the long haul. There will be ups and downs. You‘ll have posts that go viral and posts that flop. Just keep focused on providing as much value as you can to your target audience. Keep engaging with them, listening to them, and incrementally improving.
Over time, you‘ll start to see the compounding effect of all these strategies. Your daily efforts will start to snowball into more and more traffic. You‘ll build trust and authority in your niche. Readers will fall in love with your content and eagerly await every new post you publish. And before you know it, you‘ll have the thriving audience of your dreams.
