Blogging is a process, not an activity. For growing a blog, one needs to work on it every single day. Slowly and steadily, every small action you take for growing your blog will add up to your total success.
With more content and links, your blog posts will start to rank for their targeted keywords. In time, these keywords will start to generate traffic from search engines and your blog will get regular visitors. Many of these visitors coming from search engines will subscribe to your email lists, social profiles or simply convert on advertisements and affiliate links.
Here, in this article, we are going to cover several small tips that won’t make you an overnight success but will add up to your blogging efforts every day.
1. Add New Content: Adding regular content is important for building a blogging audience. If you stick to your schedule and make sure to add your new blog post on the same day and time as you have set and keep it maintained over the months and years then you will see that your audience will rely on you and come to your blog and wait for you to add the latest content.
Ultimately everything in blogging depends on your blog posts, if you add more content, let them rank on the search engines, they will generate more traffic and affiliate conversions.
2. Share and Maintain queues on Social Media: Treat your social profiles and timelines as micro blogging platforms. If you only share your own content then it won’t have a lot of effect, however if you start posting several updates on the social profiles, spaced throughout the day, you will find a dedicated audience building up over time.
3. Do Blog Commenting: Those bloggers who have taken commenting seriously, understands its true potential. This step isn’t all about link building alone. When you comment on other blogs, you get to know your fellow bloggers closely and build a strong relation. This will open up further opportunities of collaboration, link building, guest posting and so much more.
4. Use Quora: If you are a really active blogger then there are several sites, depending on the niche you are in, can send as much or more traffic compared to Quora. However, since time is limited and if you can focus on only one site for replying to answers and getting involved into discussions, then Quora is perhaps the best target for you.
5. Use Affiliate Marketing: Instead of spending few days to sign up for affiliate offers and updating all the blog posts and adding those aff links, it is best to take a long term approach. Write at least one to two articles every week, targeting an affiliate product and adding those aff links as call to action where ever possible within the article.
6. Feature other Bloggers: Every week, make a habit of featuring one blogger in your blog post. While in the blogosphere you might already know your target blogger well, still it is best to research everything before writing the post. The details of the blogger might already be available in their about and contact section, they might have a blog post on their blog explaining more about themselves and there can be past interviews that you can research.
7. Take Part in Roundups: Look for roundup opportunities where you can participate. Some people make these roundups actively and they keep a mailing list ready where they send the roundup emails. Reach out to them and make sure that when they make their next roundup, they allow you to participate in them.
8. Do Keyword Research: If you have a spreadsheet ready with plenty of keywords in it, you can easily pick the ones you haven’t used in the articles and start writing an article targeting that keyword. The key here is to keep a ready list of keywords and long tails that can be used whenever possible.
9. Look into your Competitors: The best way to research titles, content, keywords, links etc. is to look into the competition and check what others are doing. Take that idea into your research and start working on it. While we never suggest to blindly copying from a competitor, but looking for ideas and inspiration isn’t a bad thought.
10. Do Guest Blogging: One of the easiest ways of leveraging other people’s influence and reach is to guest post on their blogs. This way you get to post on a blog that already has link value, audience, social influence and subscribers. If you make a habit of doing at least one guest post a week, you will be able to gain a lot of benefits from it.
11. Be Active on Forums: Whatever niche you are blogging in, it is likely that you will be able to find a relevant forum where you will be able to contribute. The first priority here is to build up a natural profile in the forum before you start to post anything promotional. Every day post a few replies to forum threads and in the process build up a strong forum profile. After that, when you come across a thread where one of your blog posts can be linked with ease, based on the requirements of the thread, feel free to do so, but once a month or less.
12. Share on Blogging Communities: There are several blogging communities where you can share you content. These communities are built for sharing content and the more you share, the stronger your network will become and the members of these communities will further share your content on their timelines.
13. Network with other Bloggers: If you follow the above steps of blog commenting, guest posting and sharing other people’s content on your social time lines then you have already started to network with other bloggers. One can take this a further step ahead by linking to other blogger’s content and then doing an outreach campaign and letting others know that you have linked to them.
14. Use Canva: Good images are always helpful in sharing and promoting blog posts. With the help of a tool like Canva, one can easily update and add more images in old blog posts and make them catchy and attractive.
15. Optimize old Content: Over the years you might have added several hundred blog posts and some of them might be ranking well on the search engines. If you take out some time and optimize old posts for keywords, relevant content etc. then more and more blog posts will rank on the search engines and bring passive traffic and audience.
16. Research and Stay Updated: With time, new tools and trends come into play. A blogger needs to read and research to stay updated with the times. Keep aside an hour or two every day for reading blog posts that keeps you updated and stay with the trends.
Every blogger needs to make sure that these small blogging actions are taken care of every day. In blogging, time runs out quickly, so rather than doing things randomly, setup a blogging schedule and make sure to include all of the blogging tasks in that daily routine.