Blogs have a lot of power to help grow your business. But you need a sizable audience to make that happen.
Wondering how to grow your blog?
It takes work, targeted strategies, and persistence — but businesses can reap great rewards.
Simple Ways to Grow Your Blog
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Define and Target Your Audience
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Understanding your buyer persona is critical to increasing the visibility of your content. The readers/potential customers won’t find you if you’re not targeting their needs. You can do that by clearly defining the needs of your specialty/niche.
For example, do you sell environmentally friendly cleaning products? If so, what are common questions about your products, what motivates your customers to buy them, and what scenarios would they need to happen to buy them? The answers to these questions would be attractive to your audience.
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Ensure Your Website is User-Friendly
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Cumbersome design can be a huge roadblock in growing your business blog. Ensure your website is easy to navigate, and the blog can be quickly found. Where is your search box? Its location should be easily visible.
With the consistent year-over-year increase of people researching and buying products and services on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly site is a must. Have a plan in place to regularly review your site to make sure that the mobile experience is seamless.
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Be a Contributor to Top Blogs in Your Particular Niche
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If you’re trying to quickly push your numbers upward, seeking out top blogs in your niche and asking to be a contributor is an excellent content strategy for how to grow your blog. Connect with the owner of the blog first before going right to the pitch. Comment on their blogs and introduce yourself via email if possible and tell them you are a fan of their work. Share your favorite content with them on social media.
Once you have established a connection, you can pitch them an idea that not only serves as a showcase of your expertise — but helps them too. Top bloggers get pitches all the time and can be quite selective about who they choose to be a contributor. But once you’re in, it can be a fantastic way to get exposure.
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Stimulate Clicks by Creating Strong Headlines & Dynamic Header Images
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With the never-ending stream of content on the internet, you must give them a good reason to click. Strong headlines and dynamic header images go a long way to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Always stay on brand, though, to avoid confusion. Is your brand persona considered to be helpful, playful, or serious? Stick with that for your blog content too. Be creative and do not be afraid to take risks. But always be aware of the boundaries that you should not cross.
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Promote and Build Engagement
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If you have read much at all about marketing in the digital age, you are bound to have come across the importance of customer engagement. This is a central technique for how to grow your blog. Fortunately, you have a smorgasbord of options to promote and build engagement.
First off, the structure of your blog is important. Keep your paragraphs short, use subheadings, lists, and vibrant images. Facilitate sharing on social media by having an easily visible share button. Wrap up your blogs and make a call to action to propel conversations — and be attentive and responsive. No one likes their comments to echo into nothingness.
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Collect and Make a Database of Emails
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Having the contact information of your blog readers can be an effective tool to grow your business blog as well. Place a “subscribe” prompt on your site to keep your audience informed of new content as you post it. You can send a message in an email to your list with a clickable link to the new blog. You can also request them to share with friends or family that may also be interested in the subject.
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Help the Search Engines Find Your Content
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still a thing. An important thing. Yes, the SEO strategy has been talked about for years, but that’s because visibility and ranking matter. How are you going to grow your blog if new customers can’t find you?
Can they depend on you to take care of their needs?
Make sure your meta title and meta description are optimized and use strategic keywords throughout your post — particularly in the title and subheadings. Link to other posts on your site. You can also construct descriptive ALT tags for your images when sharing on social media. If you have not started to do this already, link to other credible sites in your blog posts. The search engines are often programmed to reward these types of actions.
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Improve Your Page Loading Time
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One of the quickest ways to discourage readers is to be slow. Slow loading, that is. Patience is definitely not a virtue when it comes to people seeking out new information. They want to click and view quickly. If your website takes too long to load your blogs, seriously consider reviewing your design and web host.
Some of the things that can speed up your loading time include removing unnecessary visuals, updating your core technologies, removing wasteful and necessary plug-ins, and updating your content management system (CMS).
Leveraging these eight tips on how to grow your blog can be a real game-changer. When you begin implementing them, make sure to closely track your traffic so you can understand how to manage and evolve your strategies for optimum impact. Once you start seeing the results of your efforts, you can maximize your efficiency in your blog management as well.
With a comprehensive yet diverse approach, businesses across industries have the capability to excite potential customers — and motivate them to take action — evolving their blogs into a winning strategy that drives the achievement of business goals.