It doesn’t matter how many social media followers you have or how great your articles are, if you’re not managing to find a way to drive people to your blog then none of it really matters.
I’ve realised over the past few months of blogging that keeping people on your site and keeping them coming back is absolutely crucial to making sure your content is being seen. If you want your time on your blog to feel worth it, then having people return, visit, comment and appreciate your content is the best way to do this.
I’ve been blogging for a few months now so by no means am I the most experienced at this. However, I have a few years in marketing, I’ve done a little research into the matter and I’ve got a small amount of experience now in what works best.
Increase your social media following
One of the first things you’ll notice with anybody who has a well-followed blog is their large social media following. This may be the fact they’ve grown a successful YouTube channel from blogging tips or they’ve already become TikTok or Instagram famous. But they all started somewhere.
I’d recommend doing social media in one of two ways: if you’re comfortable get on as many as you can. Set up a brand identity and post consistently across all of them with the same posts so you can reach as wide an audience as possible. Alternatively, if you don’t feel comfortable or simply don’t have the time, focus on one social media platform and utilise that as best as you can. Feel free to follow like-minded accounts in the hope they’ll follow you back and for inspiration.
Do promotions and giveaways
Once you have a solid base of a following on your chosen social media platform, I’d definitely recommend looking into doing competitions or giveaways. You can check out my post on a list of FREE and cheap Promotions and Giveaways to Increase Your Social Media Following for some ideas on what to post. These can be the promise of paying up to a certain amount on someone’s Amazon wish list, offering them free promotion on your socials and so much more.
Doing these promotions and giveaways require you to set up some rules for entry. These rules could be any sort of traffic-driving thing. Such as: tag a friend who you know would like my blog, share/tweet an article from my blog, leave a comment on one of my articles etc. Even if none of these results in a vast number of people coming back to your blog, it’ll at least increase engagement on your blog for THAT month.
Start a Newsletter
I’ve talked about this before in my 10 Reasons You Need a Newsletter from Day One. Setting up a newsletter is a really easy way to guarantee people get your content directly in front of their eyes. If you rely on the algorithms of social media, unless people engage with your content regularly, you may not see the sort of traffic you want. However, if you get even 10% of your visitors to then sign up for a newsletter, you’ve got them hooked into a weekly reminder of your content.
I use sendinblue, one of the few newsletter clients that allows you to get started for free. It allows up to 1,000 emails a day (this includes the automatic email people receive when they sign up to confirm and your actual newsletter), so once you start sending out more than that a month, you can upgrade.
Write guest posts for other blogs
Want to reach a whole other audience? Why not DM some other bloggers on social media and see if they’d be up for having you on their blog. Some blogs out there specialise in this sort of thing, others would likely be happy to do in return for the same on your blog. This works both ways – by featuring on their blog, you’re finding yourself viewed by a whole new audience and then by having them feature on your blog, their audience will come to your blog to see what you’ve written about them.
I recently did a Blogger Spotlight series, featuring other blogs on here to help give some light and a different audience to some blogs who responded to my call-out on social media.
Post into forums/groups online
Something I did when I first started out with my blog was posting every single article into Reddit forums and groups on Facebook. Sometimes these would get declined, but if you genuinely interact with these places enough or are offering them something of genuine use then it’s definitely possible that they may start allowing.
In addition to this, why not set up your own group that allows people to come and discuss topics that your blog also focuses on? Not only does this allow you to find like-minded people, bounce ideas off people but it gives your blog a platform. Check out my Facebook group The Book Bloggers Club.
Summary
Creating a blog and then promoting it for free is never going to be a quick process. Unless one of your posts goes viral on social media or you write something that just seems to hit Google’s search algorithms perfectly, it’s going to take time and consistency. However, if you hit all of the uses above regularly, you’ll be sure to gain a following and repetitive traffic to your blog which will hopefully soon see your visit count rolling up.
