Are you an aspiring blogger and want to gain reputable traffic towards your blog?
Do you want your blog to achieve extraordinary targets and generate good revenue for you?
I am sure you do. In today's online world blogging has become a base for a lot of individuals and firms to generate traffic on the internet and reap the advantages of content marketing. But how can you effectively build a blog audience so as to support yourself and make it a permanent profession. With so many individuals, companies and firms creating blogs on a daily basis, it has become exceedingly important to effectively market your blog in order to gain a substantial audience.
If you think that you will just write some blogs and post them online and that will do the trick for you then you couldn't be more wrong. Writing and posting are just the initial steps and have to be followed by effective marketing strategies in order to gain mentionable traction.
This guide is meant to assist you in gaining knowledge about bringing more and more traffic towards your blog. If you are already adept with blogging techniques and want to know more about how to build a blog audience then it will certainly help you in achieving that.
ATTENTION: List of 20 Jaw Dropping Blogging Tips you Have Never Heard offHere are the 9 parts which form the essence of building a blog audience
1) Build a framework where you can market your blog
Once you have successfully created a blog you need a framework where you can market your blog. What is this framework? It is the community of followers, subscribers and readers who will come to read your blog. This constitutes of those people who will read, comment and share your blogs and in turn bring traffic from their extended communities which may turn into leads and sales.
How do build this trusted framework of people. The first step is to identify them. This is the easy part. The very first readers of your blog are generally the people who fall in your trust circle. They are the first entrants in your framework. Then you will have to look for those people who may take an interest in what you write. This requires research over channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Once you have the basic data, you can start by creating a facebook page and inviting these people to like your page and giving them information about the content which is going to be showcased here. You can also use facebook ads to promote your page to interested users all across the globe and thus bring in good traffic.
Check out this video by Stephanie Arwine
How to market your blog for lead generationYou can also like and comment on other similar brands and use the exposure to bring traffic for your own page. The same process can be applied to twitter with slight technical tweaks. Over here you can effectively use hash tags to directly target interested audience.
2) Know what people like to read
Having an idea of what your customers' interests are always helpful when you are trying to sell something. In the same way when you are marketing your blog, it is very helpful to know what the people are reading and what they like to read.
Create a list of influencers in your genre of writing. For instance, if you write about online marketing then you can include people like Guy Kawasaki and in your list or else if you write fiction you can include people like Paulo Coelho and JK Rowling in your list. Influencers are those people whose writing has an immense following. Their posts can give you a great idea about what people are reading.
Generally people have an interest in reading stuff which is not long. For instance, instant of a 2000 word long post, a reader may prefer to read a list or rather see an info-graphic. Therefore make sure that your content isn't too long, is interactive and engaging.
A great example of top content is a list. Online lists are very popular and have traffic flocking to them like frenzy. They are easy to create and you can create lists of about almost anything. Another great idea is the Ego-bait or the Featured section where you can choose someone from your lists and communities to write about and directly share with him. This gets shared first hand in his communities and helps you to build a blog audience.
Must Read: 25 Top Digital Marketing Blogs You Should ReadThe key here is to create content which is trendy, creates interest and does not annoy away the readers.
3) Improve the organic SEO for your blog
I am sure you are more confident about handling your blog than you were before starting with our guide. You now have a framework and great ideas about blog posts. But that is the process of building initial reputation. The next step is to configure and audit your posts in such a manner that they achieve a high search rank.
This process is called search engine optimization. When you successfully apply SEO to your blog and its posts it helps you achieve a high rank on major search engines and thus helps you build audience for your blog and grow it by leaps and bounds.
Firstly, you need to create content based on the needs and wants of your target audience. Secondly, you need to successfully communicate to search engines about what your content is so that it shows up at the right places. The first step towards organic SEO is keyword research. The keyword is the common phrase which appears in key sections of your posts like the title, headings and subheadings and occasionally in the content.
Check out this great video by Keyur Lalani for blog indexing:
For instance, if you are writing about freelance trends in India then your keyword can be "Rising Freelance trends in India", "Freelance trends in India" or "Noticeable freelance trends in India". The next important thing is the title. It should be short, exact and should convey the information in the post in the most efficient fashion carrying the focus keyword with it.
Takeaway: Organic SEO revolves around the quality of your entire content. Make sure to keep it top notch.
4) Invest intelligently in paid SEO
You might be thinking that I will enlist tools and techniques which will cost you a lot. That is not the case here. Today with content marketing being higher than ever, paid SEO tools have become cheaper than ever and you can employ some of these effectively to build blog audience.
The best option available is Google Adwords. Once you sign up for it the rest of the process is quite simple. You can enter the URL of your post and then Google will suggest you with the common keywords which can be used to popularise your post. Remember that the biggest and complex keywords can cost a lot so focus on keeping them short and exact for cost effectiveness. Once you know the keyword you can start with your promotion campaigns.
The next step is to create simple and to the point ads for your posts. The best ones are those which trigger the emotions of the readers in a jiffy and result in immediate engagement. These need to be even shorter than your blog titles. The next process is to keep a track on performance and notice what works and what does not. Millions of users use Google daily and it is the Adwords which feature at the top in most cases and get picked up by readers.
The key here is not to overspend and do almost anything what you think is right. Using paid SEO in the right manner can increase traffic and help you to effectively build blog audience.
5) Implement Social Media Marketing
Promotion of your blog content on social media is the pillar of your entire content marketing strategy. Social media is the best source of traffic for your blog as it provides consistent traffic which comes along 24 hours a day from people subscribed to you and even those who are not as your posts are shared across indirect and implicit circles.
First, you need to identify the traffic potential from your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and implement your strategies accordingly. The sites which send the most traffic to blogs are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Google Analytics will help you track your traffic sources better. Once you are aware of the potential you can start sharing on the different channels in a diversified and targeted manner. You should not go about sharing everything on each social channel that you have available. Your approach should be focused on the target audience.
See this video by Karl Gerber
For instance, visual content goes best with Pinterest and posts go well with facebook. This is where analytics help you. You should always keep track of your traffic and make sure that you implement your marketing in such a manner that the audience is not irritated off your posts.
6) Extract an outreach
Once you have got the engine running you need to move. In this case now, you need to expand your entire framework and reach out to the increased following that you have accumulated.
Now what can you do to increase your outreach further?
Earlier in this guide, we talked about visiting the pages of influencers and looking at trending content. Well you need to expand into it. This can be done by analysing and evaluating top content posted and shared by the influencers. What you need to do next is create the same kind of content but make it exponentially better.
This way you already have the advantage of better quality. Now you can approach these influencers directly or indirectly and request them to have a look at what you have created. This will be an indirect source of more subscribers and hence more traffic for your blog.
The next vital tool is communicating with sources and letting them know that you have used information provided by them in some manner in your blog posts. These information portals are in constant need and appreciate such kind of evaluation and feedback and will then help with promoting and sharing the content with their own channels thus helping you effectively build blog audience.
Another awesome tool is email marketing. It has become less popular amid the giants of social media but is still a plausible way to market your blog and place your links in the mailbox of potential readers and subscribers. Be sure to give it a try.
7) Content Syndication Networks
In the recent years the importance of these networks has increased and made them an advantageous tool to build blog audience. These networks are similar to Google or Yahoo but have the main focus on promoting content like blog posts. Some of the networks which you can use are:
ATTENTION: Ten Amazing Tools to Boost Your Ideas for Killer Content CreationOutbrain: It has emerged as a leader in content promotions and provides cheap cost per click or cost per visitor programmes.
Zemanta: This network works to put your content in front of the right kind of people as in interested readers. It also provides you with analytics to make your promotion campaigns more effective.
SimpleReach: It is a unique content engine which analyses your blog posts and churns those out which have the potential of attracting huge traffic. It crawls through the most popular posts on leading social media channels and figures out those which have the highest possibility of receiving engagement in the form of likes and shares.
The key point to remember while using these networks is to take advantage of their analytics. This will help you in improving your blog posts and make them more efficient in performing better across the internet. You can also take note of the traffic sources and trigger the promotions the sources which perform the best. This way you can a save a lot of time and energy which could have been spent on random haphazard promotion and sharing strategies and campaigns.
8) Create a syndicate of channels
You can also try to syndicate your content yourself, for free. You can click here to see the list of sites where you can submit your URL for free syndication. Feel free to use any of these.
There are also some brilliant curating websites which can help your blog get the required exposure and effectively build blog audience too! Some of these are:
Scoop.it: It pulls that content together which is useful for a target audience. It presents the posts in a newspaper format from which people can choose the post they are interested in and then redirects them to the relevant link URL.
Inbound.org: It is a community that curates and showcases interesting and engaging content from the online marketing sphere. It has a wide range of topics. People and readers are redirected to the websites and then can come back to give valuable feedback.
Reddit: It is the biggest curator of posts on the internet. If you can take advantage of its vast network by sharing quality and engaging content from your blog then the sky is the limit.
When sharing on such portals be sure to share and indulge in other content too! This creates an online goodwill and establishes good back linking towards your own posts.
You can also indulge in sharing on social bookmarks like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious and more. These are inherently curating sites which show all the trending topics and the related posts at one place. There is fair chance of good exposure from these bookmarks.
Take This: Modi-Obama and Blogging: 3 Pearls of Wisdom Unveiled for YOU9) Regularly update and redesign your content
This is a very important step when it comes to blog marketing. You should not write posts and then completely forget about them. They require revisits and re-edits. After updating you posts be sure to implement all the above strategies once again in the form of sharing and networking.
Video by Moz Rand Fishkin: SEO's Dilemma Link Building vs Content Marketing - Whiteboard FridayAnother good way is repurpose your content into videos or whitepapers which can be then shared and marketed.
There was a time when blogging used to be just about sharing great content with interested readers. Nowadays, it has evolved into a billion dollar industry and almost every online aficionado dreams about having a successful blog. Blog marketing is a task which requires detailed focus on a lot of avenues as discussed in our guide.
Quality content, targeted audience and intense marketing are your best shots at making your blogs popular and evolving them into a source of regular revenues for you. Building traffic is the only way that will happen.
