How to Start a Blog

Grow your Audience & Following

You might find you want to come back to this section at a later date, so bookmark this page and when your blog is off the ground and running you can come back to work through some of these steps.

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

The same is true of a website or blog. What good is putting in all of that effort unless you have lots of readers to enjoy your work and engage with you?

So the next area to look at is how to make your mark! We will take a look at a few ways you can start to bring more traffic to your blog and generate email subscribers.

I could write an article on its own about each of the below growth tactics but for now, I will touch on some of the basic principles you can use to get started.

Search Engines

One of the best skills any blogger can learn is SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Why? Because ranking on Google and other search engines for your main keywords is the best way to get targetted traffic to your website and if you can rank for some highly searched keywords that can lead to a lot of web visitors.

SEO is broken up into two main categories:

On-site SEO - Also referred to as on-page SEO this is the process of optimizing your website and web pages to be search engine friendly. It also involves checking for any technical issues with your website such as speed problems and also the quality of the content and keyword focus.

On-site can also refer to things such as the internal links on the website, which is when one page on your website links to another page on the same website.

See our guide on WordPress SEO Tips & Tricks.

Off-Site SEO - on the other hand, relates to all search engine ranking factors that Google can measure about your website by looking at the rest of the internet and other websites. The majority of this revolves around acquiring backlinks.

Backlinks are when another website decides to show you some love by putting a link on their website pointing to yours.

Generally speaking the more backlinks you have the better, but it is a case of quality over quantity and spamming your link everywhere will hurt you more than it will help.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the lifeblood of any blog. You need to regularly research new content ideas by performing competitive analysis and learning from your audience.

There's no point just publishing any content ideas that come to mind, you have to be purposeful and back your ideas up with data like monthly search volume before you begin producing your content.

When you have a good amount of ideas you can focus on creating a content calendar that makes it easier for you to be consistent and maintain a good posting frequency.

It doesn't have to be every day or even every week but whatever frequency you choose it helps to be consistent if you want to build a healthy audience.

Social Media Marketing

Another one of the best ways to get your content discovered in the digital age is using social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and more.

Depending on the niche you are blogging about you may find that a different social marketing strategy is required.

For instance, if you are blogging about a professional subject you would want to make sure you adopt LinkedIn into your strategy but might want to not waste your time on Pinterest which is a visual social network more aimed at shoppers and sharing cool things.

If you your niche was more retail and consumer-focused then you might want to put more of your time into YouTube, Instagram & Pinterest since these social media platforms are more conducive than a professional networking site like LinkedIn.

Here are a few ways you can use the power of social networking to your advantage.

• Create high-quality social media accounts
• Syndicate your content on your social media accounts
• Follow related accounts
• Engage with followers, influencers in your industry etc
• Encourage people to share your content
• Share consistently
• Build a community like a private Facebook Group
• Don't just share your own content, give back and share other peoples work. You might just find they reciprocate.

The above are just a few examples of what you can do, we advise experimenting and seeing what your competitors are doing and then test everything and double down on what works best!

Outreach / Networking

One of the best ways to grow your traffic and following on a new blog is to network and reach out to other people in the space.

Find other bloggers and people talking about similar topics on social media and using Google search.

Then reach out to them either via a casual introduction on social media sharing your best work as an example or create a simple template email asking if they would be interested in reading an article you are currently writing that is related to what they also blog about.

Another approach that can be used sparingly is to comment on other blog articles related  to your subject matter and weigh in with your thoughts. Add value and avoid self-promotion, at least at first.

This approach with the correct technique can work wonders and lead to increased social sharing and potentially backlinks from other blogs.

Takeaway: Get your name out there by engaging with others in your community and niche and establish yourself an expert.

If you don't consider yourself an expert (yet) on the subject you are writing about then be authentic and explain that you are documenting your journey.

Guest Blogging

If you want to really grow your audience guest blogging can be an extremely effective method since you are able to piggyback off the already large audience of other websites.

To get the most out of your guest blogging though you want to follow a specific approach.

• Find blogs in the same niche with larger and active audiences. Check subscription numbers and comments as benchmarks. If possible also look at other metrics you can find online such as estimated traffic, backlinks and if the website is a known name in your space.
• Make a great pitch and how you can offer value. Many site owners get a lot of guest blogging requests if you want a chance of getting past the noise you need to stand out and demonstrate the value you can offer.
• Write your BEST content - blow them away with amazing content and you are more likely to be rewarded in return with more opportunities, backlinks, and respect.
• Promote the post. Sure it isn't your website but you should promote, share and link the article that is published in the same way you would if you had published it on your own blog.
• Engage with commenters. If the blog has comments turned on and you are getting replies to your article you should make sure to keep your eye on it and engage with every single response.

Many people thing guest blogging is a saturated technique but this is simply not the case. It remains one of the best ways to tap into existing audiences and shows no sign of changing.

Encourage Sharing

Chances are the more your content gets shared the more free organic social traffic is generated.

Follow these tips to make your content more shareable.

• Create content with that WOW factor. The kind of content that makes people think wow, I need to share this.
• Add social sharing buttons to your blog. We currently like SociWarfareare though have been through many plugins over the years.
• Encourage sharing by mentioning it at the end of your posts.
• Use visual content like infographics and charts from data as these mediums are known to make content more worthy of sharing.
• Make your content clean and easy to follow by breaking up large paragraphs and including images throughout.
• Build an email list - Email marketing is one of the best ways to keep your existing audience up to date.

This just touches on some of the primary ways to promote your new blog after you have launched and published a few posts but there are many other online marketing tactics you can employ that we will cover in a later guide.