7 Actionable Ways to Grow your Blog Today

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You are a great writer. You’re an expert at what you do.

You have written some amazing content.

Despite your best efforts you feel disappointed on why hasn’t anyone read your blog.

Sadly, this is a common scenario for many newbie bloggers.

Just because you write it doesn’t mean people will read it! This isn’t the Field of Dreams, if you build it and they will come! No they won’t.

To grow your blog today is just like a business, you have to attract, engage and go find your audience.

Writing is just one of your jobs. Your second job is to promote and market your blog.

Here are seven actionable and easy to implement tactics and strategies you can use to grow your blog today.

1. Outreach and Network

Find other bloggers, influencers, experts and websites owners in your chosen niche and go build a relationship.

You can do things like commenting on their blogs, writing about them and sharing their content.

Reach out to them via social media, email or even in real life.

Do anything that will get you noticed.

Once you have built a good relationship, without you even asking they will start sharing your content, writing about you and even referring other people your way.

Tips

• A good way to get noticed quickly is to do an “Expert Roundup” of your Top 50 influencers in your Niche and feature them on your blog.

2. Write for Other People

Write content for other bloggers and websites, in return you usually receive one or two links back to your blog.

This will grow your authority, influence, search rankings and as well give you some traffic to your blog.

Imagine the traffic you can get if you were to be featured on Huffington Post or Business Insider.

Tips

• To find writing opportunities simply do a Google Search – “Write for Us” + niche keyword

3. Share your knowledge

Join Forums or Question & Answers Websites and start sharing your knowledge by answering questions.

Drop a link to your blog post when appropriate, just don’t do it all the time.

Tips

• Search for the most popular questions in your niche and write a “blog post” around it. Then answer the question on the website and link to the new blog post you just wrote.
• My two favourite Questions and Answers Websites are Quora and Yahoo Answers.

4. Create an Email List

Having an email list is crucial to any blog. It is one of the most effective ways to communicate to your audience and reminds them to keep coming back to your blog.

Tips

• To get people to join your list, I recommend giving something away for free like a Course, Ebook or Offer.
• Use popup boxes like Lead Pages to make it easy for people to signup.

5. Buy Advertising

If you can afford it, spend some money on advertising. This is one of the fastest ways to grow your blog.

Tips

• You can spend as little as $10 on Facebook to start marketing your blog.

6. Make a Business Card

Create business cards and give it out to people you meet especially when you go to networking events.

Tips

• You can get a set of 250 Business Cards for $20 at Vistaprint

7. Make your site SEO Friendly

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It basically helps the search engine to index your blog for the appropriate keywords and phrases. When you optimized it this will help drive traffic from Google and other search engines to your website.

Tips

• Decide on what keywords and phrases you are targeting for every blog post you write. Then make sure the keyword is used in the title, headings and a few mentions in your blog post.
• Don’t over do it, as you can over optimised and it may decrease your ranking.
  For more information on SEO checkout MOZ Beginners Guide to SEO
• Learn SEO

Just remember this, in order for your blog to grow you need to do two things.

Write and Promote
Write and Promote
Write and Promote

I would love to hear from you. What other ways do you do to grow your blog? Comment below.