Strategies to grow your blog following and drive traffic

Writing a fantastic blog is just the first part in the process of channeling more traffic to your site. To be of any value, it needs to be read and shared by your audience and beyond. Below are five of the most common and effective ways to give your content exposure.

Commenting

Commenting on blogs related to your industry provides a presence in an online community and is a good way to build a rapport with an industry influencer, which could lead to future exposure for your content. It has the added benefit of gaining a valuable backlink to help boost your site’s search engine relevancy and authority, as it allows you to insert a link to your content on a page external to your site.

Your comments should be interesting and genuinely add something to the post they are related to. “Great post!!!” isn’t going to cut it and short, meaningless platitudes are likely to do more harm than good as they are obviously there for the sole reason of getting a link included. Make them useful and relevant. A good tactic is to add to the information through your own experiences or to offer a counter argument. Most people will enjoy a different point of view, so long as it is presented in a respectful and calm fashion. It will trigger discussion and make the blog owner, as well as their audience, more likely to look at your content and website.

Crowdsourcing content and guest blogging

Guest blogging is a great way to take the pressure of you or your team to produce great content and will add a different colour to your blog. It can provide a different viewpoint and interesting insights that may not be available to you or your regular writers. When it comes to posting it, the guest will be keen to share it with their followers and audience, immediately giving your blog more exposure than it would normally experience.

Crowdsourced content brings together a group of experts to provide their views on a specific topic. It could be related to professional mistakes they’ve made and how to avoid or combat them, how they gain inspiration for their best work or any number of topics. This is a valuable technique to gain insightful, useful content without the time commitment a blog would normally take to research and write. As with guest blogging, it allows your site and brand to be seen by the contributors’ audiences, as they will share their contribution with their followers.

Create top-quality work

Having the best work possible on your blog will improve your chances of increased traffic. 10x content is defined as content that is ten times better than anything else that exists. This means it covers every point, makes some new ones, and is grammatically perfect and well-written. It is engaging and informative, convincing users to share it on the merits of its quality and value as a piece of informative writing.

10x content is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort to create and herein lies its value. As it is impossible to scale or duplicate without a considerable commitment of resources, it encourages other sites to share it, rather than try to mimic what has been made. This will provide your blog with valuable exposure, as well as earned backlinks, bringing more people to your blog, website and brand.

Outreach

Outreach can be time-consuming, but it can yield great results. It involves inviting members of the blogging community to link to your content and take your blog to a wider audience. This, in turn, builds site authority and provides your site with a stronger backlink profile, as well as increasing your traffic.

Your outreach email should be simple and to the point, without sounding like a hard sell. The tone should be friendly and light, simply stating that you saw something similar on their site or that they had liked on social media and thought they would be interested in your article. Your email shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach, which is why quality outreach can take some time to implement. Bloggers and influencers can spot a mass email a mile off and it will adversely affect your credibility while getting you no closer to the increase in exposure you are aiming for.

It is crucial to avoid aiming too high to start with. Target bloggers who are at the same or slightly higher level than yourself. A top-level blogger may have a bigger audience, but chances are they won’t see any value in linking to you. This symbiosis is easier to achieve through bloggers with a similar following to yourself, and while it might be appealing to have Neil Patel promote your post, the likelihood of it happening is too low to be of much value. Better to have several links to smaller audiences than pin your hopes on one big one.