How To Grow Your Blog’s Audience 2015

[caption id="attachment_307" align="aligncenter" width="601"] How To Grow Your Blog’s Audience 2015[/caption]

 

In order to get people on your blog, you need to expand your reach.

This ultimately means driving as much targeted traffic to your blog as possible.

I’ve talked about traffic generation tactics in the past, but which of those tactics can really move the needle and accelerate your blog’s growth?

Below you’ll find some of the tactics that have the potential to grow your audience faster.

 

   1. Start networking with other bloggers on a regular basis

 

When you start networking, you’ll notice you get more traffic, shares and engagement on your blog.

And once you’ve developed strong relationships with other bloggers, that’s when you can figure out other ways of helping each other.

But, remember – there has to be mutual benefit.

So how can you start getting to know other bloggers in your niche?

• Engage with other bloggers on social networks – This can include sharing other people’s content and responding to them in comments of status updates.


• Leave helpful comments on other blogs – This is best done on personal blogs where the owner responds to comments. This is a sure-fire way to get noticed providing you leave anything promotional out of your comments and focus on leaving helpful comments.


• Become part of a thriving community in your niche – Online communities are a great way to connect with other bloggers. From Sub-Reddit’s to Facebook Groups and forums, there’s plenty to choose from

 

   2. Contribute to the top blog’s in your niche

If you want to grow your audience, contributing guest posts to top blog’s in your niche will be extremely effective.

But, in order to get results that will truly move the needle, there is a specific approach you need to take.

 

Here’s how you should approach guest blogging

• Identify blogs in your niche with an engaged audience – If you’re contributing to a blog with no following and no engagement, you’re not going to get much in the way of results. Social shares and comments are good benchmarks to look at.


• Connect with the owner of the blog before pitching them – This is essential. We talked about getting to know bloggers earlier; the exact same steps apply here. Get to know the blogger before and it’s more likely that your pitch will be successful.


• Make your pitch about the blogger and how you’ll help them – Most bloggers receive a crazy amount of pitches from guest bloggers. Read this post to find out how to write the perfect email pitch.


• Don’t hold back when it comes to writing content – I can understand that you may want to keep your best content to publish on your own blog, but if you really want to reap the rewards of guest blogging, go all out!


• Build an email list using your guest posts – Just guest blogging on its own will help you create awareness about you and your blog, but you can also build your email list. It’s as straight forward as linking to a page with an opt-in form from your author bio. For specific steps, We’ll also talk more about building an email list later in this post.


• Promote your post like you’d promote one on your own blog – The more effectively you promote your guest post, the better. The blogger you’ve written the post for will appreciate it and likely be open to you contributing in the future.


• Respond to comments even if the blog owner doesn’t – Responding to people who leave comments is a great way to get noticed and increase engagement later on.

 

   3. Create your own tribe on Triberr and invite other bloggers

 

Triberr is a social platform that makes it easy to share each other’s content. It can be a great way to increase your reach, network with other bloggers and grow your audience.

On Triberr, you’ll find tribes of bloggers under a wide variety of topics.

You can apply to join tribes as a follower and in those cases you’ll get updates from that tribe within your “tribal feed” (pictured above).

The chief of a tribe can then promote you to a full member, your blog posts will be seen by everyone else in your tribe, providing you’ve added your RSS feed to your settings page.

One great way to get started on Triberr is to create your own themed tribes – you’ll then be able to find other active bloggers who write about the same topic.

To do this, you’ll need to sign up for an account, click on the “tribes” tab at the top, then click the “new tribe” button.

Then you can write a description for your tribe and start searching for bloggers who’d be a good fit for your tribe.

 

   4. Publish content your target audience wants to read

When you publish the right content for your target audience, you’ll grow your readership faster.

And when you publish the right content consistently, those readers will stick around.

Before you can dive into specific steps here, you’ll need to figure out exactly who your target audience is (and how you’re going to help them).

Once you’ve got that figured out, you can use a combination of these tips to narrow down which topics to write about:

How to keep your audience

coming back for more

We have covered some effective steps to accelerate the growth of your blog’s audience, now it’s time to ensure they keep coming back.

Below you’ll find out how to improve your blog’s user experience and make it easier to notify your readers about new posts.

 

   1. Tidy up your blog’s user experience

Our goal should always be to simplify the experience on our blog’s as much as possible.

Every element on our blog must have a purpose, if it’s of no help to anyone – it probably shouldn’t be there.

Here are a few things to look at when you get started:

• Make it clear who your blog is for and how your blog will help them – Your about page is a great page for this. Just answer this phrase: My blog helps ___ to __________. You could use this to create a catchy headline for your homepage and descriptions for your social media accounts.


• Trim down navigation menu items – I like to keep my main navigation simple and focused. There are always other pages that need to be visible somewhere; I put those in my footer.

 

   2. Encourage your audience to subscribe to your email list

Building an email list is one of the best things you can do to keep people coming back to your blog.

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Use an email provider instead of a feed delivery service – Using an email provider like MailChimp means you can send out emails to your subscribers whenever you like and you get much more control over how emails look. You also get better analytics and can create sequences of emails that new subscribers will receive, otherwise known as auto responders. There are plenty of services but MailChimp can be used for free but you don’t get the auto responder feature unless you use a paid plan.


• Offer something for free in exchange for email addresses – Your audience has a problem and your goal is to solve it so this is a great opportunity to put together a free resource for your readers. It could be a checklist, guide, template or even a tool.


• Make it easy for people to subscribe – Give your audience plenty of opportunities to subscribe. This means adding opt-in forms to strategic locations. WordPress plugins like Thrive Leads and SumoMe’s List Builderare super effective. SumoMe is free and works with WordPress sites and HTML sites.

 

   3. Ask your audience to join you on social networks

Considering the sub-heading above, the following may sound odd but bear with me:

It’s important to mention that your email list will be far more successful at bringing your readers back to your site than social media.

That’s a fact.

Why?

When someone clicks on your social profile, it’s far too easy for them to spot something else and not return.

I’m not saying social media is a waste of time, because it isn’t.

What I am saying is that you should prioritize list building via your blog over building your social networks via your blog (at least on the surface).

This ensures that while they aren’t distracting people away from my opt-in form, my social profiles are still accessible.

The key here is to introduce your social networks once people have signed up to your email list.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Add a follow button to your confirmation page – When someone confirms their subscription to your email list, they’ll be sent to a confirmation page. This is a great opportunity to add a Facebook Like box, Twitter follow button or something else.


• Invite your subscribers within a welcome email – When new subscribers join your list, they should get a welcome email telling them what to expect from you. With MailChimp you can send a “final welcome email” using a free account which does the job, for other email providers you may have to add this manually using their auto responder feature. This is as simple as asking them to join you on your favorite social network.


• Create a special email for your auto responder sequence – Most email providers have the option to create an auto responder sequence. Similar to the welcome email, you could add another email later which encourages subscribers to follow your social profiles. How you introduce this is up to you, you could use a “getting to know you” type email or just add it to the next email in your sequence.

 

   4. Make RSS subscription easy

RSS is sometimes referred to Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.

It’s just a file which makes it easy to syndicate content.

Why is this important?

A lot of people use feed readers like Feedly and Netvibes to subscribe to their favorite blogs.

Some say that RSS is dead, but people still use it. It’s not as popular as it was but it’s still worth taking advantage of.

All you need to do here is make it easy to find your RSS feed URL.

WordPress creates this automatically for you, so yours would be:

http://bloggersetup.com/feed.

Mine is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bloggersetupcom

Most feed readers will automatically find your RSS feed URL by default, but it’s still good to make this URL available.

I do this with a social media widget in my blog’s footer; it includes my social profile links too.

If you use WordPress, there are plenty of free plugins available which can help.Social Icons Widget is one such plugin.

 

   5. connected with your audience

If you want your readers to keep coming back, you need to engage with them.

Once you start engaging with your readers you’ll help to foster a stronger community surrounding your blog.

So how can you get started?

• Be accessible – Being unreachable is something often done in business, but it shouldn’t be done with a blog, even if your blog is a business. Make yourself available, starting with adding a contact page for anyone wanting to get in touch. And always avoid sending emails to your subscribers from a “noreply” style email.


• Respond to your readers – The more readers you have, the more difficult this is but it’s important to do. Whether through commenting or emails, responding to your readers needs to be done.


• Involve readers in your content – This can have a huge impact. Brian Dean is a great example of someone who does this right. He publishes case studies about readers who have used his marketing strategies.

These are just a few ways you can get started, but there are likely a lot more.

Sure, it can be time consuming but you’ll become closer to your readers, create a stronger community and make a lasting impact.