If you have opened a blog, it is understandable that you would want it to grow. However, you might be writing articles every day or week, yet your audience is seemingly stagnant with little to no participation from them. This makes you look at larger blogs and you begin to wonder what makes them as great as they are – did they pay to go up the search ranks? Did they pay for bot-like services to comment and like on their posts, in a similar way to social media? How much did they pay, if they did it at all?
In this article, we will examine some easy strategies that will help you cultivate and grow your blog to new heights – and not exactly in the ways that you think. Read on for some of them.
Make the site easy to navigate for your readers by:
Ensuring the layout is easy
For easy communication purposes, it is essential that you make the layout of your blog easy for your visitors and readers to understand. It is important to ask yourself what kind of layout you would like if you were a reader, and if the layout is not something you would understand or want to see, then it is time to make changes.
Making sure the navigation is clear
Ensure that the content you have, as well as the search bar and the aesthetics of the site are all good and relatable to the readers. For you to achieve maximum success, ensure they work together – unless you would allow the reader to become annoyed and leave the site as soon as possible.
Search boxes are essential
This helps the reader navigate through the site, so it is a must. Make sure to place it in a visible area, so that it forces itself to their attention.
Make it friendly to mobiles
If you are reading this, then we hope you know that people tend to surf the internet more on their phones and other mobile devices like tablets, rather than desktop. In fact, statistics show that over half of all internet use happens on mobile phones, and companies such as Google will rate the attractiveness of your site to search engines using this as criteria.
If you want to spread your audience reach, then being friendly on mobile is a necessary thing.
Speed it up
We are sure that you would not enjoy navigating a slow site, and neither does search engines. If your blog happens to be the slow-loading ones, then you cannot achieve the growth you desire; studies show that Google ranks pages by using the page speed as one of the criteria. This is why it is very important to increase the speed as much as possible.
Some of the tips include not having too many plugins (such as podcasts and other advertisements), using CSS to simplify some of the icons on your page (this also reduces the time spent when connection requests are happening), and minifying the codes (involves the removal of line breaks and whitespace). You can also optimize images (compressing them so that they do not take too long to load), among other measures.
If you happen to be making all these changes and no improvements are happening, then it is likely that your server has issues. Therefore, you might end up changing your hosting plan, or try another host.
Make your content excellent
You cannot just post any kind of content – you need to make sure it is as exciting as possible to ensure you readers have something to look forward to. This will make them continually come back and eventually stick around.
During the creation of content, you do not need to showcase your abilities, you just need to spread the awareness of your brand, generate new leads, and assist the audience to grow. Keep the content interesting and fresh – when the audience sees you are doing your best to come with new approaches to things, they will talk.
If you are stuck on what to do, some ideas include telling stories, using conversational tones, eliminating fluff in your articles, giving a wide content range, finding out what your followers like, and always maintaining originality (because no one likes fake stuff).
Increase engagement levels
To make your content as engaging as possible, it is important that you make it scannable. This means that it is easy to understand for your readers, because you have kept it in a format that is easy to read, and the reader is highly engaged regardless of whether it is short or long.
This may sound like a difficult task, but it is actually easy to do. Some steps include keeping the paragraphs short, using lists, subheadings and visual aids, as well as highlighting fonts for the reader to pick out the main point easily.
You can also increase engagement through encouraging your readers to share your article, mentioning great brands on your posts, and adding a CTA (Call to Action) such as encouraging comments and likes.
Content optimization, for the sake of search engines
If you want to make your blog posts easily discoverable by different users searching for related terms, then you need to optimize your content as much as possible. The good news is that you do not need to be tech savvy to do this (even though it may sound technical).
One way is through optimizing your meta description and title – you can add some important keywords (but be careful to avoid overdoing them). You can use SEO plugins such as Yoast to do so. For all your blog post titles, ensure you use keywords, especially those that are common in search rankings.
In addition, backlinking similar posts is also important to increase the navigability of your blog, and ensure you add links to other credible sites as often as possible to increase your own credibility.
Final thoughts
Growing a blog may seem like a difficult task, but it is not actually the case. As long as you can pursue these rules, your audience will grow eventually, even if it is at a gradual pace – and you will soon become a top-notch blogger.
