Having a blog up and running is not that difficult nowadays. With just a few simple steps you can go online and start sharing awesome content and posts. What’s much more difficult, and sometimes even overwhelming, is to grow your blog, drive the desired traffic, reach the targeted audience, and, ultimately, get higher rankings from search engines.
Sure, there is not a single way that can help you to skyrocket your blog’s growth and get you in front of your targeted audience right away. But there are, luckily, useful strategies and tools that will set you on the right track. If your website is powered by WordPress, and you’re on the lookout for some useful strategies or tools, or the combination of both, to help you to quickly grow your blog, below are 7 of them. The tools have been included in the list based on the deep research and personal experience.
1. Blog Design is Important
If you want your blog to drive lots of visitors, it should have an inviting, organized and easy to use layout. That’s why, when choosing a template for your blog, favor the ones that come with the right set of features to help you and your visitors get the most out of your blog.
A great example of such a template is Sauron, a multipurpose WordPress theme that is perfect for blogging. It features a modern flat design. It uses a one-page scroll with parallax technology to make your blog stand out from the crowd. It’s editable layouts, front page builder and high customization options give you lots of flexibility to build and design your blog the way you want. The theme supports full-width posts grid and features multiple page templates for blog, portfolio, gallery, testimonials, diagrams, etc. It is social media integrated and optimized for best SEO practices. This theme has a responsive layout to serve all of your mobile visitors at its best. Check the theme demo to find out how cool it is.
2. SEO Optimization Comes First
Search engine optimization is your first go-to tool if you’re serious about growing your blog. A huge number of your visitors comes from search engines. Thus, it is a great strategy to get in front of your potential readership.
When it comes to search engine optimization, Yoast SEO plugin is a second to none choice to make. It comes with a set of useful tools to help you to fully optimize your blog. What it basically does, is helping you to write a keyword-rich content, better headings, and subheadings, remind you to give titles to photos, write Meta descriptions for posts, and enable pretty permalinks. Moreover, it makes sure whether your post titles are long enough and whether they contain the focus keyword or not. With its snippet preview functionality, you can see in real time how your posts and pages will look like in search results. To see the outcomes from SEO optimization takes time, but the results are worth it.
3. Stats Are Valuable
Stats tell a lot about how your blog is doing. Collecting and analyzing reports is probably the best way to know your blog audience. This can help you to come up with optimal solutions on how to grow your blog.
As the official member of Google Analytics Technology Partners Program, Google Analytics WD is a great way to track your blog’s performance. With such a wide range of tracking options it allows you to see the number of your real-time visitors, track who your blog’s audience is, which browsers and devices they use while interacting on your blog, visitor locations, etc. The plugin comes with the most outstanding reporting functionality that gives you the possibility to get custom reports on any metric and dimension.
If you don’t want data from specific users, IPs, countries and cities to be included in the reports, you can easily exclude them from tracking. Also, you can track custom dimensions and get reports based on logged in users, authors, specific post types and categories, post-publication year and month. Its goal management feature is a great option to track targeted activities and get instantly notified when they are accomplished.
4. Subscribers Matter Too
Converting your blog visitors into subscribers is a great way to build a base of returning visitors and let them know about the awesome content that you post. OptinMonster will come to help if you’d like to get blog subscribers and ultimately drive more traffic. It does so with its high converting pop-up and opt-in forms. These are easy to create with its form builder functionality. It allows you to build various kinds of pop-up forms. It includes floating header, slide-ins, footer bars, welcome gates, after post forms, mobile-specific forms and more. The plugin features the most advanced behavior automation, page-level targeting, and exit-intent technology features that help you get the most out of the forms. It comes with various form templates and allows you to customize the forms to best fit your needs.
5. Social media is the way
Obviously, there is no way without social media nowadays. It’s the path through which you can spread your great content over different platforms and get in front of hundreds of thousands readers. To enable your content to get spread on different social platforms, AddToAny plugin is right what you need. It adds social sharing and following buttons to any of your posts and pages and helps people share your posts or start following you on over 100 social media sites. The best thing about the plugin is that it comes with analytics integration and shows you how many times your content has been shared. You can customize button styles and sizes, and choose the best suitable locations to place them. The buttons are mobile optimized and look great on any devices.
6. Going spam-free is critical
Spam is a problem that all blogs face over time. Spammy comments hinder you from getting high rankings and also push away your readers. So, if you want to grow your blog, this is not an option to go with. The most popular and proven to work tool that fights spammy content is Akismet. It filters your blog’s comments section for spam and blocks them out. You can access and see the history status for each comment in the admin area, and also see the number of the blocked and approved comments. It’s a solid plugin that works out of the box to keep your blog clean and spam-free.
Final Thoughts
The tools for growing your blog and its audience are many, you just have to test and find out the right ones that work for your blog the best. These blog growing hacks are the ones that I personally found useful and have used them on various blogs. You can use them separately or together with the tools I recommend. If there are other strategies and tools out there that you found helpful in growing your blog, please share them with me. I would like to hear from you.
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Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 10+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development, specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".