How To Grow Your Blog Fast

Here’s the progress we’ve made so far in this series on How To Start Your Own Blog

• decided to start a blog
• found our niche
• bought a domain
• chose the blogging platform
• set up your blog and made it all pretty 🙂
• signed up for and installed Google Analytics
• added copyright to the website footer
• added a Privacy Policy and Disclosure page
• added an About Page
• set up our email newsletter
• learned how to choose and install a new plugin
• checked out my list of must have plugins

How To Grow Your Blog Fast

We have covered a lot of ground, so far, in this series.  If you’ve been following along up until now then this is the time where things begin to shift a bit.  Each blog is different and each blogger has a different style and different needs for their blog.

As time goes on, you may decide you want a new plugin or maybe you’ll want to change something in your design, or add more to the functionality of your blog.  We can honestly spend all day tinkering on our sites and not get any real blogging done.  As we are reading other blogs we see something on that blog and think “Oh, I want that on mine!”, then we set off to find out how they did it and how we can do it for our blog.

I personally have been blogging since 2009 and I still change things very often.  In the exact way I mentioned above.  Creating your new blog is not something you’re likely to ever “be done” with, for sure.  However, at this point in your new blog you need content, and a lot of it to draw people to your site.  It’s all well and good to have the fanciest or cutest blog out there, but, if there’s not enough content or no one is coming to read it, then it’s just for you!  lol

Make sure you dive in and get the blog content on there, then we can move on to adding social media profiles that will allow people to find our posts and read them.  You want to wait to create and add your social media profiles such as Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more until you have enough content to share.

We all want to learn how to grow our blog fast.  But, we also want our readers to be engaged, not just readers that pop on for a few seconds and then leave never to return.

Everything you do just make sure you keep your reader in mind, put yourself in their shoes, be your reader, write, design, and make your blog functional for them, always keeping their needs in mind.  That’s how you’ll grow your blog.

In getting plenty of content writing on your site before you add social media profiles, you’ll ensure that people don’t come to your site, get excited about what you’ve written and want to read more…. and there isn’t any more.  They are likely to leave and never return – and that is NOT what we want.

Remember as we talked about in Choosing An Email Newsletter Platform For Your New Blog, that growing your email list is more valuable, and powerful for your blog than social media profiles.  Make sure to keep your focus there.

As you are thinking about your reader and as you’re writing a blog post for your reader, think about what you can give them to add value to your content.  If you’re sharing a recipe, maybe make a free printable shopping list with the ingredients for that recipe.  If you’re talking about budgeting, maybe add a few budgeting printables – like I have done here:  6 Ways To Start A Successful Budget Plan.

You can also use these free things to grow your email list, like I have done here:  11 Ways To Make Money Online Fast if you click on that posts and scroll down a little, you’ll see a link for a free monthly budget worksheet.  If you click the link to download the spreadsheet it will take you to an email signup and once you sign up you’ll get the free download.  They get their free printable and in exchange we get a new email subscriber.

When you come up with website content ideas that allow you to add the freebies and the email subscription, you gain more than just an email subscriber – which is very valuable to you – but, you are building trust with your reader by offering them free things.  Later, when maybe you have a product to sell they will be more likely to purchase it from you because you have built trust with them, by writing for them and by giving them free things in your posts.  They don’t have to be things that cost money or take you tons of time to create.  Just remember you have the information they are looking for, so don’t think that anything you give them for free is too simple.  They either saw your post in a newsletter or searched and found it online.  Either way they were looking for the information you are providing to them, so, that means they already believe you have the answers they need.

Get busy building that content for blog posts, keeping your reader in mind always, providing them information, and possibly a freebie and you’ll have an engaged readership before you know it!

Be sure to read all of the posts in this How To Start Your Own Blog series.  Don’t miss any of them or you could be setting yourself up for failure.  Each one is as important as the next. Remember, you’re skipping all of the mistakes I have made over the years.