When I first started my blog six months ago, I had ambitious dreams of producing content every day and expanding my audience exponentially month after month.
The reality, though, is a touch more nuanced and requires appealing content, smart marketing and data insights to encourage you along the way. My hope is this blog post will assist with your blog journey, and in turn, you will share your advice/know-how that made your blog successfully with others.
As of the end of August, I’ve been able to increase my user views and visitors month over month. Visitors support your blog and read your postings because of the content. Without engaging content, you will not boost repeat visitors or increase your followers. I have used the Create / Publish / Monitor methodology outline here to develop engagement and followers.
Create
Once my blog post is composed, I use Grammarly writing assistant to spell and grammar check the content of the post. Grammarly is an impressive tool for limiting repeat words and phrases in your blog.
No blog post is finished without photographs and graphics. I use the following three sites for sourcing pictures in descending order of preference.
On each of the above sites, you can leverage pictures once you give credit to the original content creator. Unsplash even has an option to copy the content credit text for adding to your post.
Once I have my featured image or other graphics selected my next step is to create graphics for posting on Social Media -Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit– using Canva. For all my social media postings I typically leverage the same featured image and create a JPEG or PNG using the Canva templates.
As an example below I used the featured image for my Papa Bois blog and created the graphic for my social media postings to promote the article.
Once the content has been built – blog post and social media graphic – the next step is the orchestration of my work to the world wide web!
Publish
To direct traffic to your blog you need to promote it to a broader community beyond WordPress. If you just build your blog without any marketing/promotion people will not come. I have found that creating a presence on the social media platforms can help build your brand. Be sure however to create a separate Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account solely for your blog different from your personal social media profiles.
I leverage Hootsuite to control all my social media posts in one place. You can schedule, monitor, respond to posts on one platform. No need to have three separate browser tabs open for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In the free version of Hootsuite, you can manage up to three social media accounts for free. I post to Reddit separately since Hootsuite doesn’t have an API for Reddit at this time.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform, created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.
Also, for all my social media posts promoting my blog posts, I use RiteTag to determine the most appropriate tags I should be using to drive traffic and user engagement. Additionally, I use a URL shortener Bitly to shrink the WordPress URL to make it user-friendly for the social media posts, especially on Twitter.
Monitor
The last step of my process is to monitor the engagement of the blog post on all the various platforms to see how well the post is performing in driving traffic. I’ve found in the last six months that posting on Reddit has driven more users to my site than Facebook, Instagram and Twitter combined. Using information from Google and Bing WebMaster Console, you can see what user searches are driving the most traffic to your site.
You can enable site verification services on your WordPress site to monitor web traffic.
In closing, building a successful blog requires persistence and patience. If you have additional tip/tricks you use on your blog, please share below in the comments section.
Featured Image by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash
Thank you for this post. As a new blogger it’s very helpful. I use Grammarly and Ginger Keyboard to edit my blog and mostly Google Images for pictures. I also use WhatsApp and Facebook to drive traffic to my blog. Still learning lots of new stuff and your post certainly helps
Yeah, it’s trial and error. Do what’s best to drive traffic to your site. Setup the Google Web Master console it’s very useful.
Will do. Thanks
this is so helpful, i love the idea of the create / publish / monitor outline. also if you don’t mind i’m a new blogger and would be so grateful if you could check out my posts. thanks x
T, I read a couple of your posts and they are engaging. How often do you publish a new post?
i usually post every 2-3 days, but that has not been the case recently…
Yeah. Don’t push yourself. The most important thing is to have relevant content. Quality v quantity.