Creating great content for your blog is the first half of the challenge. The other half is getting people to read it. The biggest worry that most people have when starting a blog is whether they will be able to find readers. This concern is one of the primary reasons why many never start a blog for their business in the first place.
It’s understandable. Creating high-quality content requires a considerable investment of time and effort. Nobody wants to feel like they’re wasting their time writing a blog that nobody will ever read. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure that even your early content will not go unread. So let’s examine some of the best strategies for quickly growing your audience.
I’ll begin with a necessary disclaimer. Growing an audience takes time. It’s not going to happen overnight. However, it does not need to take years. You’ll need to invest a lot of time creating great content and promoting it. It’s true that few people will immediately read your first few articles unless you pay for traffic or invest a considerable amount of time promoting the articles manually.
Now for the good news. Provided you master the art of repurposing content your early articles will not go to waste. I’ll cover this art form in more detail in the next article, but there is nothing wrong with updating your early content and re-releasing it when you do have a larger audience. This means that the articles you write now can save you a significant amount of time further down the line.
Another excellent tip is to repurpose your early content into a lead magnet. By doing this, even if only a few people read your initial articles when you first publish them on your blog, the articles will be read every time someone joins your mailing list. The content will be working for you by attracting new members to your audience.
Now we’ve put to bed the fear that you might be wasting your time by writing content while your audience is still in its infancy. Let’s look at some of the ways you can grow your audience and find new readers for your business website’s blog!
Create a Great Lead Magnet
This is the single most important piece of advice in this article. Whatever method you use to send traffic to your blog; it is unbelievably important to make sure that you’re capturing the email addresses of whoever comes to visit. Once you have somebody’s email address (and permission to contact them), you can continue to contact that person after they leave for free.
The best way to convince people to join your mailing list is with an irresistible lead magnet. Your lead magnet needs to be something of value, it should not be cheap and quickly put together. To convince people to sign up, your offer must be outstanding.
Your first task is to map out your ideal audience persona. Your second task is to figure out what they would find to be so valuable that they wouldn’t be able to resist giving you their email address in exchange for it. This is why I recommend writing your early blog content with an eye on your lead magnet. If you plan your early content around a certain theme, your first ten to twenty high-quality blog posts can eventually be converted into a high-quality lead magnet.
Paid Advertising
Let’s begin with the obvious. Provided you have the money, and you’re willing to pay, you can easily get a lot of eyes on your blog very quickly. There are several options, Facebook advertising, promoted tweets on Twitter, promoted pins on Pinterest, sponsored posts on Reddit etc. The list goes on. Paid advertising is one of the few ways that you can significantly grow your audience the same day that you publish your first article.
Search Engine Optimisation
Another obvious way to attract readers to your blog is via Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). However, SEO is a long-term strategy and I advise you not to obsess about it. Provided you create a high-quality blog, you will have done half the work anyway. By this, I mean that you have created excellent, interesting, unique content that people want to reference and link to in their own content.
All that’s left is to learn some best practice tips to help the process along. Basic practices include writing keyword-rich content, including keywords in headers, adding alt image tags, updating your meta descriptions, cross-linking between your posts, linking to other relevant websites, avoiding duplicate content and ensuring your word count is high enough. It’s also advisable to submit your website to directories and attempt some link building.
Guest Post on Other Blogs
Find another blog relevant to your industry which ideally has more traffic than your website. Offer to write a free guest post in exchange for being able to link to your blog at the end of the post. You will need to ensure that you offer high-quality content. The guest post topic you pitch should ideally something you are in a better position to write about than the owner of the blog you’ve approached.
There is a double benefit to doing this. Firstly, you get the traffic from the people who read your guest post and then click the link to your site. Secondly, you’ll acquire a backlink to your website which in turn will boost your SEO efforts.
Promote Content on Social Media for Free
Post your content to as many different social media accounts as you can comfortably manage. There is plenty of software that you can do to automate this job for you.
It is better to focus on building an active audience on a couple carefully selected social media websites than it is to spread yourself too thinly and try to build an audience on all of them. However, there is nothing wrong with using software to post your content in as many places as possible because even if you’re not focusing on a particular social media website, somebody may still stumble across your content and click through to your blog.
You’re should carefully select a platform to invest your time. The best social media channel for you depends on several factors. This might be the demographics of your ideal audience or the type of content you regularly share. For example, Instagram is better for sharing visual content, while Twitter is better for sharing links and a high volume of posts.
I appreciate that the focus of this article is building an audience for your blog, not an audience on social media; however, the two are not exclusive. The more followers you have on social media, the more people there are potentially sharing your blog posts. The more people there are sharing your blog posts, the faster your audience will grow. Remember to update your social media biographies so they include a link to your website and lead magnet.
Network
Go where your audience goes, get to know people, participate in conversations and promote your blog.
Networking Offline
You can network offline by going to meetups, social clubs and joining real-life communities. You will need to know who your ideal target audience is and figure out where they spend their time.
Networking Online
You can network online by joining Facebook groups, subreddits and by getting involved in conversations on social media. Consider building a community around your industry or specialism. To build a community (such as a Facebook group) you need to give a lot of value upfront so that people can perceive the value of being a member of your tribe. Fortunately, by creating high-value content on your blog, you’re already doing this!
Use Your Email Signature
Including a link to your blog in your email signature is a simple trick but you would be surprised how few people do this. So remember to include a link to your blog, social media accounts or email signup form in your email signature.
Run Competitions
Competitions offer an excellent way to grow your email list or social media following on the cheap! They are cost-effective because you only need to sponsor one prize.
Set out clear rules from the start. For example, stipulate that to enter the competition a contestant must join your email list, follow you on a selected social media channel and share the competition with their own social media followers. You can select a winner from your email list and check that they have followed the rules before announcing the winner. There are plenty of stories about such competitions that went viral and the host grew their audiences by several thousand in exchange for a prize worth no more than £10 / $12!