Whether you are trying to establish yourself as an authority on a particular subject, promote your business, or you simply want to have your voice heard and share your knowledge and experience with other people, blogging is one activity you cannot miss out on. According to research done by HubSpot, 53% of marketers say that blogging is their main content marketing priority, which just goes to show how effective it is. Blogging is not just great for showcasing yourself or your business in the best way possible, but also for building backlinks, boosting your ranking, and SEO.
However, blogging involves a whole range of other activities apart from writing and publishing, which can get pretty complicated if you are doing everything yourself, as 80% of other bloggers do. If you favor the DIY approach or don’t have the resources to expand at the moment, let’s take a look at 10 things you need to do in your first three months of blogging to drive traffic your way.
-
Establish Your Goal
While producing great content is not easy, there are plenty of resources online which can help you with every aspect of it, from keyword research to place, which specialize in editing. But, to make your blogging more meaningful, you need to have a goal. Whether it’s building a community, growing your authority, promoting your service, brand, or product, or simply writing for the fun of it, you need to establish both short-term and long-term goals that are going to get you there.
-
Do Keyword Research
Even if your content is top-notch, you cannot follow the “if you build it, they will come” principle, because people find stuff using search engines. And as smart as Google is, it doesn’t understand human speech. It uses keywords entered by users to find the most relevant content matches, which is why you should come up with a list of keywords that you need to target.
-
Do Your SEO
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, search engines need stuff like keywords to find relevant content. Keywords, along with backlinks and great content, are the three most important SEO signals Google looks at when deciding where to rank your blog or website. Now, seeing as you probably won’t have a lot of resources to spend on custom writing help in the shape of SEO specialists, you will have to do all of these things yourself. Regarding backlinks, you need to reach out to other blogs in your niche and ask them to write a blog post for them in exchange for a link back to your blog, which will expose you to a new audience and drive traffic to your posts.
-
Create a Social Media Presence
For starters, do your research to see which social media platforms your target audience use the most, and then pick just one to begin with. Why just one? Because you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.
-
Engage Your Audience
You need to do this not just to build a relationship with them, but also to figure out what it is they want. So, don’t hesitate to talk to them inside the comment section of your blog, on social media, or even inside your email. Once they see you are interested in what they have to say, they will jump at the chance to provide meaningful feedback.
-
Send Out Newsletters
Despite what you may have read online, you need to start building your email list from day one, and which has contributed to their success. While you won’t have many subscribers at first, it’s still better than nothing, plus you will be prepared once your blog does take off.
-
Learn About Photography
By this, we mean knowing to at least edit a photo by applying some basic adjustments, such as contract, brightness, as well as being able to crop a photo in order to make it fit for your featured image or your social media. Also, you should know where to find free stock photos and how to attribute them properly to avoid legal action.
-
Comment on Other Blogs
Commenting on other people’s blogs allows you to demonstrate your expertise, as well as to link back to your blog. Also, this is a great way to break the ice if you are hesitant to reach out to bigger blogs to build a backlink there. This way, you will be on their radar, and they will be more likely to respond favorably.
-
Narrow Down Your Scope
Pretty early on, you will realize that your blog cannot be all things to all people, which is why it might be a good idea to niche down and focus on those which are truly interested in what you have to say and which would be more willing to become your customers. In case you are truly not interested in making any money blogging, then you can write about anything.
-
Master Google Analytics
Google Analytics will enable you to track the most important metrics and see how your blog posts are doing, where your audience is in the world, as well as where the majority of your traffic is coming from, so you can focus more on those channels. Also, it is the best way to make sure you are still on point when it comes to your goals.
Conclusion
We hope that these tips will help you start on the right foot when it comes to blogging and generate more traffic. Good luck!
