If you’re now doing everything I’ve explained in this post, then you will steadily grow. This is almost inevitable: a site that has genuine passion and something unique to say and one that has been beautifully designed; this will automatically generate readers and they will be likely to share with their friends and other places online, thereby helping you to gain more and more followers.
But if you aren’t actively promoting your site as well, then this is still going to be a slow process. Posting to your site alone and sharing it on social media will probably mean you generate some traffic from Google (due to long-tail keywords) and from the occasional share.
But this alone is going to take years for you to gain the momentum you need to start thriving.
And that’s why it is absolutely crucial for you to actively grow your audience too. You’ve built the perfect net, you just need to start waving it around in the right places.
Here are some tips that will work as growth hacks – and they’re things that a lot of other blogs won’t ever consider.
Communities and Social Sharing
One of your very best options for promoting your blog is to post on social sharing sites and forums. That includes the likes of subreddits, Google+ Groups, Facebook groups and online community forums.
A single post on one of these can gain huge exposure for your site and get the system you’ve created churning over perfectly. But there is a right and wrong way to go about this.
If you sign up to Reddit, find the relevant sub reddit and post your article there, then it may get met with distrust and it might get badly downvoted. Even if the article is great quality! Why?
Because you are clearly promoting yourself. This doesn’t go down well anywhere and particularly not in a supportive, tight-knit community. The solution then is to focus on building trust in that community first. Spend time there. Get to know people. Mention what you’re trying to do. Learn their likes and dislikes. Built authority.
Doing this means you’ll now have ‘friends’ in that community and anything you share will be hugely more successful. Those people are also more likely to share your posts elsewhere and in general, having the force of an active community behind you can make a gigantic difference.
Another tip is to consider tangential niches. If you have a fitness site and you post in a fitness forum, you’re competing with a heck of a lot of information and you won’t stand out. But if you write a blog on martial arts and fitness and share it in a martial arts forum, suddenly you have something more interesting and unique. And you have an entirely different audience that you hadn’t reached before. Consider your buyer persona and use this to know what else your audience might be interested in.
There’s no way around it: if you want to rapidly build an audience online, then the single best way to do that is by networking and speaking with other creators and other businesses. Find someone that has a large number of followers and offer to work with them so that you will both expose each other to your respective audiences. This is the only way to create exponential growth, so reach out to those people, speak with them and tell them why you’re keen to begin your partnership. Don’t aim for the top right away though: start with influencers that are at a similar level to you and then work from there.
Finally, I just wanted to end with a note on SEO to say that while this is a useful tool, you should never let it dictate your actions.
The reality? Getting to the top of Google for a highly popular search term is nigh impossible unless you have a giant budget. And if you want to build an audience then you need to write for that audience.
So consider SEO yes. Allow it to influence the odd post. Think about more niche topics that will speak to your audience and find out what people are looking for. But don’t rely on this method to build your audience.