Four Easy Ways to Supersize Your Blog

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You have something to say, and your audience is out there, just waiting to soak it all up. For many bloggers, humble beginnings often snowball into impressive followings and page ranks, but you’ve got to be good, and you’ve got to be proactive.

Let’s be honest: bloggers are a dime a dozen these days, and you’re going to face competition at every turn. Fortunately, the beauty of blogging, and the Internet, is that you have a global reach. It’s likely that someone, somewhere, shares your specific interests, and will love reading your posts. The challenge comes in connecting with these people, and giving them the good stuff that keeps them coming back.

Below, we’ve put together a brief list of simple things you can do to up your traffic and following. As a rule, the suggestions don’t require money or advanced technical knowledge. They do, however, require your dedication to quality, and the willingness to familiarize yourself with some popular websites and basic practices of content creation .

Work That Social Media Scene

If you use Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest for fun, you’re already halfway to making them work to your blog’s advantage. These direct, personal connections to your audience operate on the idea of sharing, and when used well, can lead to that coveted snowball effect.

Bloggers aren’t limited to specific social networks, although the leveraging techniques will vary depending on the kind of blog you run. For example, a food image that flies around Pinterest won’t necessarily replicate tweets when converted to a headline. Still, some tweaking can adapt one blog post to multiple platforms.

Speaking of headlines, social media loves them. Consider what gets you to click on a link shared by a Facebook friend, and you’ll likely remember a large, boldly-lettered quip. Twitter only gives you 140 characters per tweet, and it’s a great place to polish those headline-writing skills. Make your headlines easily sharable with share buttons on each post.

Depart from the above social networks for a bit, and check out news sharing communities and discovery engines like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. You can actually submit your articles to these sites, or just post a link to what you’ve written. Again, be certain to craft enticing headlines.

Social media isn’t going to do much for your blog if you’re not being social. Interact with friends and followers in a positive way that reflects the tone of your blog. On Twitter, find people you like with substantial followings, and pay attention to their posts. Through retweets, mentions, and frequent conversations, the two of you could enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship.

Create Living, Breathing, High-Quality Content

Writing a blog post is easy. Creating high quality, consistent content that courts interaction from the denizens of the Internet—and doing it on a regular basis—is a little tougher.

Your top priority is quality. From catching the smallest typo to checking the big facts, high quality standards give you credibility, not to mention readability. Present your visitors with original ideas framed in a relevant, yet evergreen, manner, and they’ll have somewhere to put their loyalty.

Beyond the quality of the content is how it functions. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex practice that’s spawned an entire industry of professionals. Yet anyone can incorporate simple SEO into their blog. For example, look at your article’s main points, and ask which keywords people might use to search those topics. For more in-depth research, do a quick Google search to see which terms auto-populate the search field. You can also use a variety of free and commercial tools to enhance your keyword research further.

Include the keywords gracefully in the text and as tags to help readers find you in their browsing. Tagging images with keywords also helps, though it’s important to ensure your use of images avoids copyright infringement.

Links are another smart way to promote your blog. Use internal links to your own content in your posts (where appropriate), as well as links to other trustworthy sites. Chances are, bloggers to whom you link will return the favor at some point. Further, linking makes you more connected, and easier for search engines to locate. Just be sure your hyperlink uses descriptive text, rather than something like “Click Here.”

Remind Readers with RSS

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary,” depending on to whom you’re speaking. Essentially, it allows readers to subscribe to a blog, and receive notifications of new posts. RSS is a great way to remind your readers that you’ve got something they’ll enjoy.

Most blogging platforms create an RSS feed for you, and offering it to your readers is as simple as adding a widget or subscribe button.

While getting individual readers to subscribe to your RSS feed is excellent, you can draw more traffic if they display it on their own sites as content. Be aware that some disagreement exists about the ethics of publishing an outside RSS on a separate site; take steps to protect your content if you’d rather not share your RSS feed so freely.

Analyze the Statistics

Numbers don’t lie, but they can be confusing. Your blog’s statistics tell you what posts are most popular, what days brought the most visitors, and much more. Charts, lists, and graphs give you visual representations of these numbers, and help you focus on particular areas of interest. Your blogging platform may offer a statistics feature, or you can use something like Google Analytics.

Traffic is more complicated than just how many people come to your site. Statistics tools can help you get a clear picture of total visitors, total page views, total time spent on a given page, and even demographic information on the folks who visit your site. They can also help you determine the best time to post your content, based on traffic and activity.

Other available information can include views per country, search terms leading to your blog, clicked links and potential spam referrers. When you look at all of this information together, let it guide your future strategy regarding what your readers want, when they want it, and how they respond. It’s also a very useful way to determine what isn’t working, so you can punch up content that’s not quite as popular as it should be (or eliminate it altogether).

Small Steps to Supersized

No one magic formula will bring you a million views overnight. But if you’re hoping to increase your blog’s popularity and become an Internet juggernaut, you’ll need to focus your efforts on creating high-quality content on a consistent schedule while making time to connect with your fans, followers (and potential clients) in a real and compelling way.

Do you have a go-to tip for fast blog success? Let us know in the comments!