Drive more traffic ways to your website and increase readers.

How To Grow Your Blog And Get More Readers

What are the things you can do to grow your blog? As your blog grows, it helps you make more money.
You don’t need a massive blog with millions of page views and visitors to make money. You can make a good income with a small, niche site as long as you’re adding value to your visitors.
My adoption website NRFA.org is a very tiny niche. It doesn’t get much traffic at all, but it still churns out a nice profit each month.
Yes, the more visitors you have, the more you can make. You certainly want to do anything you can to drive more traffic to your site and build your email list. The following are some of the top tips to grow your blog traffic. You can explore each of these tips further as you continue on your blogging journey.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the practice of writing your blog posts so they rank higher in search engines. It’s quite a science and way too much to get into.
There are all kinds of books, courses, and websites dedicated to search engine optimization. You can spend hours just learning the basics.

Install the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin is a free WordPress add-on that helps you write blog posts that are search engine optimized. It’s installed on over 1 million blogs – because it’s that good.
It’s an easy way to get started learning SEO. The plugin shows up right in WordPress below your post editor. It will give you suggestions on what to fix for better SEO. Plus it gives you tips on improving the Readability of your post.
Make a note that as you get further along in your writing – maybe a couple of months from now – you revisit this topic.

Guest Post

Guest posting is where you write a blog article for someone else’s website. There are two very important reasons for guest posting:

1. You can drive a ton of new traffic to your website

I guest posted an article on The Penny Hoarder and got 155 email subscribers in 48 hours, and 2,500 new pageviews.
I also guest posted on Ultimate Guitar and got one email subscriber.
You never know what results you’ll get. But you do have to try occasionally to find out.

2. To get links to your website

One of the factors in how high you rank in Google and other search engines is how many high-quality websites link to your website. It’s part of the secret sauce, and Google doesn’t tell us how important it is, but it is important.

For example, Forbes is a very reputable website. Articles published on Forbes.com are more likely to rank higher than articles published on MyDogLikesToSleep.biz (or whatever). Google ranks Forbes articles higher in search results (generally) because of Forbes’ reputation.

If I can get quoted in Forbes or become a contributing author on Forbes.com and the quote/article includes a link to ScottAlanTurner.com, Google will see that link. My website posts get ranked higher in Google because it’s associated with Forbes.com.
The fancy term for this strategy is called backlinking. The more links you have from other reputable websites to your website, the higher you will show up in search results.

The easiest way to get those backlinks is to guest post.

Make It Easy To Share Your Content

All of your blog posts should have buttons that allow your readers to share your posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)
And it’s got to be easy!
Here are two tools I have used and recommend.

SumoMe

Another feature of the free SumoMe tool I mentioned in the email list building lesson is the free sharing tools it includes. It’s free!

Social Warfare

Social Warfare is the sharing plugin I currently use on my website. I used SumoMe at one time and then I switched to Social Warfare. For the life of me, I don’t recall why. I think Social Warfare had an email button and SumoMe didn’t at the time.
You have to decide which features you want and then pick the software that meets your goals.

Share Other Blogger’s Content

If I re-tweet or re-post content from Money magazine, it has zero benefits to me because Money magazine is a massive company that doesn’t care who I am. If the article was good it does benefit my followers.

If I re-tweet or re-post content from a popular blogger – (Stefanie O’Connell for example) – my readers and followers benefit because I’m sharing valuable content from other people.

NOTE: I’ll get into this in the section on Helping Other Bloggers, but be sincere in your help. If you only seek out to get something out of someone else, you won’t form a relationship with that person. I’ve liked Stephanie’s blog and content since I first saw it. She has an amazing story of being broke in New York City, and she’s built this amazing personal finance business in just a couple years. I help Stephanie because I like Stephanie, not because I want or expect to get anything out of the relationship.

It’s not possible for you to cover every single aspect of your topic. At some point, you have to share other people’s content. You’re going to get sick or want to go on vacation and won’t be able to write. Where will you turn? Other people’s content.

Link Your Posts Together

If you write ten different blog posts about different ways to make a sandwich, make an effort to link between your posts if it’s relevant.
For example:
• You have a blog post on making sourdough bread
• You then write another blog post on making an amazing grilled cheese sandwich
If your grilled cheese sandwich uses sourdough bread, link to your sourdough bread recipe.
There are two very important reasons for linking your posts together:
1. It keeps the reader on your site and makes it more likely they will read more of your posts. The more they read, the more page views you get, which increases your blog traffic.
2. Search engines see posts that link to one another as better than a post that has no internal linking. Your post will rank higher in search engines. Ten posts about bread recipes that don’t link to one another aren’t as good in the eyes of search engines as ten posts about bread recipes that do link to one another.
Don’t go crazy – only link to other articles when it makes sense.

Pin on Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the top traffic sources for many blogs. When I sat through a Pinterest session at a recent conference, I was blown away.
Bob over at SeedTime Personal Finance showed us how he was using Pinterest to generate over 1,000,000 page views in a year to his website. HUGE!
I’m no expert on Pinterest, nor do I want to be. I bought my wife Katie a course on Pinterest, and she set everything up on my blog. I’m now getting 1,500 visits a month to my blog from Pinterest.
While that’s much less than the 80,000/month Bob is getting, that’s still 1,500 people a month I may never have reached. I could do much better, but Pinterest is not a high priority for me.
Melissa over at Blog Clarity has the Pinterest course I bought. It’s very inexpensive compared to how much time it would take you on your own to seek out a bunch of free information on becoming a Pinterest expert.

Help Other Bloggers

Are you more or less likely to help me because I’m giving you all this great information for free?
You got that right – you’re more likely to help me. That help might come in the form of:
• Telling people you know about my website
• Promoting me on your social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)
• Sharing my content with others
• Linking to my blog from your blog
• Giving me a testimonial
• Referring me to someone you might meet in the future, even if it’s a year from now
A rising tide lifts all boats.
Other bloggers – even if they blog about the same topic – are not competition.
You wouldn’t believe how big the pie is, and there is plenty for everyone.
You can try to go it alone and not help anyone. The result will be it will take you 2-3 times longer to grow your blog. But if you sincerely set out to help others, they will, in turn, help you.
Warning: : When I say be sincere, I mean it. People can smell an insincere pitch a mile away. I was guilty of this when I first started blogging. If you start out becoming friends with other bloggers first, sometime in the future they will help you with your eBook launch, promoting your blog, your course, giving you an introduction to someone – whatever – because you’re friends.

A few months after I started blogging I went to a podcasting conference and ran into Philip Taylor (PT) of PTMoney.com. PT is a great guy. He introduced me to a bunch of people in the personal finance space that had been blogging and podcasting for years. He and I have become friends – I’ve even had him and his family over for dinner.
If PT ever asks me for help with anything, you can bet I will say yes. Because friends do that for one another.
Always give more than you get.

Action Items

A bunch more great of ideas, right? Let’s keep it simple.

1. Add social sharing buttons to your website

Hopefully, you’ve already added SumoMe to your website to start collecting email addresses. If you haven’t – go ahead and install it.

Add the free SumoMe Share tool so your visitors can share your content with their friends, family, and others. The more people share your site and content, the more viral traffic goes back to your site.

2. Identify one blogger you want to build a relationship with

Start following them on social (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) and repost one piece of their content 1–2 times per week.
If you want to get gutsy, drop them an email just to say hello and tell them why you like them. Sincerity wins.

3. Install the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress

Once you get this free plugin installed, it will help guide you in your writing of search-engine friendly blog posts.