Blogging has become a complex art. What started as an online diary has turned into a way for people to build powerful presences on the web. Now over 150,000 blogs get created every day, and there are millions of blogs on the web. Some of these blogs have Alexa ranks under 100,000 while other blogs have no Alexa ranks at all. What’s the difference between the blogs getting thousands of daily visitors and the blogs that struggle to get one thousand visitors every year? The answer is these five secrets about blogging that others don’t want you to know.
- The subscriber list is everything. Even if your blog is getting hundreds of daily visitors, you need to grow your subscriber list. Your subscribers are the ones who get emailed each time you come out with a new blog post, share your blog posts, and buy your products. Optimize your blog for subscriptions by offering free prizes and having a pop up show up on your blog.
- SEO is overrated. I relied on SEO for over a year and saw small increases. These increases allowed me to go from 170 monthly views to 200 monthly views. When I focused more of my time on social media, I got the exponential traffic that continues to grow to this day.
- You need to have your own product. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra income, but if you do not have your own product, you are not establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. In order to make revenue from your blog, you must have your own product in place. On a successful blog, the blogger’s products bring in far more revenue than advertisements. Some of these successful bloggers don’t have advertisements at all.
- All social networks are important. You want to offer as many sharing options for your blog posts as possible. The only reason I now include pictures in my blog posts is so other people could share my blog posts with Pinterest. Make it as easy as possible for others to share your blog posts on as many powerful social networks as possible.
- Big social media audiences look really good. We have a natural tendency to believe that the person with the bigger audience is more credible than the person with the smaller audience. The power bloggers also happen to have big audiences on social networks, and those big audiences allow their content to spread while boosting their credibility.
The beans have been spilled, and the methods to grow your blog are right here. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you know any additional secrets about blogging? Please share your thoughts and advice below.
Great post Marc, however I think SEO isn’t overrated if you are targeting the correct keywords with low competition & high volumes. If you implement a great SEO strategy, while building your social media & not fully relying on SEO to bring in all your traffic, you’re on the right path. However I do agree that you shouldn’t put all your efforts into SEO and not build your social media.
Jay from http://EclecticElite.com
My opinion of SEO has gradually changed and I do see the importance of it. However, I don’t want people to think they have to succeed on SEO to have a successful blog. Thriving on social media and getting the traffic that way allows you to have your own platform which will also help out with the SEO traffic. People should start by focusing on social media traffic and then expand to SEO traffic later on.
Hello Marc, really nice post. I love writing and I am about to start my blog of lifestyle and inspirational articles on how to live healthier and happily. My question is how do I get traffic to my blog when I launch? I want this to be a source of livelihood for me. How do I grow my subscription and email list and what products do I sell? Bear in mind that my social media presence is not so great at the moment.
There are a variety of methods to get more traffic (social media, advertising, etc). Try a few methods and then hone in on the method that works the most. Once you master one method for generating traffic, you then expand onto other methods. You can sue a service like iContact, Aweber, or MailChimp to grow your email list. You sell products related to your niche. If you don’t have a product, you can create a book/training course or sell an affiliate’s product.
May I say SEO is a pain. I’m trying to get a message across to readers with my post not load it with useless words here and there to rank. I want to rank for authority not SEO. Great post Marc.
Thank you Suzanne. SEO is great for getting traffic but it shouldn’t be the priority. It’s better and easier in my opinion to grow a social media audience and an email list. The funny thing is that the more social media traffic I get, the more SEO traffic I get as well.
God bless you, buddy! Your insightful nature amazes, and inspires me all the time.
Thank you Tawseef. That means a lot to me.
SEO is not only overrated, it’s almost irrelevant. Strategies like on-page optimization, keyword frequency, directory linking… they’re remnants of a time when search engines were stupider. Yes backlinking works. But you know what works better? Spending that $10k/month on legitimate marketing — like creating great content, a smart distribution strategy, and data-driven conversion optimization. I enjoy reading your articles, Marc. I can always count on you to provide fresh and valuable perspectives.
Thank you Ersan. I am happy to hear that you like the content. No matter what promotion we do, everything comes down to our content. Readers only stick around and buy products if the content is valuable.
Blogging is definitely an art. Love the tip about always including pictures in blog posts so that people can share on pinterest. A picture could be used for instagram as well. Thanks for sharing!
My pleasure. Not only are pictures valuable to tapping into Pinterest and Instagram, but pictures also get the reader’s attention. On social networks like Twitter and Facebook, posts with pictures get more engagement than posts without pictures.