*This How to Grow Your Blog Resource Page is still a work in progress! I will be adding to it throughout the month- so check back again soon!
A few years ago I delivered the closing presentation at a blogging conference where I detailed the steps that I had taken as a blogger to grow my small blog into a bigger blog- and I am still stopped at conferences today by bloggers who tell me that my presentation changed the way they approached their blog and really helped them to grow! And while the past few years has changed EVERYTHING in blogging and social media- the good news is that we have more resources, tools, and analytics today to help us make smarter decisions and make the most of our precious time. But the fundamental process of how to grow your blog is still the same.
I call it the “blog improvement cycle”. You want to “get your house in order” first by presenting the best possible resource to your readers- and then look externally for additional ways to help your blog grow!
Step 1 of How to Grow Your Blog: Improve Your Blog Internally!
A good house must be built on a solid foundation! You shouldn't focus on building traffic and readership of your blog until your blog is ready to be presented as the best possible resource to your readers! That means that you site needs to load quickly, and have clean and orderly navigation to your readers can get to your best content.
The Foundation
Now I know that you can find literally dozens of posts online titled “How to Start a Blog” and you'll see that post of these posts talk about using Bluehost as a hosting company. I think that Bluehost may be a fine place to start as a small blogger- it is known for handling smaller traffic blogs well and it is indeed inexpensive- but who here is planning on staying small? Why not get started with a company that can immediately scale up with you?
Cloudways is a managed cloud-based hosting platform that is actually very simple and straightforward to use. I moved over to them (from GoDaddy) once my site reached over 100,000 monthly page views and I wish I hadn't waited so long to do it! I was experiencing serious site speed issues on my old server but I was terrified to move my site!
But with Cloudways- you can easily migrate your site to their cloud servers as a “test site” first- and test the heck out of it before you go live. Oh- and you do all of this for free- no strings attached! (I actually did it all myself!). But the best part is the “future proofing”- I can literally go into Cloudways at any time and increase my server size if my website is growing. Just a click and a setting change- and that's it! More room to grow! And it costs me less than $20 a month! So if you thought you had to pay a fortune for a large scale website- you don't. Go check out Cloudways for yourself to see!
WordPress.org is what you want to use for your blogging application for maximize SEO success. Please don't try to grow your blog using Blogger or even WordPress.com!
Genesis is the best “foundation” available for your blog that you can use (and trust me- I've used other themes including Thesis over the years). Right now Genesis is the theme that I use alongside of a child theme called FoodiePro (and no- you do not need to be a food blogger to take advantage of the clean style of FoodiePro!). There are a wide variety of settings you can use to manage the layout, design, and look of your site. And if you start to get comfortable with coding in WordPress- you have access to the style.css and functions.php files so you can further customize your site.
Graphics and Images
Fiverr is my go-to place for logo graphics or anything I need designed. You can scroll through various designers, get a feel for their work and then buy a design package rather inexpensively. I have found that the turn around time is usually just a few days and most packages allow you to request a number modifications to the design so you can tweak things to get them just the way you'd like!
PicMonkey
123RF
Building a Framework
Invite People to Your House
People gotta know that you want to invite them over to see your blog!
Get good at SEO
Sticky SEO
CONQUER- taught me about the importance of landing pages and linking together similar content for SEO success.
KWFinder
Tools: Yoast
Get good at Google Analytics
Skyrocket Your PageViews
Get good at Pinterest
Pinning Perfect
Simple Pin Media
Sinple Pin Mastercourse
Mastering tailwind
Tools: BoardBooster
Busy Budgeter book on BoardBooster
Tailwind
MeetEdgar
Improve Some More
Speed
Codeable
Spam- Akismet
Security
sucuri
newsletter
Sarah from Early Bird Mom book
optinmonster
convertkit
Affiliate
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing
PrettyLink Pro
The Blog Fixer
Seek and create more opportunities externally
Facebook groups for round ups
Guest Post
Link Ups (hire someone to do it for you)
Get paid writing gigs for other sites and write a strong bio
More Great Resources
Blog Critique
Spring the Blogging Marathon- written from a food blogger's perspective- Sabrina. This is a great head-to-toe re-examination of everything you are doing in SEO and Pinterest to get your blog seen by your target audience. Sabrina's focus on understanding a pin's virality and how to use that to your advantage when creating Capaigns in Boardbooster and pinning in tailwind.
EBA