Every blog should start with a main objective.
Whether you’re doing it as a hobby, or looking to make a profit from it, you need to first thinking about who your audience is if your content will drive the volume of traffic you want to the site from the search engines.
After all, if the plan is to monetize your blog, you first need traffic to give your website/blog any value so that it is worth convincing advertisers or affiliate networks that your site could make money.
But the issue with blogging is it is very easy to start on the right track but go a little off course as you add more content and possibly slightly go off niche a little. And you may not notice it immediately but Google may start to drop your rankings if your content is ‘diluted’ by old content or non-related content.
But think of your blog like it is a car, and that occasionally it needs tuning up and a clean up to ensure it doesn’t lack performance.
There are a few ways to get your blog back on track without a massive amount of work…
Review your primary Objective again.
When you first started your blog you most likely had an objective in mind, but as time goes on and you either go off on a tangent or just get bored of writing about the same niche and you start to love that objective.
Grab a piece of paper and writ the primary objective in large letters, and then under it write what is currently helping reach that objective and what isn’t. For example, your banner advertising on your site may not be getting as many clicks. Find out why, such as if the banners are too low on the page, or the site is starting to slow down due to too much content.
Both these can be fixed very easily by moving a few things around, and for your content you can run optimization plugins to speed up the site and database.
The Audience
Do you still have your original audience as the focal point of your website? You may find that as you’ve been adding content you have been slightly changing the content to suit a different audience, without even knowing. Remove or edit any posts that are not well related to the larger audience. And ensure your content is still as valuable today as when you first started. Some bloggers can get lazy, which can change the value of the content if it isn’t well written. Focus on high quality content and always do your research first. By simply doing a search on forums or even typing in a couple of words in Google can assist in what people are searching for.
Build your mailing list
Traffic is the key to any successful blog, and if you can gain visitors that return time after time and spread the world of the blog at the same time you’ll find your organic visitors will grow fast. The best way to grab return visitors is with an email marketing list. Using a popup form or just a standard banner and integrating it with Mailchimp or one of the other free mailing applications, and you can ensure visitors will join the list, allowing you to send out a new email once you have added something of value.
Promote your Blog on Social Media.
Social media is a great way to promote your blog, and by posting your posts onto the Facebook page makes it easy for people to like and share your posts.
There are a few ways to get maximum return on your social media posts.
The first is to ensure your post is ‘newsworthy’. Using a plugin such as Yoast SEO allows you to upload not only a feature onpage into your blog post but also add a unique feature image for your social posts. These can be different to each other, particularly as the social media image should be eye catching enough to get people’s attention fast.
By copying the URL of your post and pasting it into your Facebook updates will automatically pull through the image content for your post, which becomes a clickable object, leading the reader back to your main website/blog.
You can also pay to boost your posts which works very well usually, depending on your audience.
Ensuring these few simple things are reviewed every few months can make a massive change to your visitor traffic and income from the site.
