The first several months following the launch of your blog are the most important. Countless would-be bloggers dip their toes in the water, only to be discouraged by a lack of early results, and quit. It is critical that you take a realistic approach, set reasonable goals, and implement a solid strategy.
Realistically, you shouldn’t expect mountains of traffic to come after you publish a few posts, regardless of how good they are. Building an audience takes time, and you should set your sights on realistic volume benchmarks right off the bat. Set a goal and give yourself a generous time frame in which to accomplish it.
Since most blogs fail within a few months, and it can take team to get out of Google’s sandbox, it’s probably a good idea to plan ahead eight to twelve months out. Use Google’s Adwords Keyword tool to get an idea of what kinds of volume keywords relevant to your site generate, and put some numbers together. For instance, if you are a baseball blogger, you should expect less traffic if you write about pitching mounds, than if you cover baseball news in general.
In the early stages, you probably won’t get many social media shares or reader comments. Still, comments, likes, and follows are critical to successfully growing your blog, so you should have a plan for addressing them.
Social Media
Perhaps the most critical step you can take early in your blogging experience is to properly address social media. This is where your network can be critical. Encourage your contacts to “like” your site on Facebook, follow your Twitter account, and share your content through social media channels. Now that your blog is established, their shares are more likely to be impactful. Their friends will notice their endorsements and possibly like your blog as well.
While it can be helpful to hold off on inviting your close contacts to share your work, don’t hesitate to proactively acquire anonymous followers. Create a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and Google +1 page immediately. Gradually follow others as you go, and many will inevitably follow back.
The injection of visible popularity based on the follows of your network will encourage strangers or casual readers to follow suit and share your content as well. It is human nature to avoid standing alone and readers typically “like” pages that are already popular.
Reader Interaction
Now that your blog gives users the impression that they are not reading alone, visitors will be more likely to comment on your posts as they will feel like they have an audience. Always, and I mean always, respond to user comments. Remember, readers comment because they believe their voice will be heard. You can actively prove it by instantly responding to any comment, suggestion, or criticism logged by a reader.
Doing so will turn a comment into a conversation, and encourage other passive users to join the discussion. The feedback you receive can give you new ideas and inspire additional posts.
Momentum
At this point, you should have cultivated a number of return visitors. Commenters will return to your blog to view follow-ups to their posts, and social media followers will come back to see whatever it is you are blogging about now. This is when you should begin checking your traffic data with some regularity.
You will see the return visits and be motivated, if not pressured, to produce new content! Building a loyal audience can be inspiring, and the attention you get will help you continue to update your blog with regularity. Before you know it, you will have cultivated an audience and crafted the niche you sought when you first began.
Andrew is an SEM/SEO professional and blogger. He currently contributes to Chicken Fried Baseball, a Texas Rangers baseball blog.
Thank-you so much for this post. I’ve had my business and blog up and running for a year now and have often been discouraged at how slow things have been going. Just earlier today I was thinking that I shouldn’t be so disappointed because in that last year I’ve learned a lot and while sales and page views aren’t nearly where I would like them to be they are increasing.
(P.S. Found your blog thanks to Triberr:)
Tushar says
In the earlier days, it is important to have a good healthy interaction with the readers and as they say, establish your credibility. Then you can move on to bigger things
kristeen says
Social media is a important thing to lift off a blog. It gives you 90% of the time good visitors. Lovely post, and thank you for the share.
sandeep Kumar says
This is the first time in my blogging experience that I was a female blogger from India.
Hats off to your effort…
Really great blog.
thinkingaboutinc says
Great! Hang in there!
Catarina Alexon says
Good and useful advice for new bloggers Jane. It took about 6 months for my blog to really take off and social media was the key to success. Depending on what subject you write about make sure you promote it on social media platforms with an interest in those subjects.
And Twitter is a great way of notifying your readers whenever you have published a new article.
thinkingaboutinc says
Absolutely. What social media platforms do you use?
Annie Andre says
I do a lot of commenting on other peoples blogs and i also find that the people who comment on my blogs are also other bloggers. What’s even funnier is that my friends who read my blog rarely leave a comment and are more likely to email me. I think commenting is great but it can be very time consuming. I’ve narrowed my socializing down to an hour every day because it can be all time consuming. Not sure if that’s wise or not but it works so far.
thinkingaboutinc says
I’ve noticed the exact same thing. I occasionally have to suggest commenting to my friends.
There are some really great tips here. Your advice to have a plan and set goals is excellent. I’d like to add to this that it’s important that new bloggers start early on to brand themselves and build awareness. One of the simplest things a new blogger can do is go to Gravatar.com and set up a (free) globally recognized avatar. That way, when they interact with us, we see their smiling face (or at least a graphic that we can associate them with). Personally, I recommend using a profile pic because it personalizes your avatar. This one step can go a long way in helping us recognize you and feel like we “know” you.
thinkingaboutinc says
I agree. I can never decide how often to rotate my pic. What are your thoughts?
I have yet to change my pic and I’ve been blogging for well over a year. I think my profile pic is similar to my logo. I’ve worked so hard to build awareness, I hate to risk changing it. What are your thoughts on this?
thinkingaboutinc says
You’re probably right. I want to change mine, but am afraid casual users will forget who I am.
Initial momentum for a blog is quite difficult but it isn’t impossible. One needs to have patience and keep building an authority with backlinks. Rest comes with time and hard work.
thinkingaboutinc says
Definitely. The challenge is building backlinks without setting off flags with Google.
junaid says
I totally agree that building traffic which is fanatical is really a harder work to do and we should not expect a lot of visitors after we publish a single article.Really good points.
Brian Hawkins says
Great points Andrew. I know it’s hard for bloggers to spends hundreds of hours building a blog just to watch it collect dust. I believe it’s all about building relationships and getting their name out there.
Planning ahead so far if you’re going to start up a blog is a wonderful tip, because once you get started, you’ll have more on your plate you’re going to have deal with, including writing new material. So if you already have enough to keep floating for awhile (content that isn’t time-sensitive), then you’ll be able to spend more time focusing on other aspects of the game.
Adam Justice says
This is good advice, people always look over the fact that you don’t get page ranked until the next Google PR update, you will not get crawled regularly until you are a PR 3 or better (except the crawls you initiate from webmaster tools) and you’ll only get a couple hits a day from search unless you have a database of hundreds of articles already anyway. It takes a long time to grow a blog organically, but if your content is good and you use good strategy, it will eventually happen.
thinkingaboutinc says
I think traffic can depend on your niche. All too often, bloggers choose to write strictly about content that generates high a RPM. Many people fail to realize just how competitive this can be.
Nice post.Very helpful for newbie like me.Thanks for sharing
I started blogging, nearly a month ago, What you wrote here is the best thing I read and needed to read at this stage. thanks you, all the best
Azhar says
I have used Google Adward Tool box for keyword research but for some keywords I have got wrong results. Can you tell me why is it happening ?
thinkingaboutinc says
I’m not sure what exactly you mean. Can you elaborate?
I agree with your tip to plan 8-12 month out. I think you don’t really see the results of your blog grrowth until you see it over a long period of time. The trend over 2-3 months can be almost impossible to spot. The key is to be consistent and not get discouraged after a few months. Try to learn something new everyday and just enjoy the process of blogging.
Getting past the first few months is a difficult process, and it’s easy to see this when we look at the many abandoned blogs that float on the web.
I’d say it’s an avoidable outcome if the people get a little prepared before starting, make plan, write some things down. It’s really not that hard.
Herbert says
I have been doing social media campaigns recently for my blog and I can say that its doing well
As for the readership of my blog, im looking forward to gain some soon as I am just establishing my blog. Thanks for this one Andrew
thinkingaboutinc says
Wonderful. What kinds of social media campaigns are you running? How do you go about executing a campaign?
Thanks to this post it gives inspiration to new bloggers and webmasters. As of the moment I use facebook and twitter I should say that it is really effective.
SEO is one of the strategies that may help to develop your websites and can gain more traffic in search engines. When it comes in local aspects, Social Media is the best way to look out customers and deals clients/ prospects.
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I am glad to hear that it is normal for blogs not to receive much traffic at first. I was starting to think I was doing something wrong.
Thanks so much for the insightful and encouraging post, Jane. I’ve been working on my blog for about six months now, and for a while I was getting a bit discouraged because I was under the impression that I should be getting tons of traffic by now. At least now I know not only that it can take a while for a blog to really get off the ground, but from your suggestions, I can say that I’m on the right track. Guess I just need to be a little bit more patient and spend more time on it.
For you to achieve success in the blogging industry, you have to plan, work hard and spend long hours in social media marketing. Success doesn’t happen overnight. You have to do research, acquire visitors and write quality articles. You may get overwhelmed with the things you need to consider in blogging but you need not to worry. Break your task into chunks and try to reach those chunks daily. This would make your goals easier to achieve and at the same time motivates you to reach the finish line despite of the bumpy road towards success.
I believed that having the right momentum is the core to success.
I’ve a friend who is running a business and got discourage sometime. But then she stands up back using social media as a big tool. And now i can say she’s successful and i know she can do more.