What you should do when your blog does not seem to grow

Let me start by saying that before this blog, I did had another blog.

I put in so much effort and time in my first blog, I did everything I knew to make it grow but eventually that one failed.

Moving forward, I started learning all that I can about blogging, created detailed notes, discovered new pitfalls, learned so many stuff and then finally decided to stash everything I find while on my blogging journey in this blog.

So if you think that your blog is not growing and you kind of have a gut feeling that you drastically need to do something to make blogging work for you then here is my list of drastically need to-dos.

Change your writing skills

For this one let’s take an example:

I can write a long post like Wikipedia OR I can create content full of images.

What will you prefer, I know it’s going to be the one with images.

Try to change your writing skills where you can include some of your content in the form of an image if possible.

The best thing about creating such visual content is that you can use it for Pinterest pins, everybody knows that infographics are killer on Pinterest.

Another thing to consider is that some bloggers write in a plain and monotonous way. If this is you then you definitely want to polish your writing skills.

You can check how much your readers enjoy your content by checking your bounce rate and the time they spent on your posts and how many page views per session.

For my first blog, my post was very helpful but kind of lacked something and that something was fun.

So I started writing like I am talking to a friend

Just let the words flow on the paper, and soon you will realize that this is slowly improving your audience’s engagement.

Elegant blog design

Who would like to visit a blog with a horrible design?

If your blog design is not pleasing and does not look smooth, then your readers will definitely bounce back.

You should not choose too many colors, or your blog will look like a rainbow, diverting all the focus away from your content.

Your efforts should be to design your blog in a way where all the focus goes on to the content.

Make sure you are using at most two or three colors on your blog, your font style should be pleasing, and the size of your fonts should be just perfect to read.

Make sure not everything is crowded on your blog and you leave enough space in between each component.

To make things easy for you, go through a few of the blogs that you really like and try to make your blog look like them but do add your unique style also.

Enticing headlines

If your pageviews per visitor are really low, then it indicates that your headlines are not good enough to make them click it.

Your headline should be emotion-packed, try to use different trigger words to increase your headline clickthrough-rates.

By reading your headline, the reader should feel that if they don’t click on this then they are gonna lose something huge and valuable.

If you think that your headlines are perfect then the next thing to consider is your intro.

If the opening is poor then having the best headline would mean nothing, try adding your personal story into your opening.

Adding your personal story allows readers to connect with you.

Learn new stuff

Blogging is all about sharing your knowledge with your audience.

If you yourself are lacking something that means you won’t have anything to share with them.

And if you think that you know everything then I don’t see anything that can stop your blog from growing.

Always be on the lookout to learn something new about blogging.

Learn it, practice it and then finally show results to your audience, you can compile your knowledge into posts or emails or even a paid course.

Create a sitemap for Google

If you have just started your blog then it may take some time for Google to find your site and index it.

However, there is another way where you can ask Google to crawl your blog and index all the pages through “Google Webmaster Tools”.

Before going to webmaster tools, you need to have a sitemap on your blog, the simplest way to achieve this is through adding Yoast WordPress Plugin.

It automatically generates a valid sitemap for your blog.

Next is to submit this sitemap on Google Webmaster site, I will create a tutorial for this soon, so stay tuned for that.

Once you have submitted your sitemap on Google, you can actually check whether all your posts are indexed or not.

Also, you can check for any errors that google might have found on your blog, so make sure you regularly use this tool to keep your blog free from any indexing or other types of errors.

Do keyword research

One of the most important tricks for your blog to grow is to do proper keyword research.

This process starts with understanding your blogging goals.

If you are looking to sell something then you definitely need to focus on keywords that will bring you your targeted audience like “best Pinterest courses”.

If your goal is to get more traffic to your site then you need to choose those keywords which are less competitive and have more search volume, Like “How to use tailwind” or “what is tailwind”.

You need to choose keywords based on the intent, some are informational types like “what is Pinterest” and others are the more selling type like “best Pinterest for bloggers tips”.

In the later one, you can actually promote your own paid courses on how to make money through blogging and chances of getting a sale is high.

Whereas in the first example of “what is Pinterest”, the reader only wants to know what blogging is and has no intention of doing anything, hence even if you promote your product here, chances of getting a sale is very low.

A tool that you can use for finding such keywords is Google Keyword Planner.

It provides you with all the details that you need like competition or volume or category etc.

You also need to learn a bit about SEO and how to & where to use those keywords to reach your targeted audiences.

But, the results of any SEO changes are slow and you should wait don't discard your change before seeing results.

In reality, SEO is not too much, it’s just a basic checklist and most of those workers are done by plugins.

Provide immense value to readers

If you know that you have a great headline and also the SEO part is all taken care of then it might be your content.

Content that doesn’t solve anything means nothing. Who would you ever visit such a post?

If you understand your audience then you know what they are looking for.

And if you know what they are looking for then you should have a solution else they already know their problem, no need for you to say it again.

Your content should contain an immense value for your readers.

Characteristic for such type of post is that they are very long, not stuffed with fluff and cover those topics which are generally missing from other posts.

When creating such content, your goal should not be about word count, it should be about covering that topic in great depth, considering only about the quality and not quantity.

For such in-depth posts, readers would come to your post again and again to digest all the goodies you have for them since it will be too much to digest in a single go.

This is the most important factor in creating viral content.

Extensively use Social media button

In today’s world, if you are not on social media then you will reach nowhere, and this is a universal fact now.

If you don’t have social media buttons then get it, there are plenty of them that are free.

If you don’t have responsive social media buttons then get the responsive one because most of your audience browsing your site is on mobile.

When most of the newbie start blogging they focus on multiple social media platforms.

This was one of the major mistakes because of which my first blog failed.

When just starting out, try to master a single social media platform before jumping to another one.

My major source of traffic is Pinterest and I definitely recommend that Pinterest is huge for bloggers.

Make your blog lightning-fast

Many times, when I am researching my next blog post I encounter so many blogs that take like half a minute to load only.

What do I do, I reach for the close button and leave the blog without reading a word.

Nobody likes to wait, even if you think that your content is awesome along with the beautiful theme, if your blog is slow then many like me will just bounce back.

If you are using too many plugins on your blog then that may lead to poor page loading speed. Make sure you only use the essential ones.

Most of the newbie tries to use as many as plugins they like, but it makes your blog’s loading speed horrible.

The next big thing that degrades blog speed is the loading of all the images.

If you are using heavy images then you can actually compress it to a smaller size while keeping the quality of the image the same.

This way you can also save on the bandwidth of your hosting plan if you are on a limited one and also your blog is load instantly.

Stop overexerting yourself

When starting out, blogging can be overwhelming if you are doing all by yourself, just like me.

Getting help can be expensive but may increase your chances of success.

If you think that you are in no position of getting a helping hand and want to do all by yourself then you really need to learn some new productivity tricks.

I used to do all the work manually as much as I could, but later on, I found that there are plenty of tools on the internet for that.

If you are a one-man army and you really need to do everything and that too in limited time, then it will not only break you, but the quality of your content will degrade, and this will impact you on a larger scale.

No one is going anywhere and the surprising thing that I have observed is that those who do things slowly are more successful.

Slow and steady wins the race!!

Yeah! It does take little more time, but you will reach there knowing that you are on the right track and your work is not suffering.

Engage with your audience

Just as much you want your audience to engage with your blog and with you, the same way they also want you to engage with them.

If people comment on your site or on your social media profile, then engage with them, stir up a conversation and try to find what exactly they want help with.

If they get a reply from you, it shows that you care and perhaps it might interest them to stick around your blog.

Another advantage is that when you engage them, you get to know your audience better.

Even if you write thousands of articles and then also people going away then it is because what you are writing is not what people are looking for.

Learn for what reason they have visited your blog, understand the major pain point that they suffer from and try to provide a solution for that in your future posts.

Ask directly to them what is they are looking for or even what do they think is wrong with your blog, you never know their advice might be a fortune for you.