29 Oct Learn how to Create and Grow your WordPress Blog Traffic (Revised & Updated)

I recently got asked by one of our readers,

What advice would I give to someone starting out and wanting to run a successful blog?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer or shortcut simple answer

Just hard work and a point in the right direction.

In today’s article, I will try to make it as actionable and useful as possible. These tips I pick up first hand from hacking away at online for almost six years now.

Since you are here, I will assume you have already chosen your niche and decided why you want to create a blog in the first place. Why and what you want to get out of it is important questions you need to ask yourself.

Here is the Quick version to creating a blog in under 5 minutes.

Buying your Domain

I strongly advise you to purchase a domain instead of using other alternatives like a yourbrand.wordpress.com. Most domain registrar providers are reliable I have used several over the years, but I would recommend NameCheap because you get a free whois guard. If you are struggling to find a good domain, check out this post on 5 recommended domain name generator.
 

Getting your Hosting right

It took us some years to get this right, in fact, it is still work in progress. A few years back when I was just starting off, I used to search web hosting forums for cheap hosting. Which I found for around $3 per month if not cheaper the only issue is the uptime wasn’t great, and the hosting company went out of business. From that, I lost every lesson learned no matter who you host with today alway keep a regular backup of your site.  Check out these free plugins to help you create a backup of your WP site. The other takeaway from that experience is that a reputable, secure hosting solution is always best which also give you room for growth. See our top cheap hosting providers and our most recommend managed hosting company.

Choosing the right theme

Picking the perfect theme an important factor to consider because it will be representing you and your brand. Since the launch of WordPress there and been thousands of theme release now it’s up to you to decide whether to choose a premium theme or a free on like ours. There is WordPress template for virtually all niches from business, photograph, magazine and much more. You can browse all our handpick round-ups here. For further reading on how to choose the perfect theme for you read this. We have created several theme collections of our most recommend templates for a personal blog, magazine themes and other niche themes that you can browse here.

Create a schedule (Consistency)

Just stop and think about this point for a minute if you favourite TV show came on randomly would you continue to try and follow each episode? One of the biggest factors, I believe that contribute to my success is being consistent with my content creation. This does not mean you have to be writing articles daily focus on quality over quantity. Just put yourself in your readers shoes would you want a daily post with little value or epic articles weekly. Over the past six years, I have created blogs in several different niches from pets, car, fashion, tech on so on. I have been experimenting over the years with posting frequency, and I can honestly say that have that fix posting calendar helps a ton. I have blogs within the fashion niche which I only post once a week, and it get just under 100k page views per month the same goes for my heath blog.

Keyword Research 

I will not get into this too much as there are already lots of tutorials on the web regarding this topic. A free and cost-effective method is to use Google’s keyword planner. We use this among many other methods such as keywordtool.io for long tail suggestions. Another method that as help us out is using services such as Quora and Twitter to pay attention to issue your potential target audience are facing. For more food for thought on this topic see backlino keyword research guide.

Creating Engaging content

Here you want to create content with a different approach or angle. What I mean by this is consider including videos, infographics or even a web app. We have a new post publishing soon in which we are creating a web app to make it more interactive and useful. Alway keep your readers in mind you are there to help and serve them. If you are not an expert on a particular topic, you might want to consider bringing a few on or interview several experts to get their input.

Reach out to influencers

Now that you have created some helpful and interesting content the work does not stop there. You want to reach out to influencers relevant to your niche. And present it to them and just ask if they like it whether they would consider sharing it with their social network.
 

Get involved in the wider community

Here at 85ideas, I always try to get involve in the wider WordPress community whether that’s in server Facebook groups, WordPress.org forum, Google+, Quora and so on. I urge you to find out where your audience hangs out and go and join in the conversation in a non-promotional way. You can comment on other blogs where ever your audience hang out the key to this is to be genuine and respect the platform terms.

Listen to your audience

You want to say lean and ahead, listen to what your users are saying about your site onsite and off it. I have had countless valuable inputs for our readers from recommendation to issues with our site and article suggestions. It is because of our readers why you are reading this article today. If you have not got an established community yet, I can’t say this more go over to Quora, Facebook group, Reddit where ever they are. Listen and offer a solution.

Best SEO Practices

It is no secret that a lot of bloggers rely on traffic from search engines to help growth their blog. I have not got any secret black hat tactics to share with you that will have you ranking tomorrow. But I can show you how to stand out in the search results to get better click-thru rates than your competition. This is all thanks to Schema.org markup; this is the extra bit of information you see in Google and another search engine. So if you are starting a blog reviewing movies and updating users on the latest releases and showing. Then it would be wise to have schema setup to display these extra snippets to your potential readers. See our most recommend schema markup plugins.

Of course, that is not all but making use that our on page stuff is well optimized meaning our site is fast-loading, user-friendly and crawl-able. To read our in-depth guide to WordPress SEO click here.

Build your mailing list

The is an excellent way to keep in touch with your audience and keep them updated when you have a new post or something worth sharing. We have written several articles on some of the top WordPress email subscription plugin. We are currently using Bloom, which I highly recommend due to its flexibility, ease of use and numerous targeting options.
 

Bonus tips

We are creating a free mini-course on how to ramp up your organic traffic from the major search engines, search our past articles to get access now.

Wrapping up 

Thank you for visiting, if you would like me to expand on any of the points mentioned, please leave a comment below. If you are facing any issues, please use the comment form below and I will try to reply promptly.  All the above is the blueprint I have used to create several successful blogs, and you can do the same too.