A couple of weeks ago I was graciously hosted by fellow author Nigeria Lockley. I wrote a post for #WriterWednesday about 5 simple ways to increase your blog traffic. Although it isn’t Wednesday I thought I’d re-post it on my blog today. I hope you’re all coping with the time change better than I am. Where the coffee at?
Have you been wondering how to make your blog work for you instead of you working for your blog? Have you racked your brain trying to figure out why your readers barely engage with the content you post? Well, today on #WriterWednesday the 2014 winner of the Very Inspiring Blogger Award, Faith Simone ofAll Things Written to Inspire and Encourage is stopping by The Neophyte Author to steer us all in the write direction.
5 Simple Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic by Faith Simone
Blogging is not for the faint of heart, but it doesn’t have to be super difficult either. At its root, blogging is intended for two things: sharing a person’s personal thoughts on a variety of subjects and connecting with others. That’s it in a nut shell. But we all know that many folks use their blogs as a way to sell products, make…
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Faith Simone 
Simple but effective, thanks for the reminder that no man is an island and for even the best of blogs to work it takes help from fellow bloggers. Keep the great info coming as I and many others appreciate you taking the time out for all of us to grow and be successful.
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Thanks Donald. Team work makes the dream work. 🙂
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Hey Faith Simone! Thank you so much for sharing this AND for explaining tagging. I generally tag posts in a general way i.e. “food”and “recipes” , but I never thought about adding specific tags like “easy” and “enchiladas.” I’ll give it a shot! Also, I took you up on your suggestion and goggled my name and I noticed that the posts I shared via Google + showed up near the top. ( I thought that might be helpful to your readers.)
Finally, I have one additional question. I noticed that both you and Nigeria Lockley have LOTS of email subscribers. I realized the importance of email subscribers a few months ago, but so far I only have about 30. And it can be discouraging! How have you grown your list to almost 2K?! Please forgive me if you’ve answered this in a previous post.
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Hi Simone! It’s amazing how small changes like tagging can make a big difference in helping interested readers find you. Google is my best friend and worst distraction…I’m obsessed! (Not with googling myself, although it is helpful). I’m still trying to figure Google + out. I just realized that I’ve have my posts there set to share privately instead of publicly for the last year, which is a problem because my main goal on that platform is to network with other writers/entrepreneurs, etc. I’m just now starting to utilize and build on that platform, but it’s a work in progress because I’m not even sure what a +1 is, lol! Thanks for bringing that up.
Email subscribers….sigh. I feel your pain in that regard, and I’m actually planning a full post about it soon. You’re right, it’s super important to build up your direct email subscriber list but I’m starting to think that quality over quantity is the name of the game here. While I have almost 2K subscribers to this blog, they are unique to this WordPress platform, but my actual list of email subscribers, rather than WordPress users is about the same as yours…so what does all that mean? Right now I’m bound to WordPress for my subscribers, and that could be a problem down the line, so my focus going forward will be to build a list of email subscribers that I could actually take with me on ANY platform, and also specifically geared towards readers of Women’s fiction/Christian fiction. I’ll use mail chimp or some other subscriber program for that.
Now to answer your actual question about how to build up followers/subscribers. There’s no one single way to do it. Keep blogging and interacting with other bloggers, taking your email sign up sheet with you to events related to your topic. I know you have a passion for helping to create and maintain healthy relationships and it’s faith based. So a good idea might be to always have an email request list ready at church events, singles events, couples retreats, etc. Also, promote your content like crazy on social media (I’m lax about this, but trying to get better at it). When you have solid content, it can be recycled for years. You never know what will strike a cord with lots of people, go viral, and suddenly you could have a few hundred thousand subscribers overnight (I’ve seen it happen). And when or if that happens, you want to have plenty of excellent content ready. My goal when I started just a little over a year ago was to produce the best content I can, and see what happens. I’m no where near where I want to be, but I’m farther than I was when I started!
Whew! This was waaaayyy longer than I intended it to be…I guess I need to write that post about subscribers sooner rather than later. I babbled a lot, but I hope I helped a little. Be encouraged Simone. 🙂
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Oh wow! Thank you for your generous explanation. I’d never thought about taking an email list to related events. I’m going to try that. I have to say it is super encouraging to see your blog’s success in a relatively short period of time! I’ve been blogging for a while, but I’m pretty shy about promoting. I’ll do better about that. Thanks again for the detailed response. Super helpful.
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You’re welcome Simone!
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Good stuff! Especially about consistency. We all have busy lives but if we can just manage to type two or three sentences about something at least once a week, people’ll rock with you.
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“People’ll rock with you.” I like that, and I’m stealing it as one of my new catch phrases!
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