Many new bloggers think that once they start writing their awesome content, if they optimize it correctly and build links to it, then Google will take care of their traffic for them. The truth is, if they do manage to do proper SEO that will/should bring in visitors from the search engines, it won’t happen in the first few months – and it will take much longer if they are aiming for any decent and stable amount of traffic. SEO is a slow dance, and recent changes have made it even slower, something you should be aware of from the get-go.
Once your blog is established, you have two options: You can follow your editorial calendar and publish content regularly, waiting for it to see the first visitors (other than your mom, your best friend and his girlfriend); or you can go looking for readers and start building your audience from the beginning.
It’s up to you which one you will choose – but it can get frustrating to put effort into creating content only to see zero visitors day after day. After all, if you don’t get any visitors right away, then you won’t get any feedback – so if your content doesn’t pass muster, you won’t know it, because no one but yourself has seen it.
If you’re ready to show your blog to the eyes that want to see it but don’t know that it exists, here’s how and where you will find them.
Find your niche communities and start participating in discussions there
While Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest can be great traffic generation channels, chances are that if you’re only just starting with your blog, you don’t have much of a following on social media. So you can build the following there while you’re building your blog audience. But you have to find them somewhere, and there are no better places for it than those where your audience is already gathering.
Go to Google to find forums, Q&A websites and other communities where your future audience is engaged, introduce yourself and start just helping people. It’s that easy; they will quickly notice you and many of them will want to check your blog out to see who you are, or to find out more about the topic you’re all discussing.
These communities are also great at giving feedback – you can simply ask the members for their opinion on your blog, what they feel is missing, how you could improve it. And if you do your part right, many of them will be willing to connect with you on social media, helping you to create the core of your new community.
Join a commenting tribe
Commenting tribes aren’t that easy to find, but you can start by googling for them, or finding them on Facebook. Commenting tribes are made by bloggers in same or similar niches, a kind of a blogger support group, where they make a commitment to comment on each other’s blog posts once or a few times a week.
Participating in one will bring you not only the visits from the blog owners, but from their readers and social media followers as well, and it’s a great way to create valuable relationships that can help you land some good guest posting opportunities.
Be a good guest
Yes, guest posting, you already know about that. But choose carefully the blogs you want to guest post on: since your goal is to get visitors, possibly subscribers, out of every guest post, you should choose only blogs closely related to your niche.
And once you establish a relationship with a blogger and publish your guest post, continue to work on that relationship so that they invite you to be their guest again – promote your post on their blog, participate in comments and reactions, and promote the blog itself to your networks. The hosts will appreciate it, and you will be a welcomed guest there.
Be a good host
On the other hand, when you’re in the role of a host, do everything you can to make the blogger feel welcome. Don’t forget that you’re also benefiting from their participation to your blog – the bloggers who know their stuff will be sending traffic to their posts, even if they aren’t published on their own blog.
About the Author
Andrew, from https://www.midislandcollision.com/, would like to summarize the post: Be sociable and helpful. Just like in real life, imagine that you have moved from one city to another where you don’t know anyone. It’s up to you whether you will wait for others to notice you thanks to your outstanding qualities, or you will go out and show them that you’re there. If you’re afraid, just think that the sooner you start, the sooner you will overcome the stage fright.
