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Hey there! Are you interested in starting your own blogging business? Do you want to earn passive income or build a full-time online business?

But, not sure how to start and grow a blog without the help of experts. Then you’re in the right place!

CONTENT IN MARKETING is a top-notch blog dedicated to content marketing. We offer easy to follow step by step guides, tutorials and software advice to help youjump-startandgrow your profitable online business,learn how to make money online, and be a successful entrepreneur. We are 100% supported by our readers (YOU).

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links on our blog are affiliate links (e.g. Bluehost). If you click on those affiliate links and purchase the products, we may earn a commission. It comes at no extra cost to you, but it supports us in running this blog and creating even more useful content free of charge to you.

After getting your blog off the ground, the next challenge is learning how togrow your blog. In this step by step tutorial about how to grow a blog, we’re covering the best proven strategies to drive more traffic to your blog, capture email subscribers and monetize a blog audience on a budget.

Now, before you can fully focus on these proven strategies to grow a blog however, you’ll of course need to have started a blog in the first place.

If you haven’t already done that, then head over to our step-by-step tutorial on starting a profitable blog and pick it up here once you’re ready to grow a blog.

How to Grow a Blog: 44 Ways That Really Work in 2024

Here’s what you need to do exactly to make your blog successful and profitable. These strategies are in no particular order:

1. Invest in a top-notch web hosting service
2. Add excellent navigation
3. Dig into your blog niche
4. Vary your content format
5. Collaborate with other bloggers
6. Submit a sitemap
7. Create a well-structured editorial calendar
8. Collect email subscribers and engage them
9. Drive more traffic from your email marketing
10. Make your blog’s email newsletter shine

11. Place lead magnets everywhere
12. Offer concrete value
13. Don’t let old content fade

14. Develop a content ecosystem for your blog
15. Optimize your blog posts for SEO
16. Target long-tail keywords
17. Know where your audience spends time online
18. Use paid advertising to experiment
19. Take advantage of Pinterest
20. Find the right websites to guest post on
21. Treat Quora as a goldmine of new blog readers
22. Compile impactful expert roundup posts
23. Co-host webinars
24. Get interviewed on podcasts
25. Launch a virtual summit
26. Notify every person and brand you mention on your blog post
27. Don’t underestimate featured images
28. Create highly shareable images

29. Make sharing your blog content easy
30. Target the most active readers and sharers
31. Diversify your content delivery mediums
32. Join active communities in your blogging niche
33. Involve your audience

34. Monitor social media for mentions of your blog
35. Build a community on Twitter
36. Give back to your blog readers (and make money while doing it)

37. Teach online courses for your blog readers
38. Regularly ask your blog audience questions
39. Make commenting as easy as possible on your blog
40. Offer hyper-relevant content upgrades
41. Know your analytics data like the back of your hand
42. Never stop A/B testing on your blog
43. Automate & outsource with tools and contractors
44. Continually experiment

Ready to Start Your Profitable Blog Today?

Check out our step by step tutorial on How to Start a Profitable Blog this Year.

Read Now

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Quickly, before we move into breaking down all of our best strategies to grow a blog, let’s define what we mean when we use the term growing a blog.

We’re not just talking about getting more readers to your blog. More importantly, growing a blog is also about building your email list and helping you to monetize your blog. To us, growing a profitable blog encompasses each of the following:

• Getting more readers to your blog
• Getting more email list subscribers
• Increasing your passive income
• Increasing your influence and authority

Getting more readers to your blog is all well and good, but we want you to have more than just a cool blog that people check out once and go away forever. We want you to have a blog that actively contributes to your financial independence and freedom.

And that’s why this step by step tutorial to growing a blog touches on each core stage of the blogging business journey. These are proven strategies that we still put into practice ourselves—and cost little more than your time, hard work, and a touch of creativity.

If you’ve already gotten your blog off the ground and are ready to start implementing proven strategies to grow your audience in 2024, then let’s dive right in!

1. Invest in a top-notch web hosting service

Let’s face it; a blog isn’t much without a quality web hosting service behind it. If you can only offer slow load times, potential new readers might find a different blog to meet their needs. Higher website speed also means better search engine optimization (SEO) so more readers will find you.

Fortunately, even cheap WordPress hosts can provide impressive hosting plans. Try to find one that offers top-quality hosting service while also fitting into your budget.

• Add excellent navigation

Nobody likes a blog website that’s hard to get around. A bad interface may even scare away readers who could otherwise become loyal fans. Thus, if you want to know how to grow a blog, try starting with top-notch navigation.

If you have a large blog website, try to keep the category hierarchies as clear as possible. In addition, blogs of any size can benefit from making sure no URL is more than three clicks away from the home page.

• Dig into your blog niche

Choosing the right niche for your blog is essential. It helps to focus your work and attract the right audience. As such, we recommend keeping your niche in mind for every element of design, ranging from your content to your blog theme.

However, don’t let your blog niche keep you in a box! Consider finding new ways to explore relevant topics that new readers will be interested in.

• Vary your content format

If you’re still wondering how to grow a blog, this next tip might surprise you: don’t be afraid to go beyond text. Using different format types can vary your content and make it more dynamic.

Try mixing a few different format types together, such as:

• Long-form, deep-dive blog posts
• Colorful graphics or flowcharts
• Relevant videos
• Collaborate with other bloggers

When you collaborate with other creators, you’re gaining access to each other’s audiences. You’ll also have new content creation ideas.

Don’t limit yourself to only collaborating with closely-related bloggers. If a creator is within your blog niche yet has a slightly different focus, working with them could be an effective way to reach audiences that might not even know they’d enjoy your work.

• Submit a sitemap

A sitemap is a file filled with information about your blog. Search engines like Google uses this data to explore and understand your blog. As such, it can play a role in your search engine rankings.

WordPress creates a sitemap for you automatically. However, if you want to make the most of this resource, you can submit your sitemap directly to Google using Google Search Console (GSC).

• Create a well-structured editorial calendar

The backbone of any successful and profitable blogging business and we cannot emphasize this enough, is a well-structured editorial calendar.

As we all know by now, the fundamental pillar of any great content marketing strategy is your ability to produce high quality content on a regular basis. Increasingly, that’s what the major search engines like Google are rewarding, so it’s an important tenant to learning how to grow your blog.

In order to find your target audience and bring them to your blog, you’ll need to be able to produce high quality content. To keep those readers, you need to be able to create, develop, and publish that high quality content at a consistent rate. While this sounds relatively simple on the surface, even the professional bloggers in the world will often struggle to meet this seemingly innocuous requirement.

Too often, bloggers take an ad-hoc approach to producing content. While this content marketing strategy might work for a while, it will inevitably lead to problems and stall out efforts to grow a blog—such as eventually running out of creative steam and not knowing which blog post ideas to pursue next, losing sight of your overall  marketing strategy, or missing deadlines and opportunities for promotion.

Without an editorial calendar, you’re never quite able to look beyond today and tomorrow. And how are you ever going to be able to grow your blog if you never get the chance to move beyond the short term?

A well-structured editorial calendar solves all of those problems by keeping your content organized, focused on your audience, and constantly flowing.

There are plenty of tools that can help you do this, such as CoSchedule.

• Collect email subscribers and engage them

Every online business lives or dies by the size and engagement of its email subscribers.

If you’re already getting readers but don’t make an effort to collect their email addresses, it’s going to be difficult for you to grow a blog in the long run.

Next to your blog, your email list is going to be the most important asset you have in your content marketing tactic to grow a blog—in terms of traffic and income.

For one thing, you actually own your email subscribers. By building an email list of engaged audience, you can worry a whole lot less about search engines or social media platforms like FaceBook suddenly changing their algorithms one day and finding yourself without an audience overnight. It’s one of the most long-term, sustainable ways to consistently bring visitors and readers back to your blog

Email marketing is not only the best way to grow a blog and bring back repeat readers—it’ll also be your primary method for reaching out and communicating with your audience on a personal level. Even something as simple as a newsletter that provides updates on your latest blog post and what you’re working on will go a long way towards building that sense of know, like, and trust that your audience has with you. You’re also giving them an easy way to share your blog content with others.

Start exploring different strategies to grow your email list, such as lead magnets, pop-ups, and content upgrades (don’t worry; we’ll be getting into these a little later). Make sure you’re also managing your email list with the right blogging tools like ConvertKit.

Whether your blog is big or small, getting started with email marketing is easy. It’s also relatively cheap, with a likely high return on your investment – so if you’re wondering how to grow a blog, this is the logical first step.

• Drive more traffic from your email marketing

While expert bloggers already know the power of email marketing and the importance of capping off marketing messages with a strong call-to-action, chances are you’re still missing out on a prime piece of email real estate for driving traffic to your blog.

Your email signature.

Forget about using your email signature as the basic means to share your quick contact information.

Instead, start utilizing your email signature as a way to actively grow a blog and promote your latest blog posts. Whether you’re emailing a client or a potential lead, including a link to your useful content is the best way to spread your brand awareness and show off your knowledge and expertise.

You can even take it a step further by creating a strong CTA for your highest-converting or best-performing blog posts as a way to generate direct conversions.

1.  Make your blog’s email newsletter shine

First things first—if you want to grow a blog and email subscribers, you need to give your new subscribers a strong reason to stay. The key to that is crafting a killer email newsletter.

Don’t just treat your email newsletter as another way to notify your subscribers about your latest content because it can be so much more than that. A well-done email newsletter provides your subscribers with the latest news, updates, and content from your blog and allows you to connect with your target audience in a highly personal and engaging manner.

Give your email subscribers a reason to be excited every time they find an email from you sitting in their inbox.

1.  Place lead magnets everywhere

It’s hard to find the most tried-and-true way of gathering email subscribers to grow a blog, than lead magnets.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a lead magnet is a special piece of content that can only be accessed once someone has given you their email address. Through using lead magnets, you can quickly grow a blog and email list with loyal fans and potential customers.

The most effective lead magnets always solve a real pain experienced by the reader, clearly demonstrate the expertise and value of its creator, and promise an actionable solution. As long as you hit these three things, your lead magnet can be anything from writing an eBook to offering a pre-recorded webinar.

Once you have your lead magnet, it’s just a matter of getting it clearly placed in front of your readership. You can do this by promoting your lead magnet on your blog through pop-ups, banner ads, text placements and visual callouts in relevant posts, and regularly sharing it over on your social media channels.

1.  Offer concrete value

This is a simple yet crucial concept; you need to offer your visitors a tangible benefit. This can be anything from answering relevant questions to providing recommendations.

How you approach offering value will depend on the type of blog you run. However, one marketing strategy can apply to most blog niches; try to answer the question “Why should my readers care?” as early in each blog post as possible. That way, new readers will be more likely to invest in the answer.

1.  Don’t let old content fade

As you create more useful content, older articles are bound to get pushed to the back of your bog. However, there’s still a lot of potential there, so you may want to consider updating and reusing older content.

When you do this, try to focus on your highest-performing articles. That way, new readers can see the best you have to offer, and you can make sure that content continues to rank well. You can make this task a lot simpler with a plugin like Revive Old Posts.

1.  Develop a content ecosystem for your blog

While your blog should not strive to be everything to everyone all at once, it does need to be a place that your target audience can rely upon as the ultimate authority on a specific topic. And to achieve that, you need to create a content ecosystem in order to grow your blog.

Everything you publish on your blog needs to relate back to something else that you’ve previously published.

On a practical level, what this means is that instead of sending your blog readers to an external website whenever you want to link to a more comprehensive resource on a topic, you can instead direct them to a different article on your blog.

This way, as soon as someone finds a piece of your content just by clicking on most of the links in your blog posts, they’ll continue to stay on your blog and within your sphere of influence—which is why this is such a great marketing strategy to grow a blog.

To achieve this, you’ll want to adopt a hub-and-spoke model with your blog content.

The hub-and-spoke model is essentially a visual graph of your content ecosystem.

At the center (or hub)—you have your content pillars. These are your authority pieces, your evergreen content, and the in-depth guides that cover your major blog topics. Here on our blog, there are authority pieces on topics that cover every major segment of what our audience is learning about—like how to start a blog and make money, the best web hosting services for bloggers, the best high ticket affiliate programs for them to join when they’re ready to monetize their blogs and more.

From there, you create your spokes—the pieces of content that are designed to drive more traffic back to your hub guides.

Whenever you’re publishing a new piece of content, whether that’s on your own blog or someone else’s in a guest blog post, you want to link back and build authority for your major hub guides. Not only will this help grow your blog in the long run, but it’ll greatly improve your blog’s SEO and help you gain a better understanding of how all your content ties together within your content ecosystem.

1.  Optimize your for Onsite SEO

In today’s fast-paced environment, any blogger worth their salt should at least have a basic understanding of how to optimize a blog post for SEO.

Before you even start to write a new blog post, do some basic keyword research to adhere to smart blog SEO strategies and figure out which keywords you should be targeting.

You can do this by taking advantage of keyword research tools out there, including Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Google Keyword Planner.

From there, it’s just a matter of adhering to best practices for SEO optimization and making sure to include your target keywords in your blog headlines, your URLs, image file names, and so on.

While there’s certainly a lot more you can dive into with SEO, having the basics down will make it a lot easier for you to rank your content on search engines like Google.

To help you out, make sure to check out Yoast SEO if you’re running a WordPress blog.

It’s one of the most useful WordPress plugins that helps you to optimize the SEO of a blog post by testing your page for you and giving suggestions on how you can improve your onsite SEO—helping to grow a blog in a meaningful way.

1. Target long-tail keywords

One way to boost your Domain Authority and start generating more organic search traffic to your blog is to focus on long-tail keywords.

While those high-volume keyword phrases may look bright and shiny with their promise of hundreds of thousands of monthly searches, don’t be fooled by pursuing those straight out the gate. We can guarantee you that thousands, if not millions, of other blogs are attempting to rank for the same keywords—and a good chunk of them probably have a much higher domain authority than your blog.

Here’s an example to illustrate the difference between short keyword phrases and long-tail ones:

• Short keyword phrases: email marketing
• Long-tail keyword phrase:  email marketing for startups or email marketing for travel bloggers

Instead of chasing after those high-volume keyword phrases, shift your focus to long-tail keywords that are more niche-specific… so instead of writing a review of best blogging platforms or writing a range of Bluehost reviews (with a lot of competition), you could instead start by targeting more niche search terms like “free blogging platforms for photographers” if a segment of your audience includes photographers.

These are keywords, or phrases, that generally have three or more words. While long-tail keywords have a lower search volume, they more than adequately make up for it in the ROI they can bring you in your efforts to grow a blog.

1.  Know where your audience spends time online

Let’s take a moment to think about the best places to promote content and thus grow a blog.

A common mistake we see with new bloggers is promoting their new blog posts on every social media platform that they can think of. This kind of approach is highly ineffective—both in the fact that it’s a huge waste of your time and resources and that you’ll probably only end up with a disappointing ROI at best.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes.

Think about what websites they like to visit, what kind of forums they might participate in, and which social media networks they’re most likely to use. For example, LinkedIn might be your best option if you have a very business-oriented blog, whereas if you have a mom blog, then Pinterest is probably the platform for you.

Do not waste your time sharing content with an audience that doesn’t care. Instead, make it easier for your target audience to find you by figuring out how to get your content directly in front of them.

1.  Use paid advertising to experiment

While we’re all about growing blog traffic as organically as possible, we can’t deny the power of paid advertising as a way to experiment and learn.

If you’re lucky, you may even dial in a paid acquisition process that’ll help boost your blog’s overall exposure and conversion rates.

When you have a particularly high-converting page that you want to promote, take advantage of Pinterest promotion, Facebook ads campaign, or Google AdWords to drive your target audience to that page and see which channels convert best.

1.  Take advantage of Pinterest

Pinterest is very quickly becoming the secret weapon for most bloggers looking to grow their blogs.

Pinterest outshines its other social media networks in its ability to generate a higher ROI, with one study finding that marketing on Pinterest produces 380% greater sales than your average digital marketing campaign. As if that wasn’t enough, the average Pinterest post is also 100 times sharable than your average tweet, and according to Tailwind, the average lifespan of a pin is at least one week, whereas content on Facebook lasts only 80 minutes.

Take advantage of Pinterest by creating eye-catching images of your blog posts, and share it to relevant boards and groups to grow your blog.

•  Find the right websites to guest post on

One of the best ways to quickly grow a blog by improving your level of domain authority and influence is guest blogging on other people’s websites.

The best part about guest blogging is that it allows you to share your expertise with a pre-existing community of engaged readers while simultaneously establishing your authority amongst your target audience.

Try thinking of your guest posts as sampler material for your blog content. By regularly publishing high-quality posts on a variety of other authoritative websites, you’ll be able to attract the attention of your target audience and have them craving more.

The key to effective guest blogging, though, is making sure you’re finding the right authoritative websites to guest post. It won’t help much if you’re posting on websites that none of your target readers would ever think to visit—that’s not exactly helping to grow your blog.

Start by creating a list of websites that you know that your audience trusts, and see if you can get in touch with their editor. If you’re brand new to blogging, then start with other writers in the niche you blog about, that are a little more established—don’t immediately rush to inquire about writing for websites like Forbes or Entrepreneur.

It might take a while to get some traction, and you’ll certainly have no shortage of rejections, but if you’re sending strong cold emails, taking the time to write a blog post outline that’s geared toward their readers, then as your blog grow, you’ll find that it gets easier and easier to write for bigger and better blogs.

•  Treat Quora as a goldmine of new blog readers

Quora is a question-and-answer forum that allows anyone to respond to questions across a wide variety of topics and users. Unlike its somewhat deformed and red-headed cousin Yahoo Answers, Quora possesses a highly-moderated community that generally provides questions and answers of much higher quality than other similar websites.

A tactic that we’ve used to grow our blog is to find genuine questions that are relevant to our niche (blogging) and spend a meaningful amount of time delivering in-depth answers to those people.

Within our answer, we’ll typically add a call-to-action to a relevant blog post that we’ve published in the past, which is a great strategy to grow a blog with incremental referral traffic as you build a reputation.

•  Compile impactful expert roundup posts

For an easy way to create high quality content, network with influencers, and grow your blog by boosting credibility and expertise at the same time—look no further than compiling expert roundups.

With an expert roundup post, what you’re essentially doing is crowdsourcing a blog post from a variety of influencers in your industry. By simply associating your own name with other authorities and influencers within your blog niche, you’re signaling to your audience that you also have similar levels of expertise.

Not only does this give your blog post extra credibility, but if you can get any of these influencers to share the blog post after it goes live, that’s a strong vehicle by which you can grow a blog.

As an alternative tactic to grow a blog, you can also make it well-known that you’d love to participate in other blogger’s roundup posts. Dive into your network. Find social groups with other bloggers and actively share your advice when others have questions.

With this approach, you can write a short but still valuable answer and get mentioned alongside other big names within your blog niche.

•  Co-host webinars

Another way to consistently grow a blog by getting in front of an engaged audience and demonstrating your expertise—is to co-host a webinar with a well-known brand, more established blogger or company in your industry.

Many brands and bloggers today run webinars as a part of their content marketing strategy, and most of them are always looking for creative ways to bring more value to their audience by having an expert to share valuable knowledge.

•  Get interviewed on podcasts

Even if you don’t have your own podcast, that doesn’t mean you can’t still take advantage of both the growing popularity of podcasts and the need of podcast hosts to have on interesting guests.

There are more and more shows springing up every day, and all of them are hungry to provide unique and valuable content for their audience. What that means for you is that there are practically endless opportunities for you to get interviewed by a podcast—provided, of course, that you have something worthwhile to say.

But don’t wait around for podcasts to notice you and your story. Get a head start on this marketing strategy to grow your blog by reaching out to a handful of podcast hosts every week and seeing who’d be interested in bringing you onto their show.

•  Launch a virtual summit

While nothing beats the ability to connect and communicate with people face-to-face, that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve similar results and grow your blog at the same time through video interviews.

Virtual summits are fast becoming one of the best ways for influencers to network with other influencers in their space and get their brand in front of an engaged audience.

While hosting a virtual summit requires no small amount of work, it’s a strategy that can pay off hugely in the sheer amount of leads and exposure it can bring you.

•  Notify every person and brand you mention on your blog post

One way to greatly increase your chances of having your blog post distributed is to mention as many influencers as tastefully possible within your blog post.

The mention could be anything from including a quote by an influencer, to using their story as a case study, or simply linking back to one of their blog posts as an additional resource. The purpose is to build a meaningful relationship by providing value first.

As long as it’s contextual and there’s a good reason for you to mention them, you have yourself a great excuse to then cold email the influencer and ask them if your blog post is fit to share with their audience. Don’t forget to make it as easy as possible for them to share (by providing them with a link to an existing blog post that they can re-share).

Plus, even if they don’t end up sharing your blog content, this is still a great opportunity for you to network with influencers, get on their radar, and plant the seeds for what could become a larger relationship over time.

•  Don’t underestimate featured images

Featured images are a simple, visual way of showing blog readers what your content has to offer. They can also be shared on social media websites, meaning they can play a vital role in attracting new visitors.

We recommend choosing images that are consistent and fit your brand.

If you don’t have a graphic designer on staff, never fear! Tools like Canva and Crello make it easy to create great-looking featured images from your browser.

For a really simple approach, you can always use free stock photos instead.

•  Create highly shareable images

One of the very basics of making your blog content as shareable as possible and thus growing your blog traffic is to include shareable images within your blog post.

Kick your strategy on how to grow your blog up a notch by creating graphics specific to supporting sections within your individual blog posts. This can be something like a simple graph that visually represents a fact or statistic you just mentioned.

Not only does using high-quality images within your content make your blog post more readable by breaking up large chunks of text, but it’ll also make your entire blog post a lot more engaging to read and far more likely to be shared.

•  Make sharing your blog content easy

The more effort it takes for someone to share your blog content, the less likely they are to share it.

This might seem to be a no-brainer, but there are a lot of blogs out there that don’t seem to have realized this yet—and are consequently missing out on crucial opportunities. If you want to grow your blog, share your blog content as painless and easy as possible for your readers.

Other simple things you can do to increase your content’s share-ability and grow your blog are to include social media sharing buttons throughout your blog content and suggest which hashtags your readers can use.

•  Target the most active readers and sharers

There are influencers out there with millions of followers who haven’t created a single word of original blog content.

But they’ve managed to amass a large following because their followers can always rely on them to share the latest and best content within their blog niche—and these influential aggregators are a huge opportunity to tap into as a way to grow your blog.

•  Diversify your content delivery mediums

Believe it or not, not every person consumes content in the exact same way.

Some people enjoy reading long-form articles, while others might prefer watching a video or listening to a podcast. The great news is that you don’t need to come up with an entirely new blog topic, or even create any more content, to take advantage of these different content types as a vehicle for how to grow your blog.

As the name suggests, diversifying your content delivery is all about taking a single blog post and reworking it so that the same information can be expressed in a different way.

For example, if you’ve already written an exhaustive long-form article on something, consider turning that article into a pre-recorded webinar, embeddable video, or podcast episode as well. Or, if your article is heavy with facts and figures like my guide on how to start a blog and make money this year, it could be well spun into an infographic.

One very important thing to keep in mind before you start diversifying your content is examining who your ideal customer profile is. There’s no point turning your blog post into mini-articles on Twitter if your readers don’t even use Twitter. If they do use Twitter, however, consider creative ways you can employ to better scale your results on the platform without investing too much time as you experiment and learn.

Take a moment to think about what kind of content your readers likes to consume, and focus your efforts on those specific types of content that stand a chance of helping to grow your blog.

•  Join active communities in your blogging niche

No blog exists in a vacuum. If you’ve picked a blog niche with some popularity—then you’re really in luck.

While we might have romantic ideas of going it alone learning how to grow your blog without ever needing help from others, the reality is that there are literally millions of blogging communities out there filled with other bloggers who are more than happy to share your blog content with their own audience.

Some great blogging communities to join include Product Hunt, GrowthHackers, Triberr, BlogEngage, and DoSplash.

Depending on your blog niche, some blogging communities will work better than others, but rest assured that in any one of those blogging communities you’ll find no shortage of opportunities to network, build relationships and grow your blog through amplified content sharing.

•  Involve your audience

Engaging an audience can be tricky, but it’s also effective. Likes, comments, and especially shares can be an easy way to organically spread the word about your blog.

Try to increase these metrics by including a call to action (CTA) at the end of your blog content.

•  Monitor social media for mentions of your blog

Something that new bloggers overlook when they’re just starting out learning how to grow a blog is the “social” aspect of social media.

Social media is more than just a place for you to promote your blog content—it’s also a space where you can interact and communicate with your readers in an informal and personal way. Ultimately, the strength of your relationships with your audience will often dictate how likely they are to invite new readers over to your blog content.

The trick to playing an active part in that conversation is social media monitoring.

Make use of social medial marketing tools like Mention and Buffer Reply to get notified whenever someone mentions your brand or the name of your blog online. You can use social media monitoring to do anything from sending a personal thank you message any time someone shares your content unasked to gaining insight into what your readers are like or even as a way to resolve customer service issues before they can escalate—thus proving a very useful way to grow a blog over time.

•  Build a community on Twitter

With 245 million daily active users, Twitter is undoubtedly one of best social media platforms for engaging with your audience and growing your blog readership.

You can engage with your audience on Twitter by regularly responding to any tweets that mention you and your blog and also by starting your own public conversations with your audience.

For example, starting a hashtag chat can be the best way to center a conversation around a specific topic with your audience while also having anyone who participates in that discussion feel like they’re a part of your community—as well as having the option to invite others into the chat.

•  Give back to your blog readers (and make money while doing it)

More than just a way to make money as a blogger, affiliate marketing also presents bloggers with a unique opportunity to further nurture that sense of trust and loyalty with their readers.

When it comes to learning how to grow a blog by providing value to your audience, one of the most helpful things you can do is to direct them to products and services you know they’ll love.

Any time a reader takes your advice and has a positive experience with a product that you’ve promoted on your blog, they will feel rewarded and grateful for having placed their trust in you. It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way in further developing that relationship you have with your audience.

•  Teach online courses for your blog readers

Most articles will talk about how online courses are the best way to make passive income, but one critical element we often overlook is its ability to deepen the relationship you have with your audience.

From the get-go, teaching an online course immediately sets you up as an authority and expert on whatever it is you’re teaching. Anytime someone signs up to your online course, they actively acknowledge that they respect and trust your expertise, which is always the best foundation to build a relationship upon.

Short of doing one-on-one consulting, an online course is probably the most engaging and personal way you can grow a blog and communicate your knowledge to your readers. By regularly engaging with your students, answering their questions, and sharing advice, you can turn every single one who takes your course into a loyal fan.

•  Regularly ask your blog audience questions

As we mentioned above, in order to grow a blog, you must be able to consistently provide value to your audience.

The only way to achieve that is to be intimately familiar with who they are and what they care about.

In the latest blogging statistics, marketers often stress the importance of knowing your audience’s demographics. While that information is certainly helpful, just knowing where your audience lives, their gender, or their level of education doesn’t provide any real insight into what makes them tick.

The only way to truly gain insight into your audience is to go directly to the source and ask them yourself.

By regularly asking your audience questions—whether via a tweet or customer survey—you’ll be able to gain a more complete understanding of what their real problems are, the kinds of solutions they’re looking for and the best way you can address their challenges. This’ll provide valuable insights about new avenues to grow a blog that benefits both you and your readers.

As an added bonus, while regularly questioning your audience is an effective way to keep them engaged, it also shows that you care about what they have to say and that you’re willing to speak with them, not just to them.

•  Make commenting as easy as possible on your blog

If you want your readers to keep coming back, then you need to make it as easy as possible for them to engage with you—and that means making it as easy as possible for audience to comment on your blog posts.

One of the most undervalued pieces of real estate on any website is the blog comment section. One of the reasons you chose to learn how to make a website in the first place was to connect with people, right?

Much like your email list, you actually own your blog comment section, and you don’t need to rely on other platforms in order to build a community around your brand. By creating a thriving comment section for every one of your blog posts, you’ll be able to converse, swap ideas, and engage with your readers in a way that isn’t possible through other mediums.

Another benefit with encouraging blog comments is that it gives new audience immediate social proof that you have a blog post that’s worth reading. And it certainly also doesn’t hurt that your blog gets that extra little kick of SEO juice anytime someone mentions your target keywords in their comment.

Consider removing friction points, such as requiring audience to fill in captchas or forcing them to register before they can comment. While you might be making it harder for spammers to get through, you’re also definitely making it harder for your readers to engage with you.

•  Offer hyper-relevant content upgrades

Anytime you have a popular piece of content that’s generating a lot of traffic, you have a prime opportunity for a content upgrade.

Simply put, a content upgrade is when you strategically place a lead magnet into the middle of a relevant article. While simple, this is an insanely powerful tactic that saw bloggerBrian Dean boost his conversion rates by 785% in just one day.

Content upgrades are highly effective as a way to grow a blog because you’re offering your audience something that you know they want.

•  Know your analytics data like the back of your hand

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This truth is no clearer than when it comes to learning how to grow a blog and drive more traffic.

An essential part of growing a blog is knowing exactly which metrics to measure and what data sets you should analyze. Without a working knowledge of the numbers that drive your blog, you won’t be able to spot opportunities to further improve and optimize, let alone understand how to grow a blog in the first place.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, we highly recommend checking out MonsterInsights to help you decode and fully understand your blog’s analytics. All you have to do is link it to your Google Analytics account, and you can immediately start tracking how long people are staying on your website, what your most popular blog posts are, and much more valuable info.

•  Never stop A/B testing on your blog

A/B testing  compares one version of a page against another. It studies traffic and conversion data to determine which version performs the best. By conducting this type of research, you can boost your odds of more visitors and conversions.

Plus, you don’t have to stop at landing pages. You can A/B test everything from blog layouts to your home page. If you’re not getting as much website traffic as you’d like, consider using this strategy to find ways to improve.

•  Automate & outsource with tools and contractors

The great thing about running a profitable blog is that most of the tasks involved in maintaining its growth can easily be automated once you’ve built a certain amount of momentum.

With the right tools in place, you can take a step back from the day-to-day management and focus on the long-term growth strategy to grow your blog.

And if you’re also hosting a podcast to supercharge your blog growth, you can turn episodes into blog posts.

•  Continually experiment

Finally and perhaps most importantly—never be afraid to experiment with new ideas and processes that could help you better learn how to grow a blog.

The great thing about content marketing is that it’s a constantly-changing landscape, and the ones that manage to stay at the top of their industry are always those that are willing to experiment with new strategies and tactics.

That’s how to grow your blog!

If you’re trying to understand how to grow a blog in the best way possible, all of the potential approaches on offer can be enough to make your head spin.

Fortunately, this process doesn’t have to be a mystery. By understanding some of the basic strategies, you can start expanding your user base right away.

In this article, we’ve covered 44 proven strategies for how to grow a blog. While you probably won’t use all of them, we’d suggest starting with a few of the strategies that are best suited to your readers and blog niche, then coming back for more ideas whenever your blog grows stagnant.

So, what’d we miss?

What are your favorite ways you’ve used to grow a blog?

Share with us in the comments below!