1. Post regularly. If you post once in a blue moon, you’re not going to attract many new readers – let alone keep existing ones. A consistent posting schedule keeps your site updated and lets readers know to expect fresh content regularly. This means you’ll get a lot of repeat visitors as well as give search engine spiders more pages to index.
2. Post a variety of content. Don’t just post text on your site. Make use of different media such as polls, slideshows, videos, comics, quizzes, etc. Using different formats helps break up monotony and shows that your blog has breadth. The more varied content you have, the more readers will consider your site an authority.
3. Do your keyword research. Optimizing your content for search engines is essential to showing up in search results. By targeting keywords with low competition, you can increase your site’s visibility in Google, Bing and other search engines. For example, jumping from position #483 to #12 in search results for a specific keyword can translate to hundreds – or thousands – of extra hits to your blog.
4. Always double check your work before you hit Submit. If a mistake or typo makes it into a print magazine or newspaper, that mistake is there for good. With blogs, though, you can always go back and fix errors. That doesn’t mean you should throw up your content without any regard for proper grammar, spelling and syntax. You want to make sure your posts are perfect the first time. Few things are as embarrassing as your readers calling you out in the comments section because you misspelled a particular word or misused a phrase.
5. Share your posts on social media. If you’re just starting out with your blog, social media will probably be your main traffic driver until you can build up enough backlinks and PageRank to get noticed by search engines. Whenever you publish a new post, make sure you post it on all your social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, etc. The best part about sharing your post on social networks is that other people can continue sharing the post, thus creating a viral effect. Who knows? Maybe one of your posts blows up in popularity.