How Long Will It Take To Build An Audience For My Blog?
Unlike Rome, a blog can be built in a day. In fact, with many blogging services and sites a blog can be built in 15 minutes. But a successful blog can take months or even years to build a large audience of regular readers. But like any other worthy endeavor, building a successful blog through hard work and smart strategizing will result in a valuable asset for your business – a collection of readers with the potential to become leads and customers.
I’ve Blogged For A Few Months. What Should I Do Now?
In a previous post, we discussed how picking the right blog post title will help improve the SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, of your blog post. Now that you’ve published a few blog posts, it’s time to determine which posts are attracting the most readers.
Modern blog Content Management Systems, or CMS, provide basic to advanced website analytics. Website analytics provide a means to measure traffic to a blog or site and other patterns of visitor behavior, such as tracking where your readers are coming from and how often the same visitors return to your blog or site. Using website analytics, it is time to start tracking which of your posts are attracting the most readers and if there is a pattern to the most popular topics. Google Analytics is also a popular tool utilized by many websites and blogs.
One Topic Is Attracting The Most Readers. Should I Only Focus On This Topic?
If you are only focused on the short-term success of your blog, that might be a winning strategy. If you are focused on the long-term success of your blog and building a strong and diverse audience, expand on this popular topic in future posts but continue to experiment with other topics as well. Not only will you keep your content fresher and cast a wider net for readers, but you may find that another topic becomes equally popular in the future. Now you have discovered multiple popular topics! You have both increased the diversity of your blog posts while also growing your audience at the same time. Continue to focus on what’s popular and continue to experiment with new topics as well.
Keep writing, keep track of your analytics, and continue to narrow your posts to topics that prove to be popular with your readers. Over time you will discover that your rankings among popular search engines continue to grow and you attract more and more readers to your blog.