For those of you that don’t know, this is actually my second blog. I had my first blog for almost 2 years and with minimal effort put into that blog, my blog traffic reflected that. This time around I am going all out. I post regularly on at least one social media account, engage with my audience, and write better blog posts (at least I think). As a self-described couch potato, I wanted a way to stay on track and make sure I was accomplishing everything I wanted to accomplish with my blog as well as increase my weekly traffic so I created a checklist. Something I could do every day/week to make sure I was putting effort into actively increasing my traffic daily and I thought I would share it with you.

The first section is what I like to call outreach. How are you going to get people to notice your blog? One of the most common misconceptions about blogging is that viewers will come to you through good ole organic search engine traffic, but they don’t . . . well, at least not at first. You have to work at getting the right people to view your blog. There are many ways you can go about doing this but let’s look at the most effective.

Post Daily to Your Social Media Accounts:

Social media is free advertising at its greatest, but it can be very overwhelming if you try to jump in all at once. Pick a few of the most relevant social media sites to your blog topic and start from there. For instance, I chose to start with Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. I mostly blog about surface pattern design and Adobe Illustrator which are extremely visual topics so Instagram and Pinterest were perfect for that, however, I also wanted to be able to get information out there about my website/blog without having to share a picture every time which is where Twitter comes in.

You should have some sort of interaction with all of your social media sites daily.

Pinterest: Find 5 to 10 pins that you think your audience will like and pin them. Also, follow 5 people who post similar things to you.

Instagram: Post at least 3 times a week anything that is relevant to your blog. Social media should not be used to spam your audience so engage with your audience through liking/commenting on 5 photos daily.

Twitter: Follow 5 people daily. Also, Tweeting does not take a lot of effort so tweet at least once every weekday. Tweeting should occasionally include links to relevant articles from other bloggers. You don’t want to be known as the blogger that only promotes him/herself.

Facebook: Update your Facebook page regularly when you have a new blog post. In fact, every time you publish a new blog post on your website you should share it with all of your social media accounts. Also, follow 5 new people daily.

Other Daily Tasks

Comment on similar blogs: Aside from social media you should leave genuine comments on similar blogs. Again, don’t spam a blog with links to your blog. It will likely get you blocked. Instead, leave comments about how much a blog post has helped you or how you went through a similar experience. You should do this twice a day.

Come up with 5 blog post ideas weekly: The worst thing you can do is wait until the last minute to come up with a blog post idea, write the post, and publish it all within 24 hours. Unless you write impeccably under pressure, your post ends up feeling rushed and anyone who read that post is likely never coming back. Having a list of blog post ideas is helpful in those weeks when you are out of ideas and don’t know what to do.

Schedule your blog posts ahead of time: You should at the very least be one week ahead of schedule for all blog posts. This means that your blog post scheduled for the week of 8/03/2017 should have already been written the week before. This is important because it gives you the ability to skip one week of writing if you have a family emergency, writer’s block, or are just not feeling it. Your audience responds to consistency, so if there is any point in time where you missed a big chunk of time blogging, your viewership is going to reflect that.

Spend Time on SEO: Invest an hour of your time for each blog post on Search Engine Optimization. Jenn Coyle over at Hello Brio has a great article called 9 Blog SEO Best Practices: Tips to Increase Your Traffic that I highly recommend you check out.

Guest Blog: Guest blogging is one of the fastest ways to tap into the audience of another blog especially someone who has a bigger audience than you. Don’t overstress yourself with guest blogging regularly. Start out by setting a goal to guest blog once a month and then you can scale up or down from there depending on how much free time you have left.

You can always add more tasks once you get used to blogging regularly, but this is a list of a few things you should at the very least be doing to increase your blog traffic. I have included a downloadable link to a daily/weekly blogging checklist for anyone who wants an easy way to follow along with all of the advice given in this article.

You can find that HERE: Daily:Weekly Blogging Checklist

If you have any tips for new bloggers, share them down in the comments!

If you liked this post, why not share it! It lets me know what posts you like so I can make more posts like this.

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