One of the most popular questions I receive from my subscribers is about how to get your blog noticed. Many know that eyeballs to their blog means opportunities to make money.
If you’ve been blogging for a year or more and still have no traction, no blog traffic and no money, is it possible to turn a blog like that around?
Yes! I’ve done it and others have to.
Some abandon their low performing blog and start a new one and others use the lessons they learned from a low performing blog to have a popular blog.
I’ve been fortunate that my first blog got noticed and created income for me.
To help you figure out how to get your blog noticed, I’ve compiled four solid tips and had six influencers to share how they create a popular blog.
1. Networking is Essential
Look –
Blogging isn’t in a vacuum. You don’t just publish a blog post, get Tailwind to schedule it, share it a few times on social and be successful.
The REAL reason why some blogs are popular and others don’t get noticed at all is because of networking.
Networking encompasses many things but the idea of it is connecting and collaborating with other bloggers in your space. This is exactly what I did to get Twins Mommy noticed in the mom blog community.
My knowledge up until that point was freelance writing and digital marketing. I did not spend time in the mom blog world, so when I created Twins Mommy, I knew I had to reach out to other mom bloggers as a way to get noticed.
One thing I did early on was to feature other mom bloggers in my content. I did rounds up of blog examples of work from home blogs, I featured other mompreneur blogs as well as service based blogs, and moms who were making money blogging.
I then outdid myself and asked 40 moms on how they accomplished their day when juggling everything.
So, how did I get forty + moms to contribute to some of these roundups?
I Commented on Their Blogs
For some of these contributors, I went to their blog, read some of their blog posts and made an effort to comment on their blog. This one thing can help you get on the radar of other bloggers.
I know for me, when I see bloggers commenting on my post I sometimes check out their blog. And, if their blog is amazing, I’ll be sure to bookmark it for some reading time and possible collaboration ideas in the future.
I Joined Their Community
One thing I did without realizing it was networking, was join other blogger’s Facebook groups, Pinterest groups or subscribe to their Youtube channels.
Doing this one thing can help you gain:
- Backlinks – I joined a Pinterest group for writers and later visited the group owner’s blog. I noticed that she linked to my blog in her post. The only reason she did this was because she checked out my pins in her group! Now I naturally link to her blog or mention her in my Facebook groups.
- Collaborations – When I started freelance blogging, I followed Miranda Nahmias. One day she emailed me about having a Facebook group together. This is how I started my Ready Set Blog for Traffic (for Mom to Mompreneurs) Facebook group!
- Traffic – I noticed when I commented on other blogs I would get some traffic from that site. I found this amazing and even wrote about it on this blog (and this post has the MOST comments ever).
I Featured Them on My Blog
I mentioned already in this post how I created roundups, and shared the best types of blogs, Youtube channels or resources.
Doing this one thing has resulted in backlinks and I learned how to get my blog noticed easily. This is probably the most “removed” option for networking. There is no need to ask other bloggers if you can feature them and the content comes easy when you do these types of blog posts.
So even if you are hesitant to reach out to bloggers, you can fill your blog with a lot of roundups like I did!
2. Give More Than You Ask
One of the greatest things about blogging was sharing tips, advice and hacks. Before I was a blogger I was a teacher and teaching is innate for me. I love teaching and helping and for bloggers, this is crucial to gaining an audience that trusts you.
One of the first things I “gave” to my audience was a blogging checklist. This was an opt-in freebie that helped me gain my first few hundred subscribers.
Other ways you can give more than you ask are to:
- Start a Facebook page and do Facebook lives
- Develop many opt-in freebies like email courses, eBooks, video training and more
- Go in depth on a topic that many other bloggers don’t share
- Turn your blog into a contributor blog and let other bloggers share their tips
- Create products for them!
3. Leverage Other Bloggers
When you start your blog you’re thrusted into a blogging community. It’s perfectly okay to leverage other bloggers to help get your blog noticed.
This is called guest posting and this not only helped me gain traffic, but as a freelance blogger, I gained clients and made money writing.
Search sites that pay and find a publication that is similar to your blogging niche. From there, decide on a blog topic that is popular for their blog but compliments their blog content as well.
For example, if I wanted to guest post on a homeschool blog, I would go to Buzzsumo to check their popular post (or go into Ahrefs to see their #1 post that brings in the most organic traffic) and base my blog topics off of that post.
4. Contribute to Roundups
Up until this point the tactics on how to get your blog noticed have been more centric – YOU are featuring other bloggers, YOU are pitching to guest post and YOU are creating more things to share to your audience.
Well, for this last tactic, you will be helping other bloggers with their content, but similar to guest posting, this will open the doors to a new audience and traffic potential.
How do you get involved with roundups? An easy way to find roundups is in my Facebook group, Ready Set Blog for Traffic (from Mom to Mompreneur).
Many mom bloggers ask for roundups or guest contributors to help them publish content and grow their blog.
So, for the person publishing the roundup they may go and email all the contributors the post and may ask if they could share it, helping her gain a new audience and traffic.
For you, if you contribute to a roundup that has a high domain authority, you can gain a nice backlink. For example, I contributed to a roundup for Bluehost – a popular hosting company.
Bluehost has a high domain authority and helped my blog gain more authority in my niche. This will help me get noticed! Yay!
6 Influencers Share How to Have a Popular Blog
With some proven tactics to help you get noticed online, I’ve asked several influencers how to have a popular blog. Since they have created a successful blogs and are known in the blogging industry, I thought they could provide some highly valuable insight into content marketing.
*Note: you will see different view points on Google traffic, social traffic and blogging as an industry. This should tell you there isn’t one way to make a popular blog; it’s a collection of ways that is needed.
1. Adam Connell – Blogging Wizard
Answer: Include influencers in the content creation process.
Why? Because when someone contributes to your content, they have skin in the game. Success for your content becomes success for them.
As a result, they’ll be far more likely to share your content.
So how can you use this approach? At a basic level, you could reach out to a few industry influencers for quotes to include in an upcoming article.
Alternatively, you could take the group interview approach like Elna has done with this very post.
Or you could do full-on interviews with experts in your niche and include them as part of your online course. Then incentivise sharing further by inviting them to become an affiliate.
But regardless of how you include influencers in your content, it is important to consider how you can repurpose the content you create – both with and without influencers.
For example, by repurposing a group interview like this into an exclusive infographic for another website, I was able to get an extra 30K+ visits and 2K+ social shares.
Always be thinking how you can get more mileage out of every piece of content you publish.
2. Julia McCoy – Content Hacker
For many new and sometimes even seasoned bloggers, it’s easy to get lost in the “bells and whistles” aspects of blogging – focusing on having the snazziest design, the coolest features, or launching that overnight campaign or Insta Reel to try and get more traffic.
While all of that certainly has its place, nothing replaces the power of great content writing itself.
Learn to write well, research with accuracy, and create thorough, informative content tailored to your audience; do that regularly and consistently, and as they say, “they will come!”
Focus on the writing aspect of your blog, and be consistent – if your goal is to publish on Tuesdays, don’t skip that goal.
Make it a priority to publish writing you’re proud of. This will get you further than almost any other blogging tactic.
3. Ryan Biddulph – Blogging From Paradise
Making your blog popular seems to happen organically if you think upside-down compared to most bloggers.
Most try to make their blog popular by promoting ONLY their blog on social media and linking only to their blog posts, via inter-linking.
But this usually does not work because few folks gravitate toward self-centered bloggers who promote only themselves.
Think upside-down: make other bloggers popular by:
- Promoting their blogs through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Promoting their blogs by dropping backlinks to their blogs through your blog posts and guest posts
- Commenting genuinely on their blogs to add content (comments are content) credibility and social proof to their blogs
Doing these things generously, patiently and persistently draws blogging buddies to you. Bloggers who appreciate your kindness begin to befriend, promote and endorse you, making your blog popular.
But one critical step remains; in order to make your blog popular you need to show off some serious blogging skills. Popular bloggers are polished, skilled, credible and trustworthy. Blogging buddies cannot promote unskilled, untrusted bloggers; their credibility is on the line.
Become a skilled, confident, popular blogger by writing diligently, publishing helpful posts persistently and by seeing this journey through for 1000’s of hours spanning years.
Becoming popular is actually 100% about generously helping people and developing your skills and virtually 0 percent about trying to gain fame, exposure and popularity for yourself.
Again; this is upside-down thinking at its finest.
4. Sarah Titus
One of the first questions my mom asked me was, “What if you run out of things to say?”
GASP! “Oh no!” I thought to myself.
What if I DO run out of things to say on my blog? Will all the work I’ve done crash and burn and I’ll lose everything in time??? Ahhh!
That’s what happened eight years ago when I told my mom I wanted to start a blog.
I didn’t know much about blogging at the time. I had no idea where to start or even HOW to start.
I just knew I was called to do it. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help other people and make a difference in others lives.
After all these years, I can tell you, I’ve never once run out of things to say. ?
You might be thinking, “Okay, this chick is a chatterbox,” right?
WRONG. I’m an absolute, 100% verified INTROVERT! Haha.
Talking to people is hard for me. I get all stumbled and tripped up. I get nervous and feel like no one would listen to me anyway so why bother.
After all, I’ve been abused ALL my life from my mom, my ex-husband, and a lot of so-called past friends who think THEY should be able to run my life for me.
Anyone relate?
Do you have people in your life trying to tell you what to do? Cage you? As if you can’t make solid decisions on your own?
Here’s the trick…don’t let them control you!
My secret to staying relevant over the years and being highly engaging to my audience, for never running out of things to say, for always having a super popular blog that everyone LOVES to read, for creating products that sell like hotcakes (did I mention I make 7-figures/year?), for doing everything I do online, comes down to ONE THING…
SERVE…YOUR…AUDIENCE!
No, I’m not serving Google, okay.
They can’t control me. I’m not here on this planet to serve a machine, a bot, Google, SEO, or anything else like that.
Nor am I here to serve social media. Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram can’t control me either. Call me a rebel but if I’m going to make money online, I’m going to do things MY way. I’m not going to live in a box someone else creates.
I’m not here to serve a bot or some fat cat at the top. I’m here to serve YOU.
And in serving YOU, Google loves me (I get over 130k traffics/month from Google alone. Pinterest is over 95k/month).
I’m not saying I don’t GET traffic from those sources. I’m not saying don’t market your blog. Absolutely market your blog, but WRITE for the PEOPLE. FOCUS on the people.
Now the question becomes, WHO do you write for? WHAT people? Maybe you don’t have an audience yet.
Get one. If you have 3 people that follow you, talk to THEM. If you have 50, talk to THEM. How many people you have, talk to THEM.
Next, talk to the people you WANT to serve.
I don’t like writing blog posts on certain topics. I don’t like the people it attracts, and even though it would be super advantageous of me to do so, financially-speaking, I don’t do it. Why?
Because I end up burned out and not happy. Write for the people you want to attract. The people you like to serve. The people you WANT to surround yourself with. Be specific.
When you do that, THOSE people will have a way of finding you.
They will sign up for your newsletters and become your best friends because they feel connected to you. You met a need in them and they come back, they tell their friends and soon you have a LOT of people to write to.
Yes, do SEO, yes market your blog, do social media, but never forget who you’re serving.
Never forget why you’re here. You’re not here for a bot. You’re here to help make people’s lives better, whether that’s through a recipe, a blog post, a course, a printable you create, or anything else.
Don’t get bogged down with all the to-do’s of blogging or feeling like you’re missing something major if you don’t follow everything everyone says. Just serve YOUR people. Put your head down and just focus on THEM!
Ask them what THEY want. Send out a Google doc and ask them what they want to learn from you. Ask your friends what they want to learn from you and just start talking.
You’ll never run out of things to say, because there’s always SOMEONE to serve with a new problem YOU can help them with.
Start with one topic, then write for another topic, if need be.
My blog started out teaching saving money, then I taught blogging, now I teach how to make passive income through Shopify creating printables.
Whatever you do, write the heck out of it. Write every angle, every question, every single thing on that topic people ask you about and you feel led to write about.
You don’t have to be someone else to be a popular blogger and make millions. The key is being yourself and serving the people you were put on this Earth to serve. The key is…YOU!!!!!
Your unique ideas.
Your take on things.
Your ideas, values, opinions.
The key is you!
5. Anna – Real Ways to Earn
If you are wanting to have a really popular blog, remember that Google is your friend. And not just because you want to rank highly for the topic you’ve written about, but because you can use it for valuable research.
Before you begin writing your blog post, type the topic into the search bar on Google and pay attention to the “People Also Ask” and the similar search queries sections on the search results page.
The “People Also Ask” questions could be included in your content.
This will not only make your content more informative, but it will also give you more chances to rank highly for your topic.
And if you include some of the similar search queries into your content (keywords), again, these are more opportunities to rank for more keywords related to your topic.
Ranking highly on Google for your blog post will help to make your blog popular.
But remember it can take time and you’ll need more than just a handful of blog posts on your blog before Google will see you as an authority.
6. Ashlee Anderson – Work From Home Happiness
For me, It was all about being authentic to myself and building a brand.
To do this, I created a blog brand board that I printed out and still have displayed on my desk to this day. It’s a good reminder to stay true to my blog’s mission.
After all, the readers that show up month after month and year after year do so because they relate to the content I create.
If I suddenly deviated from what they’re used to, they would stop showing up and that would be a disservice to them.
I think popular blogs also provide tons of value and that doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of free content.
A site’s usability is super important and can really make all the difference in whether a blog will get noticed or recommended.
There’s nothing worse than landing on a blog only to find it is bogged down by ads, cluttered with pop ups and overwhelmed with so many affiliate links that you can’t tell what’s paid for and what’s authentic.
I always focus on usability design over paid ads.
I’ve also found it’s really helpful to be out there, and that’s kind of hard for me as an introvert 🙂
I’ve also found blogging to be the easy part of having a blog because all you have to do is write.
But that’s not really going to get you noticed or help your blog gain traction.
So, it might be scary but always say “yes” to interview requests or invites to speak.
I was asked to do a virtual interview with the Wall Street Journal on the subject of remote job interviews. I was absolutely terrified and wanted to say no but I pushed myself to do it and I’m so glad I did.
It resulted in so many wonderful connections and invitations to speak.
This really helped elevate my blog to “expert” status in ways I never could have on my own.
Virtual volunteering is another amazing way to gain popularity and visibility with your blog.
I volunteer my career coaching services to a foundation a few hours a month and they give me shout outs every so often in press releases and the PR gets picked up by so many popular publications that give my blog a tremendous SEO boost.
I think it’s important for bloggers to remember that their core blog is just a very small part of their overall blogging strategy.
They need to constantly be looking for other opportunities to shed a positive light on their blog, whether that’s volunteering their services, engaging with their audience on social media, making quality content to sell, focusing on user experience on site and usability design, establishing a brand voice and identity, showing up regularly by producing consistent content – these are all helpful. Oh, and step outside of your comfort zone.
Say, yes to things that scare you, that means it’s probably worth doing 🙂
There Ya Go!
I hope you enjoyed this post and gain traffic for your blog based on all the wonderful advice said here about having a successful blog!
Learning how to get your blog noticed takes baby steps but you WILL get there!
Let me know in the comments what tactic you will try out first!
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