It hurts when no one comments -let alone reads- your blog content. Why can’t you get anyone to visit, share, and engage on your blog? You’ve found your niche, but no one’s biting.
If that’s the case, there might be a few issues you can identify and immediately flag for changes or additions. Some are immediate changes that might present results in a matter of days, while others…might take a little while. Regardless, like all things digital, quality content and patience often equal great results.
Poor Social Integration
Social is the way of the web; it flows through content, linking it to the masses through countless little veins and connections. If you’re missing social media sharing buttons (or simply social media buttons that link to your social profiles), you should really consider adding them.
Not only are they an added convenience for readers, but if some of your content is already being shared, it reinforces your authority; your content is being shared, and other people are actually interested in it, too. All in all, a mandatory addition for blogs of all sorts.
If you’re using a WordPress template, there are countless options that float, hover, or magically appear at the end of an article. They’re easy to implement and look great with just about any template.
No One Is Seeing It
If you don’t know how to share your content across various channels (email newsletters, social media, press releases, etc.), Ryan Johnson has a great post detailing many strategies to assist you. I’ll be brief, but each channel has a multitude of ways to get your content out into the world. Finding influencers in your nice on social media platforms (through Klout, for example) can allow you to share content with them and if they’re enthusiastic, share it with a larger fan base than your own. Creating attractive whitepapers and other helpful documents, then have visitors join your newsletter for access can act as another avenue to grow your audience.
You have lots of options here, across many avenues that are likely to appeal to one of your strengths. Be it sharing on video sites like Youtube, sharing across Twitter, Linkedin, and, or simply designing a strong incentive for signups onto your newsletter, these are all great ways to get your content out there.
Little Or No SEO Strategy
SEO is a scary word (err, well, abbreviation) in the digital landscape today. Not only Search Engine Optimization become a mainstream topic for bloggers, marketers, and other digital users, it’s also retained its notorious reputation as being something with poor performance analytics regarding month-to-month metrics and results. Simply, people just don’t know if their SEO strategy is working despite a ton of online ‘noise’ where vendors promise the best-of-the-best SEO strategy.
If you’re not sure about SEO, it’s really just a way to be found on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and other search engines. Google, for example, ranks websites relative to a keyword (say, ‘watermelon vodka’), and displays them in your search results in order of metrics such as ‘most trusted’, ‘most talked about’, ‘most visited’, and so on. It used to be the case where you can put ‘watermelon vodka’ in every other sentence on your website and be placed high in Google; however, now things are less finicky. Google and other search engines now look for ‘organic’ factors when ranking your website for keywords and other tidbits (meta data on images, tags, etc.).
‘Organically’ usually has people scratching their heads; what’s it mean? In the end, organic SEO simply means you aren’t actually trying too hard to excel at SEO. Confusing? Think of it this way: SEO for your website can be improved through social media signals (a good social media presence), on-page SEO (adding tags for titles, images, in addition to hyperlinks, proper keywords/longtail keywords, quality images and content and more) and off-page SEO (linking to high-ranking websites with authority, guest blogging on other sites, etc.). On-page practices should be routine, and there’s no negative to making sure each post is properly optimized. However, throwing in tons of keywords in a single post to get a ‘better’ ranking won’t work. Spamming your links across the web to various blogs with blackhat software won’t help you (it’ll actually hurt you). Stealing content won’t work.
All these unnatural methods that you would probably consider ‘cheating’ are inorganic methods, and will likely harm your ranking in the end. Wrapping up, Moz has a wonderful SEO article for beginners to get you started on the right path (as do we). Getting some SEO knowledge will give you more presence online through search engines, and you’re bound to find new readers (although it takes time for SEo to work it’s magic).
