Ways to Make Your Blog More Popular

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Making a blog popular is every bloggers dream. It cannot be done overnight and I know it is not easy if you are new in the business but if you are hard working and are willing to learn and adapt, I can guarantee success my friend.
There are many ways to take your blog to the next level but always make sure you know what you are dealing with. I have seen people spamming the shit out of social bookmarking and networking sites such as digg, reddit and requesting people to vote for their links. Please do not do that. This is considered spam and it really sucks. But then again, reddit is very popular. If you have something awesome to share and it goes viral on reddit, you will get ton of traffic.

1. Customize Your Blog Design

I have posted this like what, hundred times before. Well without a doubt, design matters. This is very important my friends and that is why I have listed it first. Every blog should have a unique design. People are attracted to something that is unique and interesting. When a person visits your blog, the design gives them the first impression and this determines the amount of time they spend browsing your blog. Now to be honest, if your blog has a crappy design, I am not going to visit it. Even if I visit it accidently, I might spend a few seconds before I leave and bam.
Look at this blog. How cool is it? I am sure you can setup something similar or decent. Practice makes perfection so keep tweaking and trying out new layout, design and navigation and focus on creating the best user experience for your readers.
There are plenty of decent templates you can find online. I am running a customized thesis theme which is one of my favorites and it powers almost 80% of my websites. I chose thesis over woothemes and others because it gives you ton of sweet options such as buttons to easily change fonts, color and seo capability. It is easily customizable and if you know a little code like I do, you can create awesome designs in no time.

2. Add Your Blog to Blog Communities

Blog communities are really popular for blogs. Other bloggers and web enthusiasts are constantly checking out these communities for networking and information. There are many communities you can submit your blog to but it’s better to stick with the ones which are popular and have a decent Google PR (pagerank).
I have posted a list of top article and blog directories so check them out and submit your blog right away.
Remember: When you follow a blog that you find interesting, and you contribute something nice through commenting on it, you are basically increasing your visibility in the community. A lot of people will check you out and also subscribe to your blog if you are good. Always try to participate in a network and engage in conversations. Whether you write a blog post or a comment, make sure it delivers some value to the community.

3. Write Tutorials and Pillar Articles

I have followed Yaro Starak who is one of the top bloggers. Yaro has always emphasized the importance of pillar articles. Now think about this, if you write an article about what happened on a certain day, the content is meant only for that day and with time it gets old. But, if you write a How-to Article or a tutorial that solves a problem, it stays there forever.
Let me explain. If you write something about “How to get rid of twitter spam or How to get loyal readers to your blog”, you know that you can use these tutorials whenever you want and they won’t get old because the same method would apply all the time. Lots of people will share it and bookmark it for future reference. Pillar articles are killers and you can easily write at least 5-6 a month.
Check out my wordpress hacking prevention guide which got shared over thousand times throughout various social networks. The post was retweeted more than 700 times and is growing every day. It’s really not a big deal to see such numbers especially when your posts are awesome and solves a community problem.

4. Be a Guest Author on Popular Blogs

Most blogs you will come across these days accept guest posts. Popular blogs like problogger, shoemoney, johnchow just to name a few; they all give new bloggers a chance to get noticed through guest blogging. Now this is a great opportunity and shouldn’t be missed. You can’t just post anything you like but it should be related to the niche and you have to prove your worth. One blog post on some of these popular blogs can get you huge amount of traffic.
How to find blogs that accept guest posts? How about you Google terms such as “guest post by” or you can check out this blog post on kissmetrics that explains guest blogging in details.
Writing guest posts is a truly amazing way to get noticed and drive traffic to your blog. Don’t forget the link juice you get and waves of new subscribers.

5. Give Something to Download for Free

I love free stuff, don’t you? A good way to gain readership and make your blog popular is to give free stuff to the public. It can be almost anything; an eBook, a wordpress theme, some popular tools or even free online class. Based on the experience from my other blogs, people love free things especially when they are premium and valuable.
There are several PLR content that you could give away to your readers. Whatever you decide to give, make sure it is worth downloading. Ask yourself, would you download it yourself? If you wouldn’t download the free stuff yourself, you can’t expect others to download it either. Quality matters my friend and if your stuff is good, people will just keep coming.

6. Blog Frequently

Fresh content is the key to your blog’s success. Do not just blog once a week and expect people to check in every day. Your readers are hungry for information and they expect to see something valuable and new on your blog frequently. I know sometimes you can get busy and have days when you don’t feel like blogging, and it is completely ok. If blogging is your passion, you will manage time for a post; it comes naturally my friends.
The search engines can find out how often you blog and they love fresh content. The more often you post to your blog, the better it gets. Of course, unless you follow a different blogging style such as Glen at viperchill who makes 1 – 3 posts per month. Glen has a unique style of creating blog posts. Most of his posts go above 4000 word limit and if you carefully notice, he has a lot of lengthy pillar articles on his blog. And as a result, viperchill gets 10 times more traffic than most other blogs combined in the similar niche. Viperchill is the proof that quality content matters over quantity of posts.
Whatever style you adapt, make sure your content is unique because at the end of the day, that is what matters the most.

7. Link Love

One of the best ways to get your blog noticed is to trade links with other bloggers in the same niche. There are multiple ways you can approach a blogger or an author and request for a link love. You can email them (make sure you don’t spam), you can comment on their blog post and request and of course add them on your facebook and discuss about it. I personally do not do this right now because google doesn’t give much value to such links.
The best way to get link love is through guest blogging as mentioned earlier. Try creating some great blog posts in some popular blogs and you will get both traffic and quality backlinks.

8. Create a Facebook Page and Promote it

Facebook pages are rising in popularity. Check your account right now and tell me how many invitations you got to join a page. I bet it’s a lot. Create a facebook page for your blog right now and start sharing it with other millions of facebook users. When requesting to join your page, make sure you don’t spam because it can be really irritating. You can also set up your blog’s RSS Feed on the Page itself so that people can check out your posts without even visiting your blog.
The new facebook timeline gives you lots of options. There are lots of amazing facebook apps that you can use to integrate your blog with facebook and make sharing easy breezy. Some good methods you can use to promote your facebook page is by adding a widget on your blog, adding a popup like button, writing a blog post on it and also including the page details in your newsletter. Facebook is huge and the traffic is legit. The quicker you create your page and get involved with it, the better social presence you will have.

9. Get a Twitter Account and Tweet your Posts

I am sure by now most bloggers have a twitter account. Forget bloggers, pretty much everyone has a twitter account today, and they use it to broadcast what they eat, when they sleep etc. There is no problem in doing that but to make it a little more productive, how about tweeting your blog posts to your followers instead.
People follow you because they are interested in sharing things with you. When you tweet, they are most likely willing to check it out. I like the idea of microblogging because it makes it easy for you to share your opinion and cool stuff with the world. Achieving the celebrity status on twitter is everyone’s dream. If you deliver value through tweets, you will have created a huge network of loyal followers who will retweet your stuff which eventually drive massive traffic to your blog. Retweets matter. Remember, retweets do not only help in driving traffic but also help in search engine optimization.

I hope you have found this article useful. I would appreciate if you share it and spread the word. Keep following the right thing, learn and adapt and, I promise that your blog will reach new heights.