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Dear Lifehacker, 
As a side project/experiment, I’ve started my own blog. The problem is, now that I have one, how can get people to actually visit it? My traffic is dismal so far, but I’m hoping to some day make money off the blog or at least become a more prominent blogger.

Signed, 
Beginner Blogger

Dear BB,
Congrats on your new blog baby. Starting and maintaining a blog can definitely be rewarding, and not just in the financial sense. As you know, though, it’s not just enough to choose a platform and set up a blog or spend hours carefully crafting posts. To be successful, you need to build—and continue to grow–an audience. So here are seven tried-and-true methods for increasing your blog’s traffic, whether this is just a hobby or something you want to do for income.

1. Find Your Niche

The broader and more general your blog’s topic (e.g., technology), the harder it’ll be to gain an audience, because of all the bigger, already established websites competing for the same readers. At the same time, you want to make sure your blog isn’t so specific that there aren’t enough people looking for that particular information or you run out of things to write about. Focus your blog on a unique angle (e.g., technology for young kids), and make sure your subject is one that you’re both passionate about and feel you could write tons of posts on.

Not sure what your blog’s main subject should be? Think about: Your hobbies, topics you like to talk about and debate with others, and subjects you love reading and researching. Boost Blog Traffic offers straightforward guidelines for how to tell if you’ve chosen the right blog topic or not. Among the recommendations, measure your interest and the topic’s viability by checking: how many books you own on the topic, if there’s already an audience for your topic, and whether you can come up with at least 52 different post ideas (one for every week of the year).

Once you’ve decided on your blog’s theme, stick to it. (That means no middle-of-the-night, out-of-the-blue rants!) Consistency is the key to getting the audience you’ve already attracted to keep coming back for your great content.

2. Keep Writing Great Content

Speaking of great content, what makes posts popular and more likely to be shared? Generally speaking, great posts: answer a question, solve a problem, make readers laugh, or make them cry (in a good way).

Also, no matter how long or short a post is, format it so readers can quickly scan the content by using:

• subheads


• bulleted or numbered lists


• blockquotes or captions


• line breaks


• bold fonts


• images


• and other formatting to break up large blocks of text

If you can build a habit of writing every day, awesome. Quite simply, the more useful content you have out there, the better your chances of readers finding your blog. Even if you can’t write every day, aim to post often and regularly so readers will keep coming back for more and you can build a loyal audience base.

On the other hand, as blogger Cherly Harrison advises, don’t blog just for the sake of it or just because you’ve set a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. Publish when you have quality content:

I have never heard anyone say “I unsubscribed from Blog X because he didn’t post this week.” I have heard dozens of people say “I unsubscribed from Blog X because it was obvious he was stretching for content.”

There’s no perfect blogging schedule for everyone, but to get t