Blogging

5 Powerful Methods to Grow Your Blog in 2018

Grow your blog in 2018

I’m feeling excited to share what’s going through my mind right now. Nothing will make me happier than helping one or two of you to grow your blog in 2018, or at least, take it to the next level. I’m obsessed with small steps, and if you start doing something you love in 2018 just because you read my blog post or watched any video of mine, it will be huge for me.

Do you want to grow your blog in 2018?

Hold on.

If you think I have a shortcut to give you then I’m sorry, I don’t have one. See, a lot of readers walk away right after they read that there is no shortcut. But, I promise you that I’ll give you some practical advice on growing your blog in 2018. The reason for this is that I’ve seen some of the strategies worked for me, and boy, 2018 is going to be amazing.

So when your blog would grow, you’d build your influence. The point is that the influence and blog growth go hand in hand.

I’m going to give you five things right off the bat that will help you build influence and grow your blog in 2018:

1. Stay Relevant by Helping Others

I may be wrong at this, but I believe that nothing is remotely close to helping others. If a blogger doesn’t envision helping others, it’s game over before it begins. If you want to succeed in blogging, just analyze your content whether or not it is going to help readers. If every time you write content and hit the publish button with satisfaction that your piece of content is going to help someone out there, you win.

The upside of helping others is that people remember you. Nobody takes the time out to pay attention to someone else’s problem – if you start doing that, it will immediately separate you from the crowd. When you start helping others out, it makes you prominent in the blogosphere. Not only do you make friends, but you also strengthen your public relations.

help other bloggers

For instance, I recently reached out to a blogger and shared my opinion on certain things. The purpose of the email was to help, and she appreciated a lot.

2. Try to Rank a Blog Post

It might sound cliché that “try to rank a blog post” because we always try to rank our blog posts. The reason why I’m saying to try to rank a blog post is that we do publish lots of blog posts and every time we publish, we don’t have any idea whether or not it would be ranked in Google.

Most probably, one after every twenty blog post gets ranked, but there is no guarantee that it would even happen—meaning, maybe you get lucky and get more than one article ranked out of twenty—similarly, there is a chance that not a single blog post may get ranked in Google either.

You could only try and tweak your strategies for your blog post ranking, and the rest of the thing depends on the search engines.

highly ranked article

For instance, on Vlogging.pk, I tried to rank various blog posts, I could manage to rank a blog post on best vlogging cameras, but it didn’t stay on the first page in Google for long. After some time, I randomly posted a blog post regarding vlogging benefits, and it got ranked on the first page in Google without any research on the topic, keyword targeting, and back-linking. Now I get regular visitors on this blog post.

You could see that some big blogs are competing with my blog, but my blog post is beating them. I don’t take much credit for that – all I did was my effort to help guide readers who want to know the benefits of vlogging. It worked. So what you can do is try out.

3. Experiment with Social Media

Social media has provided us with an unbelievable amount of opportunity. All we need is to explore, engage, and entertain the audience. Unfortunately, most of us don’t get it (at least, in the beginning).

I can speak for myself that from 2007 to 2012, I did nothing productive on Facebook, but instead wasted my time. I had no idea about building relations with the like-minded people, developing the right community, helping out people, and hanging out on a proper platform.

There are many mistakes that I have done in the past, for example, not focusing on the video at all, ignoring Twitter and Instagram, and the list goes on.

But now I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m trying to explore Instagram as well as focusing on YouTube.

The point I’m trying to make is that you have to understand your strength, audience, and niche to choose the social media platforms. Despite the fact that Quora once gave my blog a whole heap of free traffic because I answered a question in detail and provided a link to a relevant blog post of mine. I didn’t continue doing the very same thing, just because I couldn’t stumble upon a topic that I have covered in my content.

I might go to Quora website in the future, but at the moment I’m trying to understand Instagram and YouTube. All I want to say is experiment with social media, implement strategies, and move forward with your findings. It will leverage your blog growth in 2018.

4. Guest Post in Your Niche

I don’t believe in the stereotypes that some bloggers say about guest posting. I don’t do guest posting for SEO either. Guest posting is one of the best strategies to introduce yourself to someone else’s audience. The majority of the blogs use WordPress plugins like External links and Nofollow for External link to make outbound links as nofollow.

I tremendously admire the guest posting strategy, if you do it in a true spirit of reaching out to the new audience for the face recognition.

For instance, I once did a guest post on BeingGuru; it led to so many new Facebook friends who happened to be the BeingGuru readers.

So don’t hesitate to do guest posting in 2018. Not only does it help you build relations, but it also puts your face in front of the new audience. It will gradually help you grow your blog. If your first few guest posts don’t get any traction, don’t worry about it, and stay persistent. It doesn’t mean you have to do 20 guest posts every month — always prefer quality over quantity.

A lot of bloggers advice to use your best content for guest posting, which I also agree with because you can’t put your average content out there on someone else’s platform. So don’t compromise on the quality of your guest posts and keep up with your guest posting.

5. Attend Industry Events

We came across seminars, exhibitions, meetups, and social events all the time – even Facebook often recommends to check out the events that are close by so that you could get engaged with the community. If you’re wondering how on earth someone could grow a blog by attending different events, then let me explain it to you: the best part of the events is get together and meeting new people, which makes the events an opportunity to build relations and expand your network.

I have a first-hand experience of meeting people at the events, and it shocked me that how it landed me opportunities by just meeting new people.

For instance, a few months back; I attended a TEDx Talk in Islamabad, Pakistan, where I met so many influencers from different walks of life. When new people meet, they get to know each other and find out what others do for a living. People often exchange email addresses or follow each other on Twitter to get connected; I’ve connected with so many people this way.

Conclusion

These methods won’t give you an overnight success, but if you try out these strategies, at least, one of them would help you get more attention to your blog.

Even though the blog’s progress takes time; if the blogger stays in the process and doesn’t quit, the chances are that blog would get traction at some point. It happens because it’s not possible that you keep on blogging for eight months and you don’t learn fantastic things about creating good content. It eventually helps you produce content that attracts the eyeballs.

In a nutshell, I believe that if a blogger keeps TRYING and TESTING new strategies, something positive comes up that could change the destiny of the blog.

It only happens if the blogger believes in the process of DOING.

What else would you recommend someone who wants to grow a blog in 2018?

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12 Comments

  1. Hi Hassaan,

    Your article is super informative. I followed you here after you commented on my post twice. I appreciate your comments and decided to return the favor. This strategy is in fact, one of the best ways to grow your blog faster.
    Why do I say so? For example, we never met before, but because you visited my site, read my post and left me some comments, I am reciprocating the gesture, which has effectively brought us together as friends. So if you comment on many other blogs, you get massive traffic to your site.

    The tips you presented are great, I love them all because I’m already implementing them and getting positive results from my efforts.

    Thanks so much Hassaan for sharing such amazing blog post.

    NB: If you feel like you want to guest post on my blog, you’re most welcome anytime!

    1. Hello Moss,

      I’m glad to see you here. I don’t have any doubt about commenting on being one of the best growth hacks in blogging. A lot of people have got this wrong; they think commenting is for backlinking — in fact, it’s relationship building technique. Commenting on the blogs for SEO-purpose is long gone. WordPress updated their software and made comments’ URL section automatically nofollow years ago. Read the section “How Do I Use Nofollow?” for further information: https://codex.wordpress.org/Nofollow

      Anyways, I’m thrilled to read your comment. And, yes, I’d love to guest post on your blog.

      Thanks so much for stopping by and leaving your feedback on my blog.

  2. Hey Hassaan,

    I have already gone through so many articles on this topic but, almost all are talking about paid methods and super complicated SEO things for grow blog audience.

    As a newbie blogger, I think these are the best methods to follow because these methods are simple and doable even without having any knowledge of SEO.

    Thanks for sharing this very informative article.

    1. Hi Nirodha,

      I’m glad you found these methods helpful and doable. I love the practicality and only try to write things that I believe in, or I have done it personally. Everything I said in the blog post, I believe in it.

      I can’t wait to see your Facebook message about these tips after seven months.

      Start crushing it!

  3. Hello, Hassaan

    Wonderful post. Blogging is all about helping others to grow their blog. You have really pointed out some great insights and tips here to become a successful blogger. I also have put the same strategy for my blog by adding quality and informative post that helps my readers. Thanks for writing this beautiful post.

    Have a Great Day 🙂
    Vishwajeet

    1. Hello, Vishwajeet!

      Thanks so much. I don’t have any doubt that bloggers grow when they genuinely change others’ lives. And, I always tried to do that. It’s true that we don’t succeed to a certain degree every time we put out content, but it shouldn’t stop us from trying.

      I’m glad you stopped by and left a comment.

      All the best!

  4. Very helpful tips, Hassan. I decided to visit your blog due to a mention by Ryan B on his site, Blogging From Paradise in a post and I am glad I did!
    Thank you so much for sharing such quality info!

    1. Hello Jerry,

      I’m glad to see you here. Welcome!

      Thank you for subscribing to the blog.

  5. Hello Hassaan Khan,

    Thanks for giving those tips on building influence and growing a blog! believe so much in building influence and I am sure it leads straight to a rocking blog overtime. Thanks for sharing the blog post titled, “Five Powerful Methods To Grow Your Blog In 2018”. I have read and digested every tip and I am going to apply all of these in 2018.

    Ever since I started blogging, I have been trying to stay relevant and this has created some positive impacts on my site trust. I am happy seeing this happen from time to time. Nothing truly works more than staying relevant by helping others.

    People don’t really want to help or care about others, but doing it truly makes one stand out in the crowd. It works positively for blogging, helping top bloggers by promoting them through blog posts, social media and other platforms without expecting anything in return.

    This makes me believe in the law of reciprocity more and more than ever. You mentioned somewhere in this post that the goal of writing should be on helping the readers. That’s what guarantees winning with blogging. Thanks for teaching, Hassaan Khan! I am learning.

  6. This is really necessary steps to succeed in the blogging which most of the new bloggers ignore.
    Focusing all these things helps to get exposure and helpful in branding.

    Thanks! for sharing.

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