Blogging isn’t the kind of activity that drives its own users. There is no “if you write it, they will come” aspect to that reality. Every visitor is acquired through hard work and effort.
There are different ways to drive readership.
Content creation
The first, and most effective way to drive traffic is through the creation of unique and compelling content. Eventually, search engines will scrape your content and start sending readers to your articles organically.
This is a great kind of traffic because your readers are truly discovering something they set out to find. Assuming you continue to produce compelling content and a regular cadence, they’ll keep coming back for more.
The downside is: you have to keep creating more content.
There is a long tail in traffic where an article will continue to attract readers weeks, months, or even years after publication. But without regular updates to your site, traffic will dwindle and die. Regular – even daily – content creation is what drives the engine of traffic acquisition.
Publication mediums
Additionally, there is a question about where you publish your content. Your blog should always be the final destination for your words and thoughts. But it doesn’t need to be the only medium.
Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, and the like are all different ways to put your words online. Each of these can take the format of a micro-blog, pushing out short snippets of content to a large mass of readers. In each and every case, these microsites should drive readers back to your site. Don’t spread your readership out – use these sites to find and drive readers back to your main page.
Using a newsletter is also a great way to drive readership. Up til now, every post on this site has been pushed on my newsletter – daily – a few minutes after the post has gone live. While building a site, this is a great way to build an audience.
But there’s nothing driving folks to click through and visit the site once they’re read the article in their inbox.
Moving forward, articles are going to be somewhat truncated – your inbox will provide a preview, but the real content will live on the site. Likewise, I’ll be introducing a weekly wrap-up newsletter so you can see everything in one place rather than focusing here daily.
Both are strategies to build an audience but, even more so, to drive that audience’s traffic back to the main home for this content.
