Blogging world was introduced to the word “Growth Hack” in the year 2010, when famous entrepreneur and startup advisor Sean Ellis was working for brands like Dropbox and Eventbrite. Sean helped these brands reach billions of dollars of net worth. What did he actually did? He used “Hacking”. No not like those Facebook or Twitter hacking, but well planned and executed blogging growth hacks.
Famous blogs and growth hackers, such as Noah Kagan, got over 100,000 visits on his blog in just a few months of starting his blog in the year 2011. And now his blog is paying salaries to over 10 of his employees. All thanks to Noah’s growth hacking strategies.
The internet is filled with many such “Hacking Wonders”. Another very popular case of growth hacking is that of CrazyEggs. According to Neil Patel’s blog, “CrazyEggs’s blog traffic jumped to 62,980 in the year 2014 in a matter of few months”. That was a 206% increase in CrazyEgg’s viewership.
What the “hack”?
Hacking your blog may sound like an illegal, high-tech or very complex task. But it is not. You don’t need a masters degree in web programming or years and years of hustle and experience to perform growth hacks.
You must know a few things before you aim for the peeks. Target audience, call to action, lead generation, and email marketing are a few “Keywords” you better get on your tips.
The logic is simple. More Efforts, More Hits, More Revenue, generates More Income!!
To make your life a lot more easier and to make you a hacking ninja!! (of course a growth hacking one) We present you the top blogging growth hacks to rocket your income from $1 to $1,000 (or even more!!).
Blogging Growth Hacks: Points to Remember
- Build a Strategy : Irrespective of your niche, you just can’t do without a proper, well planned strategy. Let’s admit it, you as a blogger got some massive players of this game to compete with. Huffington posts for example. With keeping your target audience in mind, your campaign budget, your available time and of course your niche, build a content marketing strategy and follow it.
- Relevancy of Content : You must have seen this point at a lot to other blogs as well. Don’t confuse your audience. Be specific and relevant in your blog posts. If you are blogging about cars, no profit in writing about ice creams for a change. While building a community around your blog and generating traffic, this is the most underestimated, but the most important point to remember.
- Keep an eye on your competitions : 80 million blog posts are posted daily on WordPress alone. And you think yours is the best? It is very important to keep an eye on your competition. Checkout your competition’s annual income reports. Check out their blog posting frequency. Keep an eye on their social media involvement. This is actually a very healthy practise as you get to see what trend is going on and what trend is about to arrive.
- Patience is the Key : Who doesn’t want overnight stardom? But that’s not how things happen. And specially for beginners. You have to be patient with your strategy. Growth is what you aim for and patience is your arrow. Remember slow and steady wins the race!!
Blogging Growth Hacks
Hack #1 Offer More To Your Viewers
Blogging and bloggers these days have gone way beyond mere words. Gone are the days when people actually used to read those long hefty, wordy articles.
Even for the shorter articles also, “boring” is a term introduced in blogging that is referred to all those wordy blogs that don’t have any images or videos, or any kind of graphical content for that matter.
If you notice some of the famous websites or blogs, such as that of Neil Patel’s, you will definitely notice the amount of images, screenshots, graphs, social media shares, videos, and so on.
These graphical contents are a win win deal for you. Your blogs will look amazing and presentable, you can use them to generate and redirect genuine traffic to your blog by using social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and also these graphical content help your blog in better SEO rankings.
Hack #2 It’s Not Just What You Write, It’s Also How You Write
It’s important for any blog, irrespective of its niche and target audience to write or format itself in a way that it is engaging for the reader, as well as easy to understand.
A very general and well-tried method to do this is to write blogs in a hierarchical method, which is “Problem-Possibilities-Answer”.
First of all, you write about the Problem your blog is dealing with. You have to give real life examples, ask reasonable questions and you may also provide stats about the problem you blog is dealing with.
Then comes the “Possibilities” part. Here you have to tell the possible problem your reader could face. You have to write the in-depth possibilities and possible results of the problem you wrote above.
Then finally you have to solve your readers doubts and problems, and you have to write about the best solution to this problem. You answer should be detailed and actionable. You don’t want to confuse your reader. Come straight to the point and solve all the problems you wrote above.
Hack #3 Frequency of Your Content
Blogging more frequently and continuously is a key factor for a bloggers growth and success. Most marketing strategy experts won’t agree to this fact completely, but it has been proven that more blogging produces better results.
It has been noted that blogs publishing equal to or more than 16 blogs per month has seen better results than those publishing around 4 blogs per month(Appcues.com).
Frequently blogging has a positive impact on your website’s or blog’s inbound traffic.
“Inbound marketing is basically converting viewers into customers. It is the attraction of customers via the content offered on the website or blog.”
It may sound a little hectic but what’s the problem in hiring freelance content writers or agencies to write more articles for your blog. Agencies like Contentvista.com provide high quality and professional web content, sure to up your content marketing game.
Hack #4 Length Of Your Content Matters
It has been researched and proved that lengthy content have a better sharing rate and linking rate. According to IncomeDiary.com, 85% of text content is less than 1000 words on the internet.
Blogs with longer text content get a better search engine results than those blogs having shorter text content length(Incomediary.com).
Many blogs in different niche are getting better rankings, actually on the first SERP’s, thanks to their long and wordy content.
Hack #5 Using SEO and Keywords
Using search engine optimization is a must. It is not recommended to over do this hack, such as hiring any SEO company or create a ton of non-sense links back to your blog.
If you have a WordPress blog, most likely you would, you can install a SEO plugin, such as Yoast SEO, and simply follow its to-do things. You can set an in-demand, niche specific keyphrase in the title and 3-4 times, here and there in the blog.
Talking about the keywords, adding keywords, not stuffing them, is also a great practise. You can use different keyword searching tools, such as Google AdWords Keywords Planner, to pick out a bunch of useful and your content specific keywords.
Hack #6 Cross Linking
This is one of the easiest to do growth hack. Growth marketing is also about content marketing of your own blogs.
This is a common practise in tons of different top ranking blogs. All you have to do is to give links to your other blog posts and cross link all your blogs as much as you can.
For example, you are writing a blog on latest mobile phones. At some point of your blog, you might wanna write about different operating systems. And if you already have a blog written about mobile operating systems, you can give link of that or reference of that blog in your upcoming mobile phones blog posts. This way you can make a potential reader read more and more of your blogs.
And not just that, it has a lot more benefits. You get a lot more click throughs and also, you can achieve a better ranking in Google searches.
Hack #7 Engage Audience with Social Media Campaigns
No competition with the popularity of social media in the 21st century. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have a lot more to offer than memes.
A social media presence has become a must these days. You have to be involved with your audience and latest trends. Social media sharing, community building and graphical representation capabilities are a must to promote your content.
You can run a lot of paid advertising campaigns where you can offer giveaways and gifts to your viewers, which definitely helps you to redirect more traffic to your blog posts.
There are a tons of social share tools available on the internet that can save a lot of your time and efforts. Buffer for example. You can connect your multiple social media accounts to your single Buffer account and can easily share posts through a common platform.
Hack #8 Email Marketing
Now this is what you will not see in many other “blogging growth hack” lists. A lot of digital marketing or growth hacking experts will not recommend but facts don’t agree with gurus here!
Most people nowadays think that email marketing is a thing of the past. But that’s not true. It is noted that even in this era of social media marketing, email marketing generates three times better traffic than that generated from social media platforms(mckinsey.com).
You have to make sure that you provide proper proper backlinks to your blog. Email marketing is beneficial only if done properly. You can also add a section of any of your blog. Create specially designed newsletters to advertise your email campaigns.
Another tried and tested method of email marketing is to add your blog posts campaigns in your overall email campaigns, rather than creating special separate campaigns for your blogs.This way you can save time and effort, as you don’t have to create separate email lists for that.
Hack #9 Reaching Out to Influencers
This is a very important hack. Yes, we said that you can’t have overnight success, but you possibly can if you get promoted by some famous and respected blogging influencer.
And even if you can’t reach out to some big names in the game, there are thousands of influencers out there who constantly share blogs and articles all of their platforms.
You have to simply approach them, via email probably, and simply ask them to share your blog’s link. And if possible you may pay them some money, you can actually provide a service to them by, maybe sharing their profiles, offering them to guest blog or something like that.
You can also use some of the top content marketing tools, such as Buzzsumo to find influencers in your niche. Simply search your niche related keywords and check out the section “View Sharers” to get the list of the top influencers in your niche.
Last Words
Blogging demands patience. Blogging demands efforts. Blogging demands hacks.
You have to check a lot of boxes to make big in the blogging world. These are one of the best blogging growth hacks that you can use to maximise your traffic and increase your income. Yes you will see a lot of other hacks in different blogging growth hacks, but what matters the most is to make a strategy and follow it patiently.
You can also create a marketing team as a part of your blogging growth hack strategy. Many famous blogs and bloggers are using special marketing teams to get better traffic on their blogs.
An important point to notice while you check out your campaigns results is to keep an eye on the conversion rate of your resources. Look out for the number of social media shares, keep an eye on clicks on your blogs, number of visitors and so on. This will help you to manage your future campaigns.
And do check out 25 Most Helpful Content Marketing Tools for Bloggers to get all the insights of content marketing tools and make the most of your efforts.
