Why Your Blog Isn’t Growing? Tips to Get More Traffic

I’m past the point of hoping that content I write will magically pull in thousands of page views overnight. From personal experience, I know this just isn’t the case. Most successful blogs take a lot of work to grow. There are so many entwining factors and things you’ll need to work on simultaneously to achieve blogging success. So, if you’re here because you want to know why your blog isn’t growing, here’s some helpful advice to finally get you on the right track.

The Biggest Reason Why Your Blog Isn’t Growing

The beginning stages of building any blog tend to be particularly grueling. Your new website probably has little down the lines of domain authority, so it’s unlikely that search engines will shower you with traffic. This isn’t to say you should ignore SEO best practices, but you can’t count on search engines alone when you’re starting – especially if you’re blogging in a niche that’s already saturated.

The most important and overlooked part of growing a blog is that marketing your blog will take a lot of work. After writing excellent blog posts, you have to spend a ton of time marketing them and networking with people in your industry.

If you’re trying to grow a business blog, this is especially important. A lot of businesses start blogging with the idea that people will automatically start finding them online. This will hardly ever be the case.

Yes, your business blog should ultimately help you get found online, but it will take a lot of effort to work yourself up to a point where traffic starts to stream in consistently.

With that out of the way, here are some of the main reasons why your blog isn’t growing.

1. You’re Not on Social Media

It’s important to get out there and network if you want your blog to grow. Social media offers you a great opportunity to market your new blog posts and gain a following online.

Not promoting your business and blog on social media puts you at a serious disadvantage. When you’re just starting out marketing your business online, social media is probably the cheapest way to start expanding your online presence.

If you aren’t promoting yourself on social media, you’re essentially waiting for web traffic to just fall out of the sky.

2. You’re Not Using Social Media Right

To get good results from social media marketing, you must approach it the right way. A lot of bloggers fail to get attention from social media because they don’t have a marketing plan. They try to grow their presence across 5 different platforms all at once. Ironically (but not surprisingly) they end up struggling to get attention on even one of their 5 chosen platforms.

I suggest taking a step back. Look at what’s worked for other bloggers in your niche. Most of the time, having a Facebook page and Pinterest profile is best to grow traffic. Rather than reposting the same boring content over 5 social channels, learn how to stand out on one or two.

Learn more about what to post social media if you want to get noticed. So many businesses have the most boring Facebook pages. Just looking at their pages, you couldn’t even begin to guess what business is behind the page. It could be a graphic design firm or an online shop, but perhaps neither and maybe both.

When trying to build a following for your brand, be sure that your social profiles are brand-focused. Don’t make the mistake of posting other people’s content all the time. It’s okay to share content from other websites, but don’t share just anything you like. Be sure that even if you share content from others, it’s relevant to your business and the brand you want to build.

3. You Don’t Have a Focused Brand

This point links directly into the last one. When building your brand online, you want it to be defined. You want people who visit your social profiles and website to quickly see what you do and who your target customers are.

Don’t start your blog aimlessly shifting from one topic to another in your content. Your content must reflect what your business does on some level. While you don’t want every blog post you publish to be an obvious advertisement for your business, it must relate to what you do. The people reading your posts should ideally be individuals who are likely to buy your product or service.

Another great way to build a focused brand is by choosing a set of brand colors, getting your own logo and setting some guidelines for yourself regarding your brand imaging. Whenever you post an image quote, infographic or any promotional image online, it must look like it belongs in your brand.

When choosing brand colors, be specific. If you’re using a bright yellow, for instance, use HTML color values to choose one specific yellow. Don’t go from one kind of yellow to another in every new image you put online.

4. Your Content Is Uninteresting or Confusing

Don’t you just love how every point is flowing into the next here? Part of having a focused brand is having an interesting one. Part of having an interesting brand, is having interesting content.

I know a lot of you are thinking I’m harsh, but this is honest advice. There are blog authors that tick all the right boxes while marketing content and still have poor results. If this is you, your content might be the problem.

I’ve seen so many people nowadays tell bloggers to put out as much content as possible to get better results. However, I personally advise against this.

If you’re just cranking out content for the sake of promoting it online, people will notice. They won’t enjoy your posts and they most certainly won’t follow you.

It’s great to publish as much content as you can manage, so don’t let fear hold you back either. But if you’re just publishing content in an attempt to turn your blog into a traffic-generating machine, the quality of your content will suffer.

Make sure that with every piece of content you publish, you offer readers an excellent sense of focus and value.

5. You Aren’t Promoting Your Online Content Offline

There are so many great opportunities to promote your online presence offline. It can seem counter-intuitive to lead in-person prospects to your online marketing channels, but it makes perfect sense.

Getting prospects who you’ve met in-person to follow you online can help you keep in touch. If you’ve already worked with a customer, keeping in touch online could help improve your customer retention rates as well. They won’t easily forget about you if they see you in their Facebook feeds, or get regular company newsletters in their inboxes.

Promote your social media handles and website URL anywhere you can offline. Include this information on your business cards and company vehicles and add it to your brochures.

6. You Don’t Optimize for SEO

While search engines are unlikely to send a ton of traffic your way from the start, you can’t ignore SEO altogether. If you’re wondering why your blog isn’t growing, even though you’ve published hundreds of posts, then your SEO is probably an issue.

Make sure you know some common SEO tactics. Learn how to do keyword research and build links between your content. Also learn where to include your keywords in your content to help search engines find it.

Not every post you publish needs to be an SEO masterpiece, but I recommend having at least some posts that follow all the common SEO guidelines in the content.

SEO can be a sticky subject. It’s difficult to learn everything there is to know overnight. If you just start out by learning how to use keywords properly, you can learn more as you go along.

7. You Don’t Have an Email List

Building an email list is such an important part of marketing your business online. Even if you’re not sure what to say in your company newsletters yet, start building your email list by offering an incentive to sign up. Once you’re ready to start email marketing, you’ll already have an email list to start off your email marketing strategy with a bang.

8. You’re Impatient

Building a decent following for your business online will take time and effort. Few good things in life just come about overnight. A lot of marketers find that organic blog traffic grows the more blog posts you have.

This makes sense, since the more content you have, the more indexable pages you’ll have on your website. In fact, companies that blog normally have approximately 434% more indexed pages on search engines.

Sometimes the only reason why your blog isn’t growing is because you haven’t been blogging for long enough. A lot of people say that good content will attract an audience, even if you only have 3 posts up, and in some cases that’s true, but not always. In the real world, few blogs have been successful after posting only 3 or 4 posts.

If you feel like your blog isn’t growing, at least wait until you have 10 or 20 good posts published before you throw in the towel. Don’t give up too soon. After publishing a few posts, you can see what’s worked and adjust your content strategy to help your blog grow faster.