Starting a blog is easy, getting people to read your blog now that is the hard part. Since we started this blog 3 years ago we have gone through major ups and downs and at some point almost deleted it. What started off as a hobby capturing our food, travel and writing adventures soon turned into a go to destinations for reviews and all sorts of other entertainment and inspirations. At this point we started to have anxiety about what content to post next, I mean some days our traffic goes through the roof and other days only my mom and best friends visit the blog. This yo-yo traffic behavior is sure to drive any blogger crazy. You start to feel like your content is just crap or you simply start panicking about not having enough content to keep people entertained and make them stay.

This yo-yo behavior has since forced me to start looking for different ways to promote my blog online with one of those being through social media. The majority of our blog traffic comes from social media platforms with Facebook being the best performing one. Sharing our posts on our social media pages has resulted in our friends/family sharing our posts with their friends and so on and so forth resulting in our content reaching thousands of people. outside of just sharing our content here are other tricks we have used on social media to help grow our blog traffic:

1. Schedule posts: Seeing that we can’t always be online 24/7 we make sure we schedule posts to go out throughout the day sharing links, images, video driving people to the blog. We also schedule posts strategically based on best performing times and days of the week so that we reach a higher audience.

2. Join The Conversation: We hardly ever miss the opportunity to join topical and popular conversations taking place on social media and making sure we link people to our content for more on those topics. For example travel lovers every Wednesday at 7-8pm their is a Travel Chat that takes place on Twitter which is the perfect opportunity to share all your travel posts with other travel junkies.

3. Join Forums: I used to think this was silly until I did it and saw amazing results. I joined the South African Bloggers group on Facebook were thousands of bloggers across SA share their blogs posts daily and build relationships with other bloggers. This group has connected me with other amazing bloggers and some have even guest blogged here helping me out with my content shortage problems, which leads to trick number 4.

4. Guest Blog: This is also something I never really believed in because why would anyone want to share their amazing work on someone else’s platform? Well the answer is because that someone else’s blog is giving you access to a new audience and access to their social media followings. Guest blogging is actually one of the best ways to grow your audience! Also feature other bloggers on your blog this helps when you are struggling to find content.

5. Share your older blog posts: My older blog posts from years ago come in handy when I have zero new content to share. Sometimes you may write a great piece but the timing of it is wrong and no one ends up reading it. So sharing your older posts gives you access to new eyeballs that may have missed it the first time!

All of the above is not always easy to do (I mean I don’t even have it completely locked down yet, well I’m just lazy) but once you get it right you will start seeing an improvement in your traffic. The below video from one of my favourite YouTubers gives better insight into growing your blog/vlog/business on social media: WATCH IT NOW this is the gospel LOL I love it!

Happy June 1 Everyone!!!