Growing your blog to the next level

Its a real tough job to get that first 1000 visitors and getting them to visit again and again, but even when most bloggers overcome this challenge, they usually face another challenge as once a blog reaches 30,000 visitors a month it will stop having growth by your existing promotional methods.

When your blog reaches this level you’ll definitely earn enough money to support your living, but you can’t earn the reputation of a six figure blogger. Now for growing your blog it requires a change in your promotional methods as well as your monetization methods. The promotional methods are usually triggered with the help of your existing audience, whereas the monetization method includes moving beyond the traditional banner advertisements. In this post I’ve mainly written about the promotional methods to reach that level.

How to become a six-figure blogger

This new trend in the blogosphere started two years ago when many of the big bloggers started to claim a six figure income either annually or monthly. This caused a lot of buzz online and successfully attracted many more people into blogging and social media. At first I believed that such claims were made only for gaining fame and authority, but when I kept learning more and moving deeper in the field on internet marketing it seemed pretty clear and felt real to reach that level.

As I said above, reaching the 30,000 levels unveils a new round of opportunities and these opportunities are not victories but new challenges. Reaching the six figure level all depends on how you use and tame this new opportunities, which include promotional methods as well as monetization methods which I’ve discussed in my previous post on Imperial monetization methods. Now this post is for those of you hunting for new promotional methods.

Target big communication channels

Till now you wouldn’t have had an opportunity to optimize your blog for Digg, Delicious and other big social sites, but now you have enough traffic which is a base for triggering a viral chain. Before you reach this level its recommended that you use small communication channels, but you’ll have to quickly optimize for bigger ones once you reach this level. This optimization should start with the placing of social bookmarking buttons on your posts and then recommend your users to connect with you in those social sites.

You must try to build a powerful account on each site you choose,this can be done by leveraging your users towards your profile, actively participating in the community and networking with others.

Big communication channels also include mainstream media such as newspapers and TV channels. I was lucky enough to get featured in my local newspaper without having any traffic, it did bring in a bit of traffic, but I was happy about the opportunity I had got. Once your blog grows you’ll definitely receive offers from newspapers, magazines and TV channels.

Pay for social media optimization

I guess most of you would not have heard of sites such as Shorttasks and Amazon Turks, so let me tell you that they are sites were people looking for small online jobs meet people who are looking to solve small problems. If you take a look at these sites you’ll see that they are flooded with offers were job seekers are asked to stumble, digg or tweet the offerers website and is paid around $0.03 to $0.20.

That amount isn’t very big and the returns they would get through that are huge, so what I mean to say is with just a few cents you can get a few diggs and in a few dollars you’ll get thousands of diggs and I guess all of you know what can lead to. I’m sure all of you will be earning enough money by now and its time you start investing money on your blog to grow it into a business.

Outsource SEO and marketing

Till now you were just promoting your blog without any proper analysis or planning, so this is the time to plan out everything, and the best way to do so is to outsource it to a good quality and well known company. Their are many internet marketing companies which eat a lot of money without doing anything, so if you avoid these companies and judge a good one, your sure to improve your traffic.

This way you can also take a break from promoting your blog and start concentrating on writing good content, but its good and recommended for you to still promote your blog as this can help you expand your blog to different networks and I’m sure that within a few months you’ll start earning passive income.

Hold a contest and increase subscribers

This is a method which is really effective, but very few people have used it and most of them have seen an increase subscriber rate on 40% to 60%. If you have a quite popular blog then you can easily get sponsors for your contest, the sponsorships can include free products or cash prizes which perform really well.

You can make subscribing to your blog as a requirement and this way you’ll have huge increase in your subscriber levels. Holding a contest also helps you get links and mentions on other blogs, expanding your niche and traffic.

Promotion of your contest is another major issue, but most bloggers successfully pull it off. Most people use forums and ad networks such as Bidvertiser and Adsense, but for me contest blogs worked out the best and one of my friend Sushant held a blogging contest on his blog and one thing very impressive was he had a separate cash prize for the best promoter, for which you’ll have to write an article on your blog about the contest.

Distribute content

Content distribution is one of the oldest and still a stable method to drive traffic to any site. Methods such as article marketing has already died out, but still there many more things under content distribution which is still untapped and can generate enormous amounts of traffic.

In content distribution the still effective ones are press release, tutorials, powerpoint presentation, videos and PDF files. Its not recommended that you use all, but press releases and videos are a must as it gives you intense exposure. A video is important because your blogs readers will on a look out for an actively moving yourself and you’ll have to tag it well and embed it for extra exposure.

On to our readers

There are many more promotional methods which mainly meant for medium sized blogs, but these are one of the best and if you actively utilize this I’m sure that your blog will one day grow into a big business. To keep yourself upto date please do subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter.