Top 10 Social Media Tips for Growing Your Blog in 2019
The power of social media as a source of information, entertainment, and business growth is undeniable in 2019. A good blog can help you build a strong personal brand or generate leads and sales for your business. However you want to develop your personal or corporate blog, here are the top 10 tips from Marina Mogilko, a blogger with almost 2 million subscribers on YouTube and almost half a million followers on Instagram.
Be Authentic
Starting a blog always means being open to sharing your life, both successes and failures. While many people believe that a blog can be only about the bright side of life, the audience has less trust in such polished posts and quickly gets bored. Nice, glossy photos and flawless, pretty views were extremely popular back in 2016–2017.
However, in 2019 people look for authenticity. It is more exciting for all of us to learn how people have faced the challenges and found solutions to various problems. The audience wants to follow the accounts with which they can identify.
Being honest helps to build a special connection with your audience. If they trust you, if they have this special bond with your content, they will be loyal to you for a long time and will help to monetize your blog later.
Start with The Right Motivation
In recent years, more and more people have been starting blogs to become famous or to easily increase their income. However, it is the wrong motivation to start blogging. Not only does it take time to grow the audience and start seeing the first scalable results, but a successful blog also requires high-quality content. The latter is possible only when you are truly interested in working on it and enjoy creating your texts, videos, or photos, regardless of how many people see them and how much income they bring in.
For me, it took almost 10 months to get my first 10k followers on my YouTube channel.
If I was not enjoying making the videos, I would never have reached this point. If it gets boring for you, there is less potential for growth and fewer chances to succeed.
Use Your Personal Brand
When choosing the content for your channel, think from the perspective of your personal brand. You can do generic videos on popular topics, e.g. TOP 5 Books to Read This Year or The Best Destinations for Vacations. But add a personal touch to them and comment on them from the position of your expertise and knowledge. People do not follow bloggers to listen to Wikipedia excerpts or read encyclopedic entries. They want to hear your opinion and understand your personal take on each matter you choose to cover. Even if you express an unpopular point of view, do not be afraid to speak out. This way, you will find your dedicated niche audience and build a strong community.
Work with Your Expertise
Finding the theme for a blog can be a challenging task. I always suggest starting by defining the area of your expertise. As an accountant, you are an expert in personal or corporate finance; as a stylist, you know about fashion and trends; as a florist, you can talk about floral decor or gardening.
Try to make a list of a few topics for blog posts/videos, and you will quickly see where your expertise lies. Focus on the topics that do not require extensive external research. People can read relevant articles and books on their own if they are interested in the topic. They come to you for your expert opinion.
The easy way to see if you are an expert in the topic is to check if you need a script for a video/podcast or whether you can talk about it in your own words.
People always prefer a natural easy-flowing speech, even with some minor mistakes or repetitions, to monotonous and unemotional lectures. Try to simply outline the structure of your speech with a few key points and refer to them when recording your video.
Diversify Your Content
No theme can offer you an endless choice of topics for your posts. When you exhaust your original theme and struggle to find new topics, look around for related themes to create original content for your blog.
For instance, I started my channel with videos about preparation for international exams. Soon, I added videos about studying abroad, learning languages, and moving to the USA. These three topics were all related to my original content and were still of interest to my audience. At the same time, they gave me more freedom in the choice of topics and let me reach new audiences.
At the moment, learning foreign languages is the major theme of my YouTube channel Linguamarina and the key service of my business LinguaTrip.com.
However, I should warn you: do not choose topics that are too different from your original theme or too diverse. Doing so, you will notice a decline in engagement on each post. Your audience was attracted by one particular theme and may not be interested in subjects from a completely different field. Try to keep a balance.
Start Simply, Become a Professional
Many young people believe that to start a YouTube channel, they need to buy a lot of expensive technical equipment, for a podcast, they need to use a real sound studio, and for Instagram, they should use only professional photos. However, these things all come later, and they’re not necessary to get a start in blogging. What is essential for starting your blog is your passion, your expertise, and your desire to create useful, high-quality content.
When I started on YouTube back in 2015, I was filming my videos on an iPhone and editing them in iMovie on the same phone. I did not have a professional studio and filmed my videos in front of the window in my parents’ flat. After moving to the USA, I kept using my phone camera for my vlogs and simple videos; walking in a park or along the street and talking to the camera. People watched my videos and subscribed to my channel anyway. They appreciated the value of my content much more than its production value.
Nowadays, YouTube, podcasts and Instagram indeed replace traditional media and compete with TV, radio and glossy magazines both in quantity and quality of the content. However, it will be worth investing in professional equipment and a studio only when your blog starts to grow and brings in your first income.
Post Regularly
Any textbook on blogging and SMM says that posting regularly is a key to success. We are all used to consuming traditional media with a particular schedule in mind: a magazine comes to the store on the 10th day of each month, and a TV show airs every week at the same time. This media consumption mode helps us to develop a habit of regularly watching the videos on a certain YouTube channel or checking a text blog that we like.
However, the algorithms of social media, especially Facebook and Instagram, change all the time. Now they take into consideration not only the consistency of your posting but also the initial engagement of your posts, their reach, and their attractiveness to the audience outside your following. Try to post on a specific schedule, see what times and days work better for your audience, but focus on the quality of your content. Make less, but make it better!
Grow Organically
While many believe that starting on social media requires some big investment, there are still ways to grow organically. YouTube and podcast platforms offer the best opportunities for organic growth. However, you will need to use some techniques and tricks to boost your growth.
The first and most important thing is to use keyword research and SEO principles for your blog regardless of whether you write texts, create videos or produce podcasts.
Check the keywords for your topic, see which are the most commonly searched for by users, and include them in your title, description and text. As we once used hashtags to find interesting posts on Instagram and Pinterest, now the search engines use your keywords to rank your posts and videos. The better you optimize them, the more users will find them via search.
Another thing to try are collaborations with other bloggers and content makers.
Research other bloggers in your field and approach the ones with followings of the same or slightly bigger size than yours. Create some content together with them and refer to each other in your posts, this way cross-promoting each others’ channels. Not only will you get a chance to attract a relevant and active new audience to your blog, but you will also have a high-quality piece of content to share.
The third way is to play with clickbait and try to create viral content.
While some bloggers may say that it is a shady way of promoting your blog, I use it sometimes. Check what topics or events attract a lot of attention at the moment and create a video about them. Don’t forget to share your opinion or include your expert commentary on the situation. Put the most commonly used words and phrases about the event in your title and description, and then work hard on the cover image/scene to attract as many viewers as possible. Do not produce too much clickbait content; it is useful for boosting your growth for a moment, but it is not very effective for building a well-engaged and loyal audience in the long-run.
Experiment with Paid Promotions
At some point, your organic growth will become too slow, and you will want to invest in paid promotion. Whether you use social media and display ads or pay other bloggers for endorsement of your blog/brand, always choose the channel wisely. Targeting the right audience with the right message is what makes advertising a form of art. Research not only demographics but also the social and lifestyle profiles of your audience. You should know which media they read, which places they attend, and which shows they watch. All of this will help you to target your ads more specifically.
If you are not sure how to define your target audience, make a quick survey among your current followers (stories and live streams are the best formats to conduct such research). Knowing them well, you will be able to define your target audience better and have more data on your followers available for potential advertisers.
When working on a small budget, try to target specific locations and interests. Also, you may consider advertising on other, less popular platforms. For instance, you can find a lot of teenagers on TikTok. And many young professionals use Spotify daily. Think carefully about other channels to reach your potential audience.
Develop Each Platform Individually
When your blog on one platform starts to grow, you may feel a temptation to drag the audience from there to your other channels. However, people do not like to change platforms.
Often, the audience of the same blogger or brand on Instagram is completely different from their audience on YouTube or Facebook.
With this knowledge in mind, you can plan your content more efficiently and better tailor it to your different audiences. As a business, you can sell different products and services via different channels. Put an emphasis on visually attractive things on Instagram while offering more complex products on YouTube or in podcasts, where it can be better explained and showcased.
Having two or more developed channels not only provides you with more opportunities for sales and monetization but also helps you to find new topics. If you see that one of your YouTube videos went viral, you can easily recycle it into a series of Instagram posts. Work with content wisely and reuse it across different platforms to reach maximum efficiency.
