From time to time, you may find that your blog is in a bit of a slump, examples being a decrease in readers or technical aspects, such as website performance. Figuring out how to recover things pick your blog up from the canvas can seem like a struggle. But checking out these tips — from updating your web hosting services to something like GoDaddy or WP Engine (makeawebsitehub reviewed WP Engine and you can read the full review here) to creating seasonal content — is the perfect place for you to start.
As a blogger, you’ll experience highs, lows, inspirational moments and, unfortunately, the occasional slump. When the latter happens, it’s important to not worry. It happens to every blogger at some point, so you shouldn’t dwell on it.
What you should do is focus on dragging your blog out of its current sluggish state. The pointers in this post will outline a few of the reasons why websites perform poorly and why blogs suffer because of content-related issues, but more importantly, what you can do to get back on track.
Quality Over Quantity
You will have heard the phrase ‘quality over quantity’ in reference to many different things — and it’s a way of thinking that you should also apply to your blog. It can be easy to fall into the trap of writing for the sake of writing, rather than doing so because you have an interest in the topic. While it is important to upload posts on your blog regularly, it’s no use if the new content is poor-quality.
If you rush through multiple blog posts, you run the risk of making typos and rookie grammar errors, which can have a negative effect on your site’s SEO. If the topic and content of your blog posts are uninspired, predictable and repetitive, you’ll begin to lose readers. This is especially harmful to your site; if you have done a good job of building up a loyal readership, losing that core group means they’ll stop linking back to your site from their own blogs or social media.
Explore a New Niche
Your blog is the perfect platform to write about whatever you want, whether it’s merely used as a digital journal, or somewhere to write about your hobbies, interests and career. If you ask a blogger for advice or read an article about blogging, you’ll probably be told that focusing on one niche is more beneficial in regards to SEO and your ability to make money from your blog.
With that said, if your current niche is no longer inspiring you to write or if you have simply lost interest in the topics it provides, you should explore new ideas. This isn’t to say that you should abandon your current niche because you’ll also be abandoning lots of readers. But you may find that researching new topics and finding a spark of inspiration again will help to make you more productive with your blog’s original focus.
Bad Web Hosting Services = Poor Site Performance
When you first create a blog, there’s a lot of decisions to be made. What domain name shall I pick? What niche will I focus on? What theme am I going to choose?! One decision you need to give plenty of time to surrounds your web hosting services. This provides you with the webspace and necessary bandwidth to create and maintain a site. In the grand scheme of things, this decision is significant, but at the time, it often makes more sense to choose whichever website hosting company is the cheapest.
The problem with this is that super-cheap web hosting is super-cheap for a reason. You can be confident that it will lack in regards to quality. Bad web hosting will lead to site performance issues such as slow loading times, cybersecurity issues and unexpected downtime. All of these problems are an absolute nightmare for website owners, but it will also frustrate your readers and send them off to look for a blogger with a decent website.
If this sounds familiar and your website is plagued by any of the issues mentioned above, there’s a good chance bad website hosting is the culprit. Finding a reputable web hosting company with genuine testimonials is your best bet, with services that are very reasonable in price, without sacrificing quality. Now you can get back to blogging without the stress and hassle of site performance issues.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you have spent time roaming the internet, you will have come across the term SEO — a lot. This stands for search engine optimisation and it’s something that you, as a blogger, should certainly take notice of. It relates to the marketing techniques used to make your website rank higher on search engines. So whenever you enter something into a search engine, the websites you find on the first pages are those with great SEO.
Optimising your content for SEO is essential to rank higher and reach a larger audience. The use of keywords in your posts will prove to be very useful, as these are the types of words or phrases that people use when searching for content in your niche. This make is even more likely that they will stumble upon your blog. You should also be using backlinks to high-authority sites in your posts, which demonstrates to search engines that your blog is an excellent source of information that uses articles, studies and the like to back up the points being made.
Use Social Media Effectively
For most people, social media is mainly used for catching up with friends and being tagged in horrendous photos. For a blogger, though, it’s the perfect marketing tool. By posting a link to your new blog content, you instantly grab the attention of all of your followers, who then become potential readers. Rather than wait for the audience to come to you, social media allows you to reach out to a massive amount of people from the get-go.
When you consider the variety of social media sites and apps — such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest — that’s a massive amount of exposure you’ll be missing out on if you choose not to make the most it. Other bloggers are using social media on a daily basis to promote their sites, so if you’re neglecting using social media, changing could well be the solution to your blog’s lack of success.
