What do all of the big blogs have in common? I mean besides the envious amount of traffic and huge advertising revenues. They’re all considered to be authorities in their niche. They’ve built a strong following of readers by offering quality content that readers trust and enjoy.
But they didn’t get there overnight.
It takes years to build up your blog, and your expertise, to the point where you can even be considered an authority on a topic. Even if you have a strong background in your chosen niche, it’s going to take time to increase the popularity of your blog.
Popularity and authority are general synonymous with each other in the world of blogging. If your blog is popular, you’re on the fast track to being an authority. If you’re an authority in your niche, you’ll have an easy path to popularity. Working on building either one will reward you with the other. Work on both at the same time could get you there twice as fast.
Increase Your Traffic
I know, it’s hard to do. But if you’ll forgive the cliché, if was easy to do, it wouldn’t be worth doing. Not to mention that everyone would be doing it, making your efforts less effective. Regardless of the difficulty, you need to increase the amount of quality traffic that your blog receives.
Notice I said quality traffic, not just traffic. You could head over to a micro-job site and buy tens of thousands of page visits for a few bucks. Don’t, and don’t think for one second that you can fool search engines with a sudden spike in traffic. Not only will it not improve your search rankings (the true traffic generator) but you could be penalized for trying.
Stick to proven and reliable methods of attracting high-quality traffic. It’s much slower, but considerably more beneficial in the long run. Build quality backlinks, especially on high PageRank sites within your niche. Large numbers of quality backlinks are a great way to show that your site is popular.
Share you work on social media sites. They’re a great place for quality backlinks, further increasing your sites perceived popularity. They’re also a good tool for showcasing your expertise that will let you build a reputation as someone with in-depth knowledge. Social media allows you to build popularity and authority at the same time.
Patience and Consistency
Patience and consistency are the keys to popularity and authority. You need to take your time and create unique content for your blog. You need to market it creatively and target it towards the type of readers who are likely to be interested in your topic. Interacting with you readers regularly can also boost your popularity and give you an opportunity to further share your expertise.
The path to authority, and the popularity that goes with it, can be a long one. Those bloggers that stick it out and put in the work are the ones that make it. You could be the next one.
