10 Ways to Jump Start Your Blog By Next Week

Blog growth is rarely steady.

You do something good, and traffic spikes.  Then you get a little bit comfortable and the stats float back down to Earth, but to a permanently-higher level than before.  Then you do something really good again, and traffic spikes even higher.

And so on.  The point, then, is to create more spikes.  So here are 10 ways to make your next one happen this week.

1. Get a new design.

Clean design is so important.  If your blog looks amateur, people aren't going to feel confident sharing your content.

For both of my blog designs, I've used a site called Design Crowd, where you choose the amount of money you'll pay and designers compete by submitting their designs.  Now I'm working with Revive My Blog to give my blogs a facelift.

2. Guest post on a big blog.

Guest posting is such an underused strategy for increasing readership.  And since you get to craft the link back to your blog, it's not a bad SEO strategy, either.

Pitch a slightly-bigger blogger on your idea for a guest post that's perfect for their blog.  Or go really big, and pitch someone you're sure will say no.  (That's what I did, and this amazing opportunity came of it.)

If they say yes, make it one of the best posts you've ever written and promote the heck out of it when it's posted.

3. Take a break.

Take a week off and figure out what you want your blog to be.  Arrange for four or five bloggers to write guest posts for you while you use the time to recharge the batteries.

They'll appreciate the chance to reach your audience; you'll enjoy a break and the traffic they send when they promote their guest posts.

4. Create an email autoresponder sequence.

The email inbox is prime internet real estate.  There's an immediacy to email that RSS or social media sites just can't match.

Your goal is to make people look forward to your emails (and therefore, to open them).  The easiest way to do this is to provide them with a sequence of emails that truly offers value.  Sites like AWeber and MailChimp make it easy to manage an email list and set up an autoresponder, the sequence of emails that automatically goes out at specified intervals to new people who sign up on your list.

5. Figure out what your blog is all about and write that cornerstone content.

When someone new shows up at your blog, what do they see?  If you said, "my most recent post and an 'About' page," you've got some work to do.

Your best stuff, the content that defines your blog and gives the most value to the reader, has got to be front and center.  Create landing pages that link to your best posts on a given topic.  If you don't have any posts like that, decide what that topic is and write them.  You want content that people will bookmark, Tweet about, and link to.

6. Go back and clean up all those pages from the early days that say "I" all over them.

First rule of marketing: It ain't about you.

We all make our blogs about us when we start them.  Many people never stop writing about themselves, and a few succeed that way.  But it's way easier when you make it about the reader, not about you.

Define your ideal reader.  Age, sex, name, job, hair color, favorite Jonas brother, etc.  Really.  And get inside their head.  Then write your pages and posts for that reader.

7. Do the Cosmopolitan headline exercise.

I didn't invent it.  I don't know who did.  I first read about it on Copyblogger.  But it works, so I wrote a post about it.

Do this, then realize that all your headlines need to be this good.  If you can't come up with snazzy headline for a post, chances are it's not worth posting.  Which brings me to…

8. Decide that if you don't have something great to post, you won't post.

This might be the single best decision you can make about your blog.  You do not need to post every day. More people will unsubscribe because you overload their feed reader with mediocre stuff than because you only write three posts a week.

When you have nothing to post, don't write a post called "Boring Weekend."  Instead, take the time you would have spent writing "Boring Weekend" and make the next day's post a homerun.

9. Look around the blogosphere (not just health) and see the potential.

It's easy to forget that there are blogs that aren't about health, food, and fitness.  But take a look around and you'll likely be amazed.

There are blogs that are 100 times the size of the most popular health blogs.  There are blogs that don't accept comments (because they don't have to).  There are blogs whose posts get more tweets than they have words.  And there are lots of bloggers whose blogs are their jobs.

10. Join the Third Tribe.

The best thing I've done all year has been joining the Third Tribe the day before the price went up the first time.  Now it's going up again on June 1, at 5 PM Central.  That's my affiliate link, but I'm not going to try to sell you on what the Third Tribe is.  I'll just tell you that it's worth every penny, and let you check it out if you're interested.

Now get to work!  You probably can't do all of these this week, but what if you could do three of them?  Where would your blog be by next Monday?