Blog Growth: How to Build a Mega-Following

Do you want to attract a bigger audience to your blog?

Are you wondering how you can write content that will generate more comments, shares and subscribers?

To learn how to grow a successful blog, I interview Syed Balkhi for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Syed Balkhi, founder of multiple popular websites, including WPBeginner and List25. He's also the founder of OptinMonster.

Syed shares how he grew his very popular sites and provides actionable tips that you can employ to grow your own blog traffic.

You'll learn about the different types of content that work best and some profitable choices for monetization.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Blog Growth
The idea for WPBeginner

Back in 2009, Syed did consulting work for small businesses, with a lot of the work retainer-based. To free up some time, he decided to switch his clients to WordPress, which would give them the ability to change their own text and not have to contact him directly.

Once this change happened, Syed was still approached with the same questions about WordPress. At the time there was no other WordPress resource site out there for beginners. So WPBeginner was formed on July 4, 2009.

Syed explains how his goal in the beginning was to produce multiple posts a day and answer all of the questions that he was asked. The idea was to put the answers on the website so he could link back to them, rather than send an email.

When he noticed that other people were using the site, he knew there was definitely a market for it.

You'll hear how Syed used Twitter to help with content creation and why he used Digg and StumbleUpon to push articles.

Listen to the show to find out why it was Syed's goal to help individuals, rather than have hugely popular articles.

WPBeginner's site metrics

Syed states that WPBeginner gets an average of 1.5 million page views a month and they have just over 70,000 followers on Twitter.

Listen to the show to find out how these figures are similar to Social Media Examiner's.

The lessons learned about content creation

From the very beginning, Syed built an email list, but he didn't engage with it. At first, he didn't realize the value of asking people to ask you questions.

Now when you subscribe to WPBeginner, it asks you one question: "What is the one thing we can help you with right now?"

You'll discover why there is huge value in this one question and how this has changed the way WPBeginner creates content.

Syed used to be the only person who wrote articles, but the site now has multiple writers with a very good editorial workflow.

Listen to the show to hear how the interaction and response to email has developed the WPBeginner community.

WPBeginner's business model

Syed explains that his business is monetized through building WordPress applications and plugins. A lot of the time, it's conversion marketing for clients.

The WPBeginner brand allows them to position themselves as experts. Whenever somebody wants a WordPress company to work with, they automatically think of WPBeginner.

You'll hear how they use affiliate links for paid plugins.

In the beginning, Syed tried display advertising. He had ads through AdSense, BuySellAds and private ad sales. You'll find out why these ads didn't work for the WPBeginner audience and how affiliate deals make more sense.

Listen to the show to find out why we use DoubleClick for Publishers at Social Media Exam...