How to grow your blog or website?

We all want to grow our websites and blog sites, and there is no wrong in it. Everyone wants to promote its business. We try a lot of things to promote our websites/blogs. There are a lot of ways to promote them but I am sharing you some of them, the ones which I am trying to grow my audience and to get huge traffic.

After many research, watching some youtube videos and reading books on blogging, these are the tips or way to grow your blog and website.

SUBMIT YOUR BLOG TO SEARCH ENGINES

Although your blog can be found on many search engines if your blog contains the same keywords but submitting them make it easier to find to blogs. The higher your content appears in search engine rankings, the greater the possibility that someone clicks your link and finds your blog. If you write outstanding content and post consistently and frequently, your traffic should increase over time.

You can submit your blog to Google very easily using Google Search Console by creating a sitemap for your site. You can submit your blog to many other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, MSN, etc.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA

With the start of the 21st century came a new generation of the Internet: Social media sites. At this time, Web content moved away from being one-sided, where Web sites typically provided information and transaction processing but little more. Social media sites ushered in a new type of Internet rather than have content pushed to users, they jumped on-board and began creating content of their own.

More and more people now join the social media by starting blogs, participating in online forums and chat groups, listening to online radio, watching and sharing videos, joining social networking sites, and participating in social bookmarking activities. The opportunities to join the conversation and share information are seemingly endless, and people and businesses are still just in the beginning stages of discovering how best to use social media. 

Blogs become most successful when the bloggers behind them understand and maximize the opportunities that social media provides them. It isn't a place to simply post information and walk away. Rather, it's a place to publish information and then encourage other people to comment, react, share, and discuss. The tools of social media can help bloggers promote their blogs and gain awareness and recognition for them.

FACEBOOK

Facebook is one of the most popular options to promote your business. Facebook let you know what other thinks of your business, you can simply connect with them.

Here are some ways you can use Facebook to drive readers to your blog

• Add your blog's feed to your Facebook profile.
• Post personal notes and updates to keep people within your network apprised of what you're working on and the news you want to share. For example, if you just wrote an excellent blog post that you think is worthy of other bloggers linking to, you can send a message or publish an update about it on your Facebook profile to spread the word.
• Use the Facebook Groups function to create a group for just about anything you want and invite people to join it. Then you can send messages, Share information, and converse with the members of that group. 
• Join groups in which you are interested in.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn has a reputation for being the go-to place for business and career-related social networking. It has a stripped-down interface that's intended to be free of spam and irrelevant content. Rather than add "friends", LinkedIn users make connections. Similar to Facebook, you cannot view another member's profile unless you have been introduced to that person and are connected to him. Finding another person on LinkedIn can be difficult, which is a common complaint.

Your LinkedIn profile acts similarly to an online résumé. In it, you upload your business and career accomplishments. Then you can add your blog information. If your blog is related to your career or business in any way, your LinkedIn profile can be another tool to help you drive traffic to it. The more connections you make, questions you answer, and relationships you build, the more potential you have for blog traffic.

TWITTER

The best way to promote your blog or website is by Twitter. Twitter is a kind of microblogging software which allows you to write texts and anyone can see it. Using hashtags help you a lot, simply share your blog link and use hashtags related to your blog which will help users find it easily.

TUMBLR

Another great tool to get some audience. Tumblr is itself a blogging software which allows users to make a blog site where you can post whatever you want. Same like twitter using hashtags make it more reliable.

INTERACT WITH YOUR COMMUNITY

Most successful bloggers give the same answer when asked to identify the most important thing that helped them become successful — their communities of readers. The people who visit your blog enjoy what you have to say and return to read more. They can become your most loyal readers if you engage them and make them feel welcome and valued. These people get to know each other and develop online relationships with each other over time, and all have a few things in common: They share an interest in your blog’s topic, they like what you have to say, and they feel comfortable visiting and discussing the topic at hand. That comfort level comes from the atmosphere you create on your blog.

Here are some ideas for how you can create a sense of community on your blog:

• Encourage visitors to leave comments. Ask questions in your blog posts, and encourage readers to leave comments with their opinions. 
• Conduct a poll or host a contest to move lurkers to action. 
• Request guest posts or content submission suggestions from your readers.
• Start an ongoing question-and-answer post series where you ask readers to submit questions and then you publish posts with the answers. 
• When readers leave comments on your blog, take the time to respond to them. Leave comments in return to show readers that you value their contributions and to show other readers that each comment and reader is important to you.

Over time, your loyal readers will even step up to the plate and begin responding to comments before you have a chance to do so! Your job as the blogger is to spark the conversations on your blog, encourage them to continue and flourish, and reign in side conversations or inappropriate comments.

Publish a blog comment policy to protect your readers and your blog's reputation from the inevitable inappropriate comments that someone will leave on your blog someday.

BACKLINKS

Backlinks are links from one website to a page or another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks "votes" for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. Backlinks are basically votes from other websites. Each of these votes tells search engines: “This content is valuable, credible and useful”.

So the more of these "votes" you have, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines.

Backlinks also notify other bloggers that you're interested in their content and you're sharing it, which gives them more exposure and more opportunities for increased traffic and incoming links. When you find a blog post idea in another blogger's post, always link to the original source in your own post, to give that blogger credit for writing about it first. Doing so not only keeps you in line with the unwritten rules of the blogging but can also help you build a relationship with another blogger and drive traffic to your blog over time as your name and blog become more recognizable.

These are the ways to grow an audience for your blog which I found by watching videos, reading other blogs and books. I hope it helps you.

Thank you