Blogging is still alive and kicking in 2025. However, the blogging industry is more competitive than ever. If you want to build an audience for your blog and boost its impact, you can’t rely on great content and curation alone (although it’s a great help).
To be successful in blogging, you need to treat it as a serious project. That means using all the strategies at your disposal to grow your blog’s reach. These are the strategies that we use for the Aggregator blog, so you know they work.
Add Original Commentary
Great content curation can take you far in terms of growing an audience and providing them with incentives to stick around. However, if you want your blog to be successful, it needs some degree of original commentary.
Original commentary can be anything, from your unique perspective to personal experiences, and your own takes on new developments. Without original commentary, readers have little reason to choose to go to your blog instead of the original sources.
Over time, all that original content will come to define your blog’s voice, which can help build a connection with your audience. If readers like your blog content and your taste in content curation, you can bet they’ll come back.
Diversify Content Formats
Articles are the bread and butter of blogging. Visitors expect to see mostly articles when they visit a blog, but that doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with other content types, like video or audio.
For example, this is a podcast feed created with WP RSS Aggregator, that’s on our homepage:
It’s important to remember a lot of people mostly skim over content on the web until they find the exact information they need. Using other content formats in your blog can be a great way to catch the attention of the “skimmers” and increase engagement on your blog.
What types of content to explore should depend on your blog’s niche and audience. For example, if your blog focuses on tutorials, it makes sense to record video instructions for them too.
Blog readers also tend to enjoy infographics, podcasts, and interactive content like quizzes or polls. If you use Aggregator, remember you can also use the plugin to share videos and curated podcast lists using displays.
Remember you can always repurpose blog posts into other types of content, so you don’t need to start from zero.
Write Evergreen Content
Most articles have an “expiration” date. After a while, all the sources and information that you include can become outdated. The problem is, that content might still attract a lot of readers and confuse them or make your blog seem untrustworthy.
To avoid this, you’ll want to update articles often (we’ll discuss this in a bit) and focus on creating “evergreen” content whenever possible. Evergreen content refers to the kind of blog posts you very seldom need to update.
For example, a list of aggregator websites might need regular updates. An article about finding fresh content ideas, not so much:
If you’re not sure how to identify evergreen content ideas, look at your blog’s analytics. Check your best-performing content and pay attention to the old articles that are still getting a lot of hits. The articles that remain relevant and continue to bring traffic after a long time are typically evergreen content.
Note: There are WordPress plugins that can help you manage content updates, but you’ll still need to review articles manually to avoid errors.
Regularly Update Older Content
There’s evergreen content and then there’s content that requires updates. For example, if you publish a roundup of WordPress tools or themes, you’ll need to update it regularly (like we do!). Otherwise, it can impact your site’s credibility.
Ideally, you’ll review all of your blog’s content at least a couple of times per year and see if the information is still up to date. If a blog post isn’t ranking well, you can take the opportunity to spruce it up (add new sections, optimize your keyword usage, check the formatting, etc.) while updating its information.
This process can take a lot of time as your blog’s content library grows. That’s why it’s smart to focus on evergreen content whenever possible.
Publish Original Research or Case Studies
In blogging, it’s always better to be the source of information, instead of relying on other publications. Blogs that publish original research and case studies can attract a lot of attention from people looking for reputable sources they can cite.
Publishing research or case studies doesn’t apply to all blogs. It depends on your niche and what you write about. In our case, we publish regular case studies going over the imaginative ways in which people use WP RSS Aggregator:
The idea of publishing research can seem intimidating. However, a lot of times, it can be as simple as polling your audience or reaching out to industry experts via email. Most of your readers are probably keen to share their opinions and experiences and if you can interact with them, it can open up a lot of great options for your blog.
Encourage Audience Interaction
Interacting with readers is half the fun of running a blog. If you take a look at the comments sections for our articles, you’ll notice we make an effort to reply to everyone.
Not only is it polite to reply to readers, but it also encourages other conversations. An active comments section in a blog typically means they’re getting great traffic and engagement.
Talking with your audience and interacting with them in general can be a great source of insights (like case studies). It helps readers connect with the blog and it can encourage them to talk to each other and build a community.
There are a lot of ways to foster audience interaction. You can include polls and quizzes in your content, ask open-ended questions, host live discussions, and even leverage social media. Let’s focus on that last part now.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is a must if you want to have a presence online. Most blogs can benefit from having an active social media presence as it gives you a channel to:
- Connect with a bigger audience
- Find out what people in your niche are talking about
- Share your content
- Talk directly with followers and ask them questions
Running one or more social media accounts for a blog can be a lot of work. To make it manageable, we recommend using social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. They enable you to create posts and other social media content in advance and schedule it, so your accounts are always active.
Growing a social media presence can be challenging depending on your blog’s niche. The most important things to remember to drive that growth is to post often and to actually interact with people on social media. Make your account look active and authoritative and your audience will find you.
Recommended: 5 Tools Every Content Curator Needs to Streamline Their Workflow
Build an Email List
If you take a look at your favorite blogs, chances are most of them have email newsletters and they encourage you to sign up often. Email is one of your best friends as a blogger because it gives you a direct channel to your audience.
Instead of waiting for subscribers to remember your blog, you can be proactive. You can send email campaigns with your best articles, other content readers might be interested in, and even freebies, like in this example.
As your email list grows, it can also become one of your best options for driving conversions. To put things into perspective, email conversion rates average between 1-2% in most industries. That might sound low, but once you start counting subscribers in the hundreds and thousands, 1-2% is not a bad number at all.
If you haven’t set up an email list for your blog, now is the time to start. It can take a while to get a decent number of subscribers, so consider leveraging strategies like giving away freebies (like e-books, reports, and guides) as incentives for signing up.
Foster a Community
The best, and most popular, blogs have communities built around them. Readers will talk in the comments section, start conversations on social media, reshare your content, and all the perks that community brings with it.
You can also foster community with events, and they don’t need to be in person. A lot of blogs host regular Q&As so readers can interact with the authors and you can also set up webinars to do deep dives into specific topics.
Growing a community takes time and it’s not something you can automate (like sharing content on social media). However, if you can get readers to feel like they’re part of a group when they visit your blog, you’ll reap significant benefits over the long term.
Network with Influencers
A lot of people who would’ve been bloggers a decade ago are now social media influencers. They simply traded the keyboard for the selfie camera.
Networking with influencers involves finding interesting people in your niche on platforms like Instagram or TikTok and seeing if they’re open to collaborations. That can mean sharing links to a recent blog post, promoting your social media profiles, writing a guest post for your blog, conducting an interview, and more.
Working with influencers enables you to tap into their audience and it can make you look like an authority in your niche. If your audiences align, it can be smart to form ongoing relationships with influencers to boost each other’s content.
Keep in mind that if you’re starting a blog or you still have a relatively small social media presence, it can be hard to find organic collaborations. At that level, a lot of influencers might not want to share your content or they’ll charge for it.
Monetize Strategically
There’s nothing wrong with monetizing your blog. If you’ve spent time growing an audience and building authority, it makes sense to look for ways to make money from that effort.
There are a lot of ways to monetize a blog. What’s important is that you focus on monetization methods and strategies that don’t make your blog worse for readers, like plastering ads all over the place.
For example, if you want to leverage affiliate marketing, that’s perfectly fine. As long as you actually recommend products and services you’d use, that is.
If you’re growing a blog for a brand, monetization is a lot more straightforward. You know your products and services are good, so it makes sense to use the blog to promote them and drive sales as much as possible.
Wrapping Up
Content is at the core of any great blog. If you combine compelling articles, great curation, and SEO best practices, your blog is bound to grow. However, there’s a lot more that you can do to increase your blog’s chance of success.
If you want to grow your blog even faster, experiment with multiple formats, publish original content, interact with your audience, leverage social media, and build an email list. There’s even more to do, but those are the most important things to keep in mind for a new blog.
Do you have any questions about how to boost your blog’s impact and reach? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
