7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It

David Frosdick

Last Updated: February 6, 2023

Here are seven of the most common plateau growth mistakes we’ve seen. If any of them sound familiar, don’t worry. We’ve got some solutions to help you out.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Blogging is a popular and very effective way to position yourself as an authority, build your subscriber list and promote your own or affiliate products.

If you're just starting out, you'll want to take notice of these seven blog fixes so you can avoid mistakes and pitfalls.

Maybe you’ve been growing your blog for awhile now. You have an archive of educational content you feel proud of, but your analytics as of late have been less than hopeful.

You’ve been stuck at the same number of page views or unique visitors for months now. Even with new blog posts added to the mix, your blog still isn’t growing like it used to.

So what’s your next step?

It’s time to figure out what’s stunting your blog growth. These are seven of the most common plateau growth mistakes we’ve seen. If any of them sound familiar, don’t worry. We’ve got some solutions to help you out.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Your Blog Is More About You Than Your Audience

Think about your favourite blogs. What do they all have in common? What keeps you coming back for more of their content? You most likely love them because you’re able to learn something new and on a consistent basis.

All visitors come to your website hoping to find out who you are, what you do, and what you can offer them. Your blog should answer the same questions in an engaging, more personal way.

The problem with focusing on what the audience wants to know about us is when we forget to address them in the process. When we don’t prioritise our audience, we leave client or customer leads on the table because they don’t feel seen, heard, or understood.

It’s good to give readers a taste of who we are through our brand voice and writing style, but we need to refocus on who they are quickly. We want them to read through our blog posts thinking “He/she really gets me” or “Wow, I never thought about it like that”, which then leads to “I need more!”.

Solution

Before writing your next blog post, consider how you can use the content to help your audience. What problem are you solving? What are the main takeaways from your article? Leading with educational content builds trust and credibility with your audience

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Your Blog Isn’t Mobile-Responsive.

When’s the last time you logged into your Google Analytics account to check your mobile stats? What you find may surprise you. Last year, multiple studies found that mobile internet use has now surpassed desktop use. So what does this mean for online business owners and bloggers?

Although we may want to design for desktop screens because of the larger display options, we need to join the rest of 2017 and make sure our blogs are mobile responsive.

What does “mobile responsive” mean, anyway? If your website is responsive, it’ll fit any device at any screen size. Phones, tablets, desktops, you name it. In theory, a mobile responsive website should function just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop.

All of our landing page themes, sales pages, and membership sites at OptimizePress are built with responsive web design (RWD) so you don’t need to worry about turning off your audience with weird formatting or pixelated images.

Don't make your visitors pinch and zoom!

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Solution

Check to see if your website is mobile-ready. Google created a mobile friendly test that can help. Simply put your URL in the search bar and Google will give you a thumbs up if it’s responsive. If it’s not, it’ll give you some quick tips to help you design a more mobile-friendly blog.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Blog Image Quality Is Low With Little To No Design

Raise your hand if you start a blog post by tackling the written content. My hand is often raised with you, but what if we took the same amount of time in producing impactful images?

Why all this emphasis on visuals? Scientists have discovered that our minds process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. The number is so big that it seems made up, but it’s because 90% of all information sent to the brain is visual.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Simply put, our minds have become really good at understanding and remembering anything visual. A survey from 2014 shows people want visual and mobile optimized content back then and still business owner are failing at this.

Too many bloggers spend the majority of their time focused on what they want to write rather than how they should display it. When they finally do get around to including images, it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

This is the perfect breeding ground for incorrectly sized images, wrong image file types, and sometimes downright boring imagery. All are no bueno.

Luckily, we have options! You don’t need to be a highly-trained photographer or masterful graphic designer to create interesting visuals. Instead, use free tools like Canva to make infographics or learn how to create graphic templates in Illustrator from YouTube tutorials.

According a report on Ipsos, a survey indicated that a significant proportion of internet users share pictures on social media. A breakdown on the most popular content shared on Social Media sites is shown in the chart - Source.
7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

We shared 62 free stock image sites here so you should never be short of images.

Solution

We should think more about the visuals we use AND how to design them to fit the words we’ve written. How is your blog post text laid out? Do you have a blog sidebar or not? How does that affect the layout of your blog? How much white space do you have (or do you need)? The answers to these questions will influence how you design your blog. Also having great images encourages people share your content.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Your Blog Is Missing Lead Capture.

Nooooo, say it isn’t so! Once you’ve got your visitor’s attention, it’s time to build trust. This can be done by sharing personal anecdotes that connect with your reader, case studies from your own work, or a method that showcases your expertise.

Too many bloggers stop here. While building your authority and trust is important, what’s most important is converting your visitors. We’re in business, after all!

The best place to start is defining what the call-to-action (CTA) of each blog post is. That way, you know which conversion metric is important. The call-to-action might be for the reader to give you their email address for a free ebook. Maybe it’s to take a quiz and send you their generated results, or to visit a landing page and fill out a form to join your product’s waitlist.

You can customise the CTA based on upcoming product or service launches, the blog post’s subject matter, or a free offer you want to highlight. The CTA can also change over time, which is especially important when publishing evergreen content. Simply swap out the old call-to-action with the new one.

This example sits at the bottom of Convince and Convert.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Solution

After determining what your specific CTA is, implement it into the strategy for all of your upcoming blog content. Bonus points for going back through your blog archive and adding new call-to-actions based on relevant offerings now. You never know when a reader will land on a past blog post so it’s worth your time to optimise it and sell.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

There Are No Social Sharing Options On Your Blog

Social share buttons make it easier than ever for blog readers to share your article. It saves visitors from having to copy your blog post link, shorten the link, and spend time crafting clever copy to post with it.

To your share blog posts, visitors only need to click a button, review the automatically generated text (and replace it if they choose to do so), and press publish. It can usually be done in just 2 clicks.

Major media websites like Forbes, New York Times and Entrepreneur Magazine use social share buttons on their blog. Why don’t all bloggers integrate social sharing into their blog? Sometimes social sharing isn’t included in their theme or template, they haven’t found the right plugin, or it’s at the bottom of their to-do list.

Social sharing elements are already included in OptimizePress for easy implementation. WordPress also offers additional social share plugins for options like floating social share bars, single-click social icons, and more.

As we said in Mistake #3, having good images on your blog also gives users something to share.

You can see some compelling statistics from Buffer's research on how images increased retweets and more.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

Solution

After you preview the social sharing options on every screen, test the buttons on your blog to see how they perform. The social sharing buttons should be obvious without distracting from your audience’s main objective: reading through your content. If you install a social share bar, make sure it doesn’t float over your content on mobile devices.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

You Don’t Practice Deep Linking On Your Blog

What’s “deep linking”, you ask? It’s a fancy term for linking to a specific indexed page on a website rather than its homepage.

Let’s say, for example, you were referencing a CBS News article in an upcoming blog post. You wouldn’t point to CBS New’s main URL (www.cbsnews.com) and include that as the link. There are so many articles published there! It would be a nightmare to manually search for. Instead, you’d find the exact article in your web history or search for it on Google to then link accordingly.

This goes back to our first point of thinking about your audience first. If they wanted to follow the link you included in the blog post, they’d be disappointed to be directed to a media site’s homepage.

Then they’d have to do the digging if they were really interested in finding the post. Do the work for them. For examples: How to build the ultimate search engine friendly landing pages (this is a deep link).

Solution

Take the time to bookmark links you reference so you can include them in blog posts. It’s really that simple! Oh, and make sure outside sourced articles open in a new tab so your website is still open in your reader’s browser and they don’t have to press the back button.

7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn's Growing & How To Fix It | OptimizePress

You’re Not Using Your Blog To Sell

As marketers, we know it’s possible to create extremely helpful and impactful blog content without sacrificing the opportunity to sell. But some bloggers (and even budding business owners) are uncomfortable with selling.

In a world full of limited-time offers penned in red and in-your-face marketing messages, the very idea of selling can feel awkward and daunting. Instead of feeling guilty for selling, reframe your mindset and remind yourself how your product or service could greatly benefit your client or customer.

Maybe your $300 Facebook ad course will help a student save $900 by not outsourcing the work, which triples his investment. Maybe investing in your executive leadership coaching program will grow a team of 5 employees to 15 with 100% retention in the next 6 months.

You take the guilt out of selling when you believe in the power of your product or service. Then you’ll want to sell it because you’ve seen all the good it can do.

Solution

Like anything, selling just takes practice. Instead of turning your blog into a constant sales pitch (which is sleazy anyway), offer freebies regularly and freely share information on your blog. Then when you’re about to launch a relevant offering, you’ll feel more confident in highlighting it on the blog because you’ve already given so much away for FREE.

How have you fought plateau growth in your own blog and business? We want to hear about it in the comments.

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    14 replies to "7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn’t Growing And How To Fix It"

    • Carla

      Thank you very much for the tips. I have noted several points of improvement on my own site.

    • Nick

      Sweet, will you all make a blog post or send an email out about it? Do you expect it to be this week?

    • Nicholaus Thomson

      David, do you have an update on when you all will release this new blog layout that you all are using now?

      • David Frosdick

        We’ve just ironed out a few more bugs the beta testers reported and the latest release went out last Thursday. Literally any day now.

    • MH Gideon

      Wow.

      I couldn’t drop my device or do anything else until I was done with this post.

      Thank you for giving out so much value David.

      I’ll definitely start paying more attention to the images I use on my blog from here on.

      Thank you again.

      MH Gideon

    • Walid

      I got the same impression about the pictures of this blog post are not mobile responsive. Also, I need to know whether the long waited for OP new theme will handle the not responsive blog of OP?

    • Clint

      Great! Thanks

    • tim

      Where is the part about getting traffic?

    • Dave

      Always love your posts, David. And this one is no different.
      Many thanks
      Dave

    • Michael

      Great post and as always very helpful David.

      When will the new blog templates be available? And any new small business teardowns on the horizon?

      Thanks again my friend.

    • Tommy arbor

      I really enjoyed this post. However, I find it interesting that one of the tips is to have a mobile responsive website, and the images in this post are not mobile responsive.

      • David Frosdick

        Yeah I messed up some of the code wit the images. Not a big deal, all sorted now 🙂

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