This is a sponsored post.

Congratulations! You just launched your first blog. At first, you may feel like you’re talking into the ether when you’re posting for essentially no one. Building a reader base takes time, so for today’s Blogging 101 lesson, we’re going to talk about the basics for driving traffic to your brand new blog.

Gaining & Maintaining Readers: Content, Navigation & Value

If you’re in the process of hiring a web designer and launching a blog for the first time, you may hear buzzwords like “User engagement” or “Customer onboarding” thrown around. UserIQ has a lengthy article explaining what customer onboarding is, which basically boils down to the practice of streamlining your product – in this case, your blog – to make it more user friendly, direct readers to your best content more efficiently, give them an incentive to return, and analyze your traffic data to better refine what you do. For a blogger, your “Customer onboarding” experience is going to focus on three key areas:

• Content

The Internet is an endless rabbithole of websites and entertainment, so if you want to gain readers, you have to offer content that is valuable. What is your blog about? Are you here to entertain, inform, help? Who are you appealing to and what do you want to achieve? Regardless of your niche, you have to offer something that people want in order for them to read. I’ve been blogging for 10 years now, and in recent times I’ve seen a great number of successful blogs fold and shut down. There are many reasons for this trend, one of which is that it’s tough to compete in a saturated market and many people get fed up with it. This is why I think that it’s more important than ever to follow your own voice and offer something unique, rather than trying to follow the same template that XYZ Blog does. What would you want to read? What do you need when you do a web search?

• Navigation

Having a user-friendly blog is very important. If readers can’t find what they need easily, they will give up and move on to the next search result. Make sure your best content is easily accessible so that people don’t leave! And don’t forget your “Other” customer – the PR representatives and companies that you’d like to work with. Make sure your email address and relevant social media links are effortless to find; this may seem like a no-brainer, but I’ve worked on several PR outreach projects myself and you would be amazed at the number of professional bloggers who don’t have an email anywhere on their blog. I wasn’t able to contact those people, even though I wanted to work with them – so don’t let that happen to you!

• Value

If you want readers to return to your blog, you have to offer an incentive. Having interesting or helpful content is the best way to inspire people to bookmark your blog, but it’s not always enough by itself. To maximize the number of readers that you can reach regularly, you can offer something valuable in exchange for them subscribing. Think about offering your email subscribers a special perk, like a free download, an exclusive ebook, or an entry into a giveaway.

What strategies have you found helpful in growing your audience?