It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. You’ve just launched your site and are awaiting the avalanche of traffic and sales that is sure to be just around the corner. But as you obsessively refresh your Google analytic s day after day your enthusiasm begins to drop rapidly. Spreading the word about your business, driving eyeballs to your site, building brand awareness and ultimately sales is the part of your business that is probably driving your anxiety levels up.

I’m a firm believer that every business should have a blog. After working with hundreds of businesses of all types and sizes, I’ve learned that blogging is the single most effective way to consistently drive traffic for free.

That’s because good blog content can drive traffic from search engines, social shares, and referrals from other websites.

Before you go calling it quits understand that launching your business is only the first step and from this moment forward you need to consider yourself in the business of marketing. So stop obsessively refreshing your Google analytic s, and instead use helpful guide to brand yourself, your business and

1. Know your target audience

It’s a big world out there and nothing is scarier than being a new business or blog and feeling unknown. The good news is that you only need a tiny portion of the world to pay attention, read your blog, or buy your products, to achieve fabulous success. So instead of harping on the challenge of attracting the whole world to your new website, just think about your niche and the people interested in what you are talking about and selling. That’s a much smaller world than you think. Be confident in what you are and in what you aren’t. Think back to the classic “he’s just not that into you” mantra. Consider that in your business, not everyone is going to be into you but be totally sure you know exactly who your perfect match is.
questions to ask yourself when determining your target audience:
1.   Who did you have in mind when you started?
2.   Who has a genuine need or desire for your point of view, products, posts, etc.
3.   Who gets the most benefit out of your product or service? Who would pay for what you are delivering?

2. Brand yourself

Branding yourself is not just a phrase that is sugar-coated by the extraordinaire to try and sell you into an ideology of selling yourself to others. Branding yourself is about you being conscious of the fact that in order to progress in life you must take the steps towards seeing yourself being better than yesterday. It means you being the driver of your own life and not living your life vicariously through others. It means being incredibly attuned to the development of self. Let’s face it, if you want to learn more you inform yourself more. Whatever form your learning takes it does not matter, but the end goal does. If there is a skill you believe you need to learn that will fall in line with your plans for success, a.k.a progression, then you use whatever platform is available to acquire that skill.

How you brand yourself to the world through your online presence is everything! It’s how your visitors will determine if they like you, your work, your posts and your products. Your users, prospects and potential readers are making assumptions about everything they are seeing and hearing regarding your brand. This entire checklist shows you how to look great on the web but when it comes to branding it’s more about the story you are telling. Be intentional and use these 4 points to guide you through the process of creating your online brand.

People are interested in other people before they are interested in things. Become known for what you do or sell through sharing your story and what you are all about rather then just promoting your products or services.
What do you want people to know about you? Create your story by sharing how you can help others & identify what problems you solve for them first. Then develop your story in to a few keywords, bullet points and sentences.
Take your story and share it. Post it on every social profile, your blog and your business website. Be consistent and live your message by publicizing what you stand for through sharing your story.
Above all be human and have fun when branding yourself. Share the real you, be vulnerable, honest and don’t try to hard to project perfection. Most of all your readers and customers want to be able to relate to you and your message.
Bonus: Take your branding to the next level by looking for opportunities to provide value to others. Share your knowledge as it relates to your story and offer help whenever possible. This will help you to quickly develop a reputation as an expert in your space.

3.Create the top 10 list

I encourage every new business or blog to create what I call “The Top Ten” list. It’s a list of brands or blogs that you want to model yourself after. Either because they are a competitor, you share a space with them, or they are in your niche. Make sure that they are successful at what they are doing and someone you want to emulate.
After creating this list you will be amazed at what a point of reference it will serve as. Refer back to it whenever you need inspiration, have to make a decision or want to see how others have done it.

To understand how the mechanics of Top 10 Lists work, let’s look at the New York Times Bestseller list. It has 20 titles on it. Instead of going through the massive list of books in a given category on Amazon, you can just check the bestsellers.

This streamlines your buying decision to a manageable number of options and you figure that if a lot of other people bought a specific book, it must be good.

4. Guest Post on Other Blogs

I have been blogging for a little over a year now, and I really enjoy it. I love sharing my favorite things and a look into my life with my readers. I enjoy knowing that something I have posted is helpful to someone in some way.

I also enjoy visiting and reading other blogs. I find new recipe ideas, helpful tips and more. I’m introduced to new bloggers and new writing styles. Sometimes, I get busy and don’t get to visit other blogs as much as I’d like.

There’s another way you can tap into someone else’s audience. Publish a blog post right on their blog. Guest posting is a great way to get your name out there and drive traffic back to your own blog. The trick is to make sure you’re targeting the right community. Write a blog post that is both relevant to the audience and relevant to your business. Make sure to include a link or two back to your website

5.Publish More Articles

One of the most effective, but often ignored, ways to get traffic to a blog is by publishing more articles; research from Hubspot has shown that businesses that publish 16+ blog posts monthly get 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than businesses that publish between 0 – 5 blog posts monthly.

Seven-figure blogger Neil Patel also revealed that his monthly traffic went from 46,134 visitors to 59,787 visitors because he increased content frequency from 1 article to 2 articles weekly.

No matter your niche, research has shown that publishing more content will always lead to an increase in traffic for you; increase your content frequency to 2 or more articles a week, and you’ll notice a significant increase in traffic to your blog.

6. Social media

Set Up your social profiles. This may sounds elementary, but once you get started you’ll see there is actually a lot involved. Choosing a profile pic or avatar for each of the social sites you will be is a matter of re-sizing to fit each specific dimension and putting up the various cover photos, background images and bios.

After you have created accounts for each site take a few hours and start to fill up your Facebook page, Twitter timeline and Pinterest boards. If someone were to come by make it look like someone is at home. It’s all about faking it until you make it :)
The set up is crucial, and when you invest time up front, you will only have to do it once and it will give you a wonderful platform to build your business or your blog from.

A quick social media breakdown:

Use Twitter to connect with interesting people. Don’t be shy! Jump into conversations whenever relevant and even start a few by just tweeting directly at someone you follow.
Pinterest should reflect your aesthetic and goals for you & your company. Keep it classy and reflective of your story and branding. Anything personal or off brand should be pinned onto a secret board.
Instagram is the perfect platform for behind the scenes shots, hints at new products or sharing your daily routine. You can be more informal when posting pictures here but always be conscious of the image you are projecting.
Make sure to post daily to Facebook so that you are showing up in your fans news feeds frequently. It’s a noisy place so stick to content that will add value to your followers or be something of interest.

7.Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

You have your blog up and running, but you are struggling for readership. You’ve heard about SEO, but it all sounds too complicated and time-consuming, or you can’t seem to find interest in the topic. It’s your lucky day today. In this post I’ll cover the ten (plus one) most basic SEO tips all bloggers should follow if they want to get some good organic traffic from the major search engines.

Search Engine Optimization is a massive subject, which makes this question difficult to answer simply and easily. Still, if you understand the basic concepts you’ll soon see SEO isn’t that big of a deal. Your goal is to make your blog and pages more search friendly so your content (and site) will appear in search engines result pages (SERPs) when people look up your targeted keywords and phrases and you’ll get relevant visits to your blog. There’s on-page and off-page SEO, which are then divided into sub-techniques like keyword analysis, blog writing, article submission, social bookmarking, etc.

But to stay on the simple side, your blog will be well optimized if your content: