When first starting your new website or even just your new blog, the first two hard steps usually are creating all the content and getting web traffic to your website.
For the part to getting traffic, there are lots of resources all over the internet. Even when you browse through Quora, one of the most popular Q&A sites (if not yet the most popular), there would be tons of questions all about something like “How to get traffic to my new website?” or “How to increase traffic to your blog?”
For that, many online marketers would suggest you to first start with search engine optimization i.e. Optimize your website to rank it high up on the search engines results pages (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). But that may be harder than it looks for blogging beginners. With Google now putting prioritizing websites’ mobile performance, or mobile-first index, you should refer to this mobile SEO best practices guide and make sure your site is fully optimized for mobile searches.
If you are using WordPress as the website builder of your site, most of the SEO best practices in the guide would be simple to implement. i.e. You just have to find the right WordPress plugins. But if you have a customized website that was developed by some web developers, it would be more complicated. You will first need to get consultation from your web developer and then decide what can be the next big steps.
Suggesting for doing SEO first is mainly because in the perception of many people or business owner or webmasters, search engine traffic is a free channel. Free traffic is everyone even though many beginners to internet marketing do not see it. Some examples of free web traffic channels (social media) where there are lots of audience (or people): Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter, etc.
It’s very time consuming to do the actual work i.e. Get on to all the social media channels, write content, post content (and links), etc. Besides, you will first have to do a time consuming research and find out what actually are all those channels (or sources) that you can get free traffic. To make it easier, start with this list of more than 200 free traffic channels. In the list, it even includes bookmarking sites, photo sharing sites, niche community/forums, etc.
Make sure you go through the list and do not over do it. Time is precious, and you should pick some of the channels to start with i.e. Start with 1 or 2 the channels that you are similar with, or channels you may already have connections or friends on them (for social media sites).