One of the best ways to attract people to a website is through blog traffic. When you add great content to your blog frequently, you will give visitors valuable resources. You will also publish more pages to your blog for search engines to index.
Writing high-quality posts will also strengthen your brand, produce more incoming links to your blog or website and improve loyalty from existing clients, readers, and potential customers.
Experienced bloggers say they made a lot of mistakes along the way to realize what increased blog traffic and what did not. In this article, I would like to share with you some proven ways on how to increase blog traffic. You can even use a blog to drive traffic to your website, so I hope you find this post useful.
1) Choose Your Topics Wisely to Increase Blog Traffic
The topics you include on your blog will impact the type of visitors who read your articles. For instance, if your published articles involve many essential tutorials on a subject, they will draw a lot of beginners. Similarly, if you post advanced tutorials, you will end up attracting readers who have more experience on the subject.
Therefore, it is crucial that you research well on the topics to include on your blog and develop a long-term content plan. This process generates targeted traffic from readers who will prefer subscribing to your blog and buy your services or products.
One technique of increasing blog traffic is covering on currently popular topics. Services such as Google Trends have trending topics and enable you to know what is hot and what is not.
Additionally, ensure you review the keywords and key phrases that are related to your business. You can achieve this by evaluating your blog traffic and searching for keywords and key phrases that generate more traffic.
Good examples of keyword research tools you can use include Keyword Tool, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and WordTracker.
One of the most successful methods of doing keyword research is by studying at how your competitors generate blog traffic. Several great tools are available online to show you exactly how your competitors acquire traffic. These tools include the key phrases and keywords they rank for, the articles that receive the most traffic, and the websites that link to them.
2) Interact with Your Readers
A blog provides you the opportunity to know your audience better and vice-versa. The best section to interact with your audience is through the comment area. By replying questions and answering to commenters opinions, you can prove your skill on a subject and develop a relationship with prospective customers.
I believe there are important reasons and benefits of responding to readers’ comments. However, if you lack enough time to reply to comments, then consider disabling them. Failing to respond to questions or comments from your readers may show a wrong impression concerning your business.
The other ways you can interact with your readers include social media services such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. You can also use surveys and visitors interviews as a way of knowing your readers well and sharing the readers’ opinions through your articles.
Always never take your readers for granted if you desire to increase blog traffic. If you connect with your readers well, then you will convert your customers into services buyers.
3) Write High-Quality Articles
Writing high-quality articles will attract a big audience and will encourage more sharing to people through social networks. This technique, in turn, boosts incoming links and search engine traffic to your blog.
Never take your blog merely as a way to increase the number of search engine indexable pages on your website. Only focus on quality content. Keep in mind that the more you target your visitors, the more likely they will buy your products and services. Therefore, concentrate on quality content and exclude cheap traffic that simply inflates traffic statistics.
One important advice I can give is that if you want to increase blog traffic try to solve people’s problems. Also, if you can help your readers by some means, they will be grateful. This assistance will prompt them to share your content, subscribe to your blog, and become your faithful customer.
It does not mean you will have to handle or write all blog content yourself. However, there are many experienced bloggers available who can assist you to publish excellent articles on your website.
You can achieve this by hiring bloggers using job boards or searching them from freelancing marketplaces such as Freelancer.
4) Use a Professional Blog Design
An attractive blog design should offer the professional appearance that you want to present to your readers. This process will increase credibility, strengthen your brand, and improve sales and leads.
A common mistake made by a blogger is placing too many advertisements and insignificant images when designing their blog. This mistake upsets many readers, and they end up clicking the back button even before reading your posts.
If you aim to increase traffic and improve conversions to your blog, you should make sure your website design is both attractive and realistic.
Create a blog design which is responsive so that it appears good on a personal computer, a laptop, and smaller devices such as smartphones or tablets. Ensure you also format your article with a font that is appealing and easy to read.
Using a sidebar that has recent posts is a perfect way to help readers navigate easily on your blog. Take advantage of this section and display category links, a search bar, and archive links. To persuade visitors to stay longer on your website, you can display featured articles, recent blog posts, and related articles.
5) Promote Your Blog
The difference between an unsuccessful and a successful blog depends on how you promote it. If you have enough money to invest in your blog, you can develop it quickly by advertising it on other websites and increasing your social media presence.
Luckily, if you don’t have a budget, there are several promotional methods available that are free of charge. One of the most popular free blog promotion is through guest blogging. This method involves writing posts for high traffic and well-esteemed websites, to gain recognition of your blog and your brand. The inbound links you display in your author bio will also increase inbound links to your blog. This action, in turn, boosts your search engines rankings.
One of the best techniques for promoting your blog is to allow others people do it for you. To achieve this, you need to publish excellent articles and develop helpful resources such as free online tools.
The other great technique of allowing readers to promote your blog is through competition. Competition services such as Rafflecopter, enable people to join a competition through sharing your article on Facebook or Twitter. One can also enter a competition by signing up to your email newsletter or write comments on your blog.
Many successful bloggers comment on favorite blogs as a way to promote their new blog. Even though this method can advertise your blog, it is rarely the most efficient use of a blogger’s time. Therefore, I recommend you to use alternative methods to promote your blog since you will get a better return.
6) Blog Consistently to increase blog traffic
There are differing opinions as to how regularly you should publish content on a blog. For instance, most high traffic news websites publish several times daily since more news brings increased traffic. However, most businesses and bloggers post articles a few times weekly or on a monthly basis.
If you assume that each article on your blog has the same quality, then publishing more often will produce more traffic. However, this declaration does not necessarily imply that more is always better. According to research, what is important is that you choose a schedule that you can maintain consistently.
Readers want consistency, and publishing three articles for one week and then failing to post for another month, is a bad blogging habit. My suggestion is to start off at a slow publishing frequency like once weekly and then increase your publishing frequency when you have available resources.
In order to organize your blog efficiently, it is useful to schedule one to two weeks of articles ahead. My recommendation is to activate the WordPress plugin such as the Editorial Calendar to assist you in scheduling tasks.
Failing to prepare content in advance will cause your blog publishing frequency become disrupted due to unexpected conditions. Such conditions include some of your authors becoming sick or failing to meet their deadlines.
7) Analyze Your Blog Traffic
Excellent service such as Google Analytics can let you know a lot regarding your blog. It can tell you what articles receive the most views, what key phrases and keywords bring in visitors, and the number of visitors your blog receives daily.
It can also inform you more concerning the people who visit your blog. For instance, it can tell you about the country they live, the language they speak, and the device they use to visit your blog. This information lets you understand your readers better and whether the content marketing strategies you use are functioning well.
It is tempting to check your traffic statistics each day to confirm traffic growth. However, this habit can produce problems rather than help to achieve a goal. My recommendation is to review your traffic stats every week, fortnight, or even every month. Always set targets and then evaluate whether you have achieved them.
Do not get discouraged if you fail to meet your expectations. Sometimes you won’t meet your targets, and at times you will even go beyond them. The primary approach is to use targets to push your blog forward with the right content and marketing strategy.
8) Ensure Your Website is SEO Friendly
Your site should not only look good to people, but it needs to be easy for search engines to interpret. Doing so will help search engines to crawl and index your content efficiently. Fortunately, the WordPress platform has SEO friendly solution with built-in SEO features such as custom page slugs to help you.
It is significant to structure your website appropriately to help your content rank well in search engines. Your website theme should validate without CSS and HTML errors and use header tags correctly in templates. It should also take advantage of other navigation features such as breadcrumb navigation links.
To optimize page titles and Meta descriptions, use search engines friendly plugins such as All in One SEO Pack, which can help to optimize your pages.
Also, many SEO plugins can be used to create sitemaps for your website. If the SEO plugin you choose lacks this functionality, then consider activating the free WordPress plugin known as Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin provides you complete control over what search engines should index and the rate at which pages get crawled.
Definitely, it is recognized as the most flexible sitemap solution accessible to WordPress users to help increase blog traffic.
9) Make It Easy For Visitors to Share Your Content
Using Social media networks creates an excellent source of blog traffic. Unfortunately, providing high-quality articles is hardly an assurance that readers will share them on services such as Twitter.
Nevertheless, if you desire to increase the frequency your readers share your articles, you need to know of easier ways to do so. The best approach is to integrate social media sharing buttons into your posts. Fortunately, many free plugin tools are available on WordPress to help you integrate Social media icon to your post. These include Simple Social Share, Ultimate Social Media, etc.
For example in my blog post, I have used Ultimate Social Media sharing buttons at the left-hand side of my posts. The plugin ensures that the sharing icons scroll down with the page to make it visible always. This technique helps to increase shares from my readers.
10) Expand Your Online Presence
Whenever readers visit your blog, you have the opportunity to convert them into a long-term subscribers. Ensure you encourage your visitors to follow you on social media network and to subscribe to your blog RSS feed. Doing so will notify them of new updates you publish on your blog.
The most successful method of expanding your online presence is through a targeted email marketing list. This method is more useful than RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.
Therefore, you should take every chance you can to persuade visitors to obtain updates by email. When you do so, visitors will receive messages directly to their inbox. This method ca also be used to promote services and products and notify the subscribers regarding your latest posts.
When visitors subscribe to your blog, they are likely to return to your blog regularly. This process helps to increase blog traffic, which generates more sales. If you succeed converting visitors into subscribers, your online presence will grow, and your blog will develop exponentially.
11) Be Patient if you want to increase blog traffic
For your blog to have an established readership, it can take several months unless you have a big budget for advertising campaigns to promote it. It can also take years before your blog gets a better traffic.
However, you should not be scared of this issue. Be patient enough and focus your effort on providing quality articles and your blog will soon be successful.
I do hope you have appreciated the above ways of increasing blog traffic. If so, I urge you to subscribe to this blog newsletter, and I will give you free updates of my latest blog posts.
