Pretty much everyone and their Great Aunt Sally has a blog these days. After all, blogging is a great hobby. It’s therapeutic, and an important tool for getting your message out to the world.
However, if you are hoping to make money from blogging, unless you are the rare case of instant success, you’re probably thinking about ways to increase blog traffic right now.
You may have even tried a technique or two, waiting to find the one that makes you hit the big time, but the wait is over.
Drive traffic to your blog with these 20 tips:
Your blog’s title is often the first thing someone sees when they come across your blog. If it doesn’t catch the reader’s attention. Your blog is toast.
In the sales world, they say someone can tell if they like you in the first seven seconds. In the blogosphere, you’re lucky if you get that long. You’ll often just get seven words, the title.
You only have one chance to make a good first impression and increase blog traffic. Do it by writing better titles.
If your blog is being viewed through the lens of a search engine (which hopefully it is!), it’s important to use clear meta-title and description. These should concisely tell the reader what this page is all about.
When readers can easily tell if your blog meets their needs, that’s when you will increase blog traffic.
The trick to strong content is knowing your audience. You must understand what brings value to their lives to know what kind of content to structure.
Overall, having a good understanding of your target market may be the most critical attribute of blogger success. If you want to increase blog traffic, get to know the people you are writing for.
One way to learn more about your audience is to use insights you can gain from Facebook.
Another good way to increase blog traffic is to use social share buttons on your blog.
These little icons appear on the top or bottom of your blog posts to make it easy for readers to push your content out into your target market via social media.
It’d be crazy for any serious blogger not to have this option available when most CMS editors offer it at the click of a button.
While social share buttons are important, you can’t expect your readers to share content that you don’t even want to share yourself.
If your goal is to increase blog traffic learn about how to best utilize the social resources available.
One such resource is the website, Twitter. Despite initial appearances, it’s so much more than just people and chatbots yelling into the abyss.
Each social site has its own community with etiquette and best practices. Learn more about how to use Twitter for business here.
Facebook has a robust suite of business tools for advertising (including cross-platform advertising with Instagram).
Here are a few ways to use Facebook to increase blog traffic:
Savvy marketers dedicate their careers to staying on top of the changing world of Facebook marketing. However, you don’t have to be a savvy marketer to promote to millions of people and gain insights throughout the process.
Instagram can be a hard nut to crack, but it’s an invaluable resource for bloggers. It’s a platform that stands firmly on the foundation that pictures are greater than words.
The app showcases user photos on its social feed. While users can write what seems like unlimited words, 2,200 is the limit, in the caption, the things that turn heads on Instagram are the photos.
For bloggers, this means using a tool like Canva to perfect the blog lead-in photo is crucial to success on this platform.
Luckily, using Canva to make a suitable title photo to introduce your blog also primes you for other photo-driven platforms, like Pinterest, where blog content performs well.
Online communities come in many forms. Well, just one form, a website. However, with different audiences, culture, etiquette and rules for posting promotional content that makes each one unique from the next.
Communities like Reddit, Facebook groups, Tumblr and Medium can increase blog traffic by raising your mindshare.
If you want to truly get to know your audience, it’s important to learn where they hang out and thoughtfully, respectfully participate in their communities.
No, seriously, go join a pod.
An Instagram pod is a group of Instagrammers who share some common interest and agree to engage with each other’s content in order to make it more visible. The idea is that Instagram’s algorithm boosts content with high engagement.
Most pods are groups of like-minded bloggers, business owners or influencers who want to support one another and grow their business.
If you can, use original photography on your blog lead-in image, or an otherwise interesting and engaging image. When you choose a photo for your blog keep in mind that it’s the first thing someone sees if they look at a link.
Using a tool like FOAP can give you access to unique photography to revitalize your posts and break away from the monotony of traditional stock photography.
At one time, keywords were the dominating force in SEO. While they no longer carry the same impact they once did, they are still important when attracting visitors to your blog.
Bloggers should familiarize themselves with tools available to do keyword research, like Google suggestions.
You can purchase keywords to ensure you rank for them or use carefully curated content to make you appear like an authority on a specific keyword to search engine web crawlers.
Any way you look at it, improving the keywords you rank for will increase blog traffic.
Backlinking is an important part of SEO and gaining domain authority.
That’s because blogs benefit from backlinks in two ways:
Inbound links increase blog traffic by getting people to your site. They also increase SEO, because having a link back to your site from a high authority domain tells Google that other sites vouch for you.
The higher authority site, the better.
Having outbound links that backlink to other sites in your content is also important. Choosing the right outbound links impacts your SEO.
Once you have strong content, don’t just share it once and call it a day. Continue to share it repeatedly.
This is best done when you create a social plan and know what you are going to share from week to week. That way you can schedule in re-share old content.
You can also use a blog scheduling tool, like Buffer, to assist in this process.
Most people don’t sit around on their computers all day just looking for any old content to read. It’s not that easy.
To attract the right people when you increase blog traffic, you must make sure you are creating content that has value to your audience.
For example, if you are a martial arts studio looking to appeal to women who make household decisions for their families, you may want to create a video tutorial on women’s self-defense moves.
It’s content that you can do well, since you are a martial arts studio, but it’s also important to your target audience who may be interested in personal safety. That overlap is how great content is made.
Videos are all the rage. They make Facebook’s algorithm happy. They make Google’s algorithm happy.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
You can’t go wrong when it comes to creating a video. But to create a video that has value to your audience, choose from popular formats like product reviews and DIY tutorials.
Bloggers blog, and if you’re going to be a good one, you better get writing and write a lot.
Latest updates to Google’s algorithm show that the search engine favors blogs that have information on a wide range of topics.
The term “topical breadth” is used to describe the trait that Google’s latest algorithm seeks.
Topical breadth is one component that makes up a trend in blogging called topical authority.
Another component of topical authority is “topical depth” which correlates directly with individual blog length.
While some bloggers favor short, easy to digests posts, Google disagrees. The search engine rewards websites that practice long-form content, offering a well of knowledge on a subject to gain topical authority.
Topical authority will increase blog traffic.
While increasing SEO and domain authority are different things. Doing the first will increase the latter, inevitably.
That said, if you’ve been following along with this blog and implementing the strategies above you are sure to increase your domain authority.
In doing so, you are likely to also see your Google ranking increase, and find more external sites link back to yours, increasing your traffic organically.
Tips about link building, SEO and catchy titles aside, you have to write good content.
Doing this means undertaking the whole process by which you learn about your audience, execute topic and keyword research and write valuable, long-form blogs that makes you a thought leader in your field.
It’s not any one of these tips, but instead, all of them put together that makes your content good. Coming up with a tried and true process to write great content can make all the difference.
If you’re still struggling to increase blog traffic, don’t hesitate to hire a professional.
Professional marketers are trained on all aspects of promoting your brand, from using social media correctly to keeping up with algorithm changes. When you hire a professional you can rest assured you are leaving your brand in expert care.
It’s not a fast and easy process but increasing the number of visitors to your blog may go a little quicker and with less hassle if you put someone else to work on it.
If you’d rather not deal with the activities associated with promoting your blog posts, it’s best to leave it to someone who will!
If you’re a blogger, lucky you!
There’s never been a better time to blog. That’s because there’s no limit to your success. It’s fueled by what you are willing to put into it, and with these tips, you can’t go wrong.
The internet-world is your proverbial digital oyster, and that goes double for your Great Aunt Sally.
It’s okay to go it alone, but if you need a little help, our professional marketers waiting to hear from you today.
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