Blogs emerged in the early 2000s, and have evolved to become valuable and great marketing tools. However, acquiring readers has always been the most significant challenge for most bloggers. You might have great content on your blog, but yet no meaningful traffic. You can’t just expect people to magically find your blog and start reading it. Traffic, in the simplest sense, is the average number of visits your blog receives over, say, a month, it could also be a week, day, hour, etc.
You need to keep driving quality traffic to your blog to seem tangible results. The reason is that the more traffic your blog receives, the more revenue you will make. There are two major ways to grow your blog’s traffic: organically and via paid ads. While the former requires time, patience, and lots of effort, the latter, mostly, requires money. Your goal should always be to generate relevant and targeted traffic.
A big part of this is knowing what you want people to do once they arrive on your blog, it’s one thing to want more traffic, but there has to be a reason for it. Once you have a clear idea of exactly what you want people to do on your blog, you can optimize your blog to improve the likelihood that it will happen – small tweaks can make a big difference with conversions.
Here are some tips to help you increase traffic to your blog.
As with any business nowadays, you’re not likely to get noticed if you don’t have social media accounts. We recommend setting up pages/accounts for your blog on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and even LinkedIn (you’re essentially your own business anyway, right?). Design these accounts in a similar colour scheme/theme to your blog so your brand is consistent and easily recognisable.
Use them to share new posts and tag fellow bloggers/influencers/companies who might share your content and help it to reach an even bigger audience. You could also dabble in some paid advertising to help your blog reach a wider audience, or run a competition to generate more likes. Once you’ve got the followers, keep them interested by posting on a regular basis (not just for new blog posts).
2. Connect with other bloggers
Make yourself known to other people who blog about similar topics. Despite the fact you’re technically a competitor, you’re likely to be pleasantly surprised by how supportive the blogger community can be. Many bloggers even have a ‘links’ page on their site which they use to link to loads of their friends within the community in return for a link on your own blog. This will help massively with your SEO (that’s search engine optimisation – how likely your blog is to pop up in Google searches). If you engage with other bloggers and share their content, they’ll likely return the favour – you could even work on some collaborations.
3. Respond to news stories on your blog
If something happens in the news which is related to your niche, get involved. This is what we refer to as ‘newsjacking’ and it can work a treat for getting you some great exposure. You can get on social media to say your bit with relevant hashtags, get involved in discussions and even reach out to journalists to say you’re available for comment. If you’re really great at owning your niche, journalists might even come to you.
4. Create valuable content
Don’t write content just because it’s about your niche. Instead, you should write content for your reader. What do they want to learn more about? How will you help them take action? You can use tools like keyword research to see if your blog post topics are searched by your audience. You should also look up your blog topics on Google to see what type of blog posts are written about them.
Creating viral content will help you reach a new market and, in turn, increase your readership. This might be easier said than done, but the key to creating viral content is to tap into controversial or highly-discussed topics related to your niche blogging field – as you can imagine, this often involves newsjacking. As this is your niche, you’ll be passionate, opinionated and knowledgable about it, so you’ll be able to post an opinion that people want to read, share and talk about.
6. Optimized for search
Your blog posts might be full of good info, but if it doesn’t rank on search then nobody will see it. This is bad news if you want to get more traffic. But luckily it isn’t hard to optimize for search. To get started, you’ll want good keywords, a fast website, and optimized images. Check out how to use SEO to improve website ranking.
7. A unique selling proposition
If you want to grow your blog then you need to stand out from everyone else. You can do this with a unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is something that makes your blog different from everyone else – why should someone read your blog over another? So how do you find your own USP? Niche down your blog topic to something specific. So instead of creating a fitness blog for all ages, you could create a daily workout blog for college students. This topic is specific, yet reaches out to a large group of people.
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