To increase blog traffic, you will have to come up with a long term strategy. Blog traffic does not increase over night. It slowly and steadily grows over a period of time. But for that to happen you need to make a long term plan and stick to it.
Blogs have the potential to attract much more audience to your website, as compared to websites without blogs.
Since regular blogging can increase the audience reach by huge numbers, it is also used as an important marketing tool by businesses to increase sales and revenue.
And this brings us to the million dollar question of how to increase blog traffic.
How To Increase Blog Traffic
Blog traffic is directly related to the revenue generated. Thus, the game of getting people to your website has to be played right.
If you are in search of ways to improve the traffic your website sees, you have come to the right place. By focusing on the points mentioned below, you can grow your traffic count exponentially!
1. Quality Of Content
For a blog to become popular, the most important thing is to capture the attention of the audience.
Originality is key. Try your best to make interesting original content however hard it might be. Do not be afraid to experiment with different presentation formats, the length of the content, illustrations, edits.
Anything different that comes to mind, go for it, and if you are lucky it may make a name for itself.
However, if it doesn’t, don’t lose hope. Until you finally find the right type of presentation for your content, keep trying new and different things.
Being original is not an easy thing especially since there are so many people looking to do well in the field of blogging and content creation. The key is to be patient and analyse the different ways your audience reacts to the content you put up.
2. Finding The Right Writer
The quality of the content of your blog posts cannot be compromised. In case you are not the sole blogger yourself, it might be a good idea to hire someone who is knowledgeable and passionate enough about the niche of the posts.
Coming up with posts from your heart and as a result, reaching the audience’s hearts and piquing their interests would highly motivate them to share your posts.
The personality of the writer reflects in the articles they come up with. The audience always prefers a certain type of personality in the writing and a well-experienced writer will know how to address the vital areas which will get the blogs returning traffic.
3. Targeted Audience
As mentioned before, the best way to increase blog traffic is by reaching the right audience. Knowing your audience is another important thing a blog owner should keep in mind.
Being informed on what appeals to them will help you, the owner, to understand what type of content will make them keep coming back to your blog.
One should try to understand the relation between the content one wants to present and the type of people that are going to review it and find that sweet spot.
This will make people not only keep wanting to come back and wanting more of your content but also make them inform their friends, family and acquaintances about it.
On understanding this, one can get a better understanding of how the content should be presented in order to keep the audience’s attention throughout the whole post.
Once that is achieved the popularity of your content will automatically surge upwards, simply by the word of mouth of your audience thus increasing your blog traffic.Learn how to get free traffic to your website.
4. External Affiliations
Having external affiliations, be it other bloggers and content creators or businesses and companies, will greatly help in popularizing your blog and driving more traffic to your blog.
Having famous figures advertise products related to activities which your business carries out, and attaching the link to your blog to their blogs or social media handles, gives people that slight push who feel inspired by looking at the things you do and allows them to explore their interests, which has been inspired by your work itself.
You may ask, how might this help? People would look up to you as a mentor and spread your work to other people—family and friends and even give you shoutouts.
I mean who doesn’t want to be a mentor to others’, right?
That aside, the other type of affiliations to have is connections with other content creators—might be the same niche or different.
This is to help each other to give a mutual popularity boost to each other’s blogs and pages and businesses which again helps to increase blog traffic.
5. Plan Your Content And Make It SEO-Friendly
Failing to plan is planning to fail
We have come across this phrase quite a few times.
It would be a really bad idea to not be able to draw traffic to a post that you might have come up with after giving your heart and soul and working really hard to make it high-quality content.
To manage this, one should ensure that relevant keywords are used in the blog posts.
An easy step to do this is to use a keyword research tool to get keyword suggestions on a topic before starting to write the blog and incorporating the same in the article as you tread through it.
Some examples of keyword research tools would be:
- Google Search Console
- Mangool SEO Tools
- SECockpit
- Ubersuggest
- Soovle, etc.
Getting to know the keywords beforehand will enable you to tweak your content here and there to subtly incorporate the keywords in the right place—such that it looks to the reader like a flawless piece of art and is Search Engine Optimised (SEO) at the same time.
The importance of SEO cannot be undermined or ignored if you are looking for ways to increase blog traffic since ultimately most of your relevant traffic will be coming from search engines.
6. Laying A Headline Trap
The first thing someone notices about an article is the title. A mundane title is likely to get much lesser click-throughs as compared to a title which stands out to the audience’s eye.
This is another essential factor which you or your writer need to get right. You must learn to come up with better titles which will help you to get more clicks.
Research done by blog experts will give you the basic building blocks to write a proper and a catchy headline:
The title triggers an emotional response from the reader such as surprise, shock, urgency, etc.
It helps in promoting the content by using relevant keywords.
It works as a call to action which might be subtle but implied so that the user does click on the post.
7. In-Depth Content
Analysis shows that ‘long-form content’ generates more traffic as compared to short posts. Long-form content is a post that goes really deep into the topic that the article is addressing.
The reason behind this fact is that blog posts that are too long dig into the topic really deep and address the questions and queries in the reader’s mind.
This engages the readers more and helps them to feel more connected with the author or the story.
Also, the higher word count would mean a better number of keywords in the post, which will in turn result in gaining a higher position in the search engines which in turn will drive more traffic to your blog.
When writing a long post, it might be easy to get off the track from the main topic. This can be disengaging for the reader and have a reverse effect on the traffic count.
So, this is an important note to be made when writing long blogs – stay on the topic.
8. Opting For A Clean And Simple Layout
The layout of your blog post should be simple and clean. Numerous theme customizations are available for the template you have chosen for your blog.
Try not to overcrowd the page with buttons, texts and images wherever possible.
Instead, try to keep it simplistic and soothing for the eye. This will result in a good first impression.
Reader-friendly designs will provide the best user experience, as a result, encourage readers to stay on your pages longer and keep scrolling on.
9. Incorporating Images And Gifs
What you are trying to convey to the reader can be eased out by incorporating relevant images into your blog post.
At times, an image can prove an interesting point, make things easier to understand and also be a relief for the eyes among a sea of words.
Nowadays memes and gifs are a popular way to incorporate a little bit of humour into your blogs. These are a good choice when writing up a casual, more freely-flowing article.
For serious, professional, business-based articles, charts and infographics can be used to present relevant data to the reader.
10. Building A Mailing List
Another thing people should keep in mind is not to be afraid to advertise your content. Most people are socially anxious about telling friends and family about their blogs.
Sharing your posts in the initial days of starting out is a crucial step to get that push, support and motivation one needs.
A trick to ensure that your readers keep returning to read your daily blog pages is to get them subscribed to your newsletters.
This is a step ahead of getting your audience to follow your social media profiles as half of your posts (posted on social media) will not reach the audience.
However, in the case of newsletters, a direct notification will be sent to their phones when they receive the email of your newsletter in their inbox.
Email marketing is one of the most cost-efficient methods to increase blog traffic that cannot be stressed upon enough.
You will lose out on a lot of traffic if you do not incorporate this into your blog or website.
11. Creating A Community
Creating a sense of community is important as well. Appreciating and interacting with your audience creates a sense of being wanted.
Asking your audience what they’d like to see, and also get a different view and perspective is one of the best ways to easily create and enrich the sense of the community.
Provide opportunities for them to actively interact with you about the blog. This can be achieved by adding a comment section at the end of the post.
Herein, people—your audience will be able to interact with you and each other.
Indirect interactions like giveaways and shout-outs also help to boost the community spirit. Direct interactions like actively participating in the comments section do the same and keep the readers engaged from their side.
Apart from creating a sense of community in itself, the comment section can be a good play to get ideas on which you should address your future blogs.
Also, higher engagements will help your article overall to get noticed on the internet.
12. Knowing Your Competition
Knowing about whom you are competing with for blogging and content creation, though overwhelming, might be an important aspect to monitor.
This can work as an important motivator for you to work hard.
Since the market in the content creation world is very saturated, there is no point in comparing numbers with an already developed creator and sabotaging your content.
Rather, try to monitor the things they are doing and incorporating to learn from them to better yourself in the field.
The above points will be quite useful to help you learn new things as well as increase blog traffic. But what’s most important is to give your brand/business time to grow.
You have to be patient with the process and keep working at it and post daily. Making it a routine to post at regular intervals will give your audience a sketchy sense as to when you publish your blog articles.
All the big pages and brands that you see today, once upon a time started from scratch and had to work for their growth. So be patient with yourself and keep blogging. Traffic will come around.