How to get traffic to my blog- How to increase-blog traffic
Starting a blog these days has become easy with platforms like WordPress. However, once its up and running, your next big challenge is to bring more traffic to your blog or website.
Dont worry, you dont need to be a marketing guru to promote your blog. You can easily increase your blog traffic to get more visitors by using some proven best practices.
In this article, we will share some of the easiest and most tested tips to increase your blog traffic like an expert marketer.
Before You Start Set Up Push Notifications for Your Site
Website push notifications help you stay in touch with your visitors after they leave your website, so you can bring them back.
We use a tool called Push Engage. Its freemium software that we highly recommend for all bloggers, website owners, and eCommerce sites.
It lets you send notifications to your visitors mobile or desktop device that are hard to miss, so you get a much higher engagement rate than social media or email.
The best part is, you can communicate with visitors after theyve left your site.
We use it on all of our websites, and its by far the best traffic channel for us.
Not many website owners know about this tactic because push notifications used to be hard to set up. PushEngage has made it easy.
1. Create Audience Profiles to Understand Your Users
Before you start creating content for your blog, its important to spend a little time understanding your target audience and what they are looking for.
You can quickly build an audience framework by answering the following questions:
· Who is your target audience?
· What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
· What kind of content are they looking for?
· How would they ideally like to find the answers to their questions?
Answering these questions will help you get a clearer picture of your target audience. You can also expand on this by adding further personalized questions such as:
· How old are they?
· What are their occupations?
· What is their education level?
· What is their expertise level in the subject matter of your blog?
These audience profiles are also known as buyer personas in the eCommerce industry
2. Do Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover specific words and sentences that users type into Google and other search engines to find the content they are looking for.
Normally, beginners just rely on their best guesses when creating content. As you can imagine, this strategy is hit or miss.
If you use the best-guess strategy, then theres a high chance that your articles wont rank high in search engines.
That might be simply because no ones looking for the keywords you have used, or perhaps there is just too much competition for those keywords.
By doing proper keyword research, you will unlock the following benefits:
· Discover actual search terms people are looking for
· Find unique content ideas for popular search terms
· Learn from your competitors and beat them with better content
· Create a series of pillar articles to drive steady traffic to your blog
Now the question is, How do you actually do keyword research? Luckily, it is not as difficult as you would think.
There are a lot of free and paid keyword research tools that can help. We use SEMRush for our content strategy.
All you have to do is enter a keyword and a website address. The URL could be for a competitors blog or your own website. After that, the keyword research tool will help you discover lots of new keyword ideas.
3. Make an Editorial Calendar
Once you have done the keyword research, youll likely come up with tons of blog post ideas.
Sometimes, a large list of keywords can overwhelm beginners to a point where they simply give up.
To make sure this doesnt happen to you, we recommend creating an editorial calendar (a game plan). Remember, no large blog was built in a day.
It takes time and consistent effort to create a successful blog. Creating an editorial calendar will help you create and stick to the plan.
There are plenty of useful tools that you can use like Asana and Trello to name a few. These tools come with a powerful set of features that will help you stay on top of your game.
The goal is to organize, create a birds eye view of your strategy, and be more productive.
Here are some more tips on managing your editorial workflow more efficiently:
· Dont be too hard on yourself. Start with two articles a week and gradually increase your pace when you can.
· Be consistent with your publishing schedule. Make sure you follow your calendar and publish regular content as planned.
· Add notes, keyword ideas, and outlines to your calendar. This will help you produce better quality content when you sit down to write.
· Use colors, tags, categories, and other features in your calendar app to make it more visual and organized.
4. Create Comprehensive and Useful Content
The most important thing that users and search engines look for is good quality content.
For a blog, a quality piece of content is usually a comprehensive article on a specific topic that covers all the details. This makes it extremely helpful for users.
These comprehensive articles are known as pillar articles. Other experts may refer to them as flagship content or cornerstone articles.
Basically, these are your most important articles. You need to choose the most promising keyword and then provide as much information as you can in one long-form article.
You should create as many pillar articles as possible to cover all the important keywords in your industry.
Following are some tips that you should keep in mind when creating pillar content:
· Pillar content could be any type of article. For example, a how-to guide, tutorial, comparison article, opinion piece, a listicle, and so on.
· The difference between pillar content and other articles is that your pillar articles are more comprehensive and provide in-depth information on the topic.
· Your pillar articles are not time-dependent. They are evergreen and always useful. We recommend that you keep them updated with new information to stay on top of search results.
5. Make Your Content Readable
As we mentioned earlier, search engines and users love longer, comprehensive articles that provide all the information they need.
Now the problem is that humans have a short attention span.
If they find your content a little difficult to read or understand, then they may leave without looking at all the useful information that you offered.
To solve this problem before it happens, you need to make sure your content is easy to read.
A good place to start is to present your article in bite-size sentences using a friendly tone and lots of visuals.
Following are a few basic tips to make your content more readable and user-friendly:
· Use smaller sentences and paragraphs. This leaves a lot of white space around text making it easier to look and read.
· Try to improve typography by using more readable fonts, a large font-size, and plenty of line spacing.
· Check the readability score of your content. The All In One SEO and Yoast SEO plugins come with a built-in tool for that, and you can also find tons of other online readability checkers
· Use a grammar checker. We recommend using Grammarly because it not only checks grammar but actually helps you write better.
· Use images, screenshots, videos, infographics, and other visual elements. These media elements make your article highly-engaging and easier to read.
6. Learn and Apply SEO Basics to Your Website
SEO is a set of best practices that help you make your website more search engine friendly. You dont nee to be an SEO Guru to improve your website.
Contrary to popular belief, anyone can do SEO for their own websites without hiring an expert. There are plenty of SEO tools and plugins, free advice, and step by step tutorials available that you can use.
We recommend using the All in One SEO plugin for all WordPress websites. Its the most comprehensive SEO and website optimization tool. The free version includes all the SEO features that you will need on your website.
7. Learn to Write Great Headlines
When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your article headline.
A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a plain and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.
This makes headlines very important.
You need to learn how to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and get more clicks.
Luckily, blogging experts have been doing research on headlines for a very long time, and you can benefit from their findings.
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
· A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
· It offers users a reward and value.
· It promotes the content by including target keywords.
Copywriters use power words to trigger emotional responses. They tell users why the article is valuable or what they will get from clicking on the headline.
Lastly, a good headline includes a call to action which is often subtle and sometimes implied.
You can also use the following free headline analyzer tools to help create better headlines:
· OptinMonster Headline Analyzer
· MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer
· EMV Headline Analyzer
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) also has an AI Title/Description Generator that allows you to automatically craft high-quality post titles using ChatGPT.
8. Make Internal Linking a Routine Task
Now that you have started creating good content, it is important to link to your articles from your existing blog posts. This is called internal linking, and it plays a huge role in SEO.
Here is why internal linking is so important:
· Internal links help Google understand the context and relationship between different articles on your website. It then uses this information as ranking signals.
· Internal links, when placed strategically and in context, can help you increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate.
· It is harder to ask third-party websites to link to your articles. It is way easier to create links on your own site.
We recommend that you make a habit of linking to your older articles from your new articles.
Because internal links play such an important role in SEO, we have even made it part of our pre-publish checklist for our writers.
9. Start Generating More Backlinks
A backlink is an incoming link to your content from an external website. Backlinks are one of the most influential signals in Googles rankings.
Getting backlinks from reputable websites and blogs is very difficult. Its not just beginners who find it hard, even experienced bloggers struggle with it.
Here are some tips to get quality backlinks to your website:
· Reach out to influencers and reputable blogs in your industry, and then tell them about specific content on your website that they might want to link.
· Write guest posts on other blogs and websites.
· Interview influencers and bloggers on your blog. They will likely want to let their users know to come checkout their interview, and youll get a backlink.
· The easiest way to get a backlink is to add a link to your website on all your social media profiles.
10. Utilize User-Generated Content
User-generated content is basically any content generated on your website as a result of user activity. This includes comments, testimonials, guest posts, user reviews, and more.
User-generated content helps you bring more traffic to your website because it gives users multiple opportunities to participate and get involved.
Users are more likely to return, share, and even purchase from your website when they spend more time on it.
There are many different kinds of user-generated content that you can add. You need to choose what works best for your blog and start from there.
11. Keep Your Website Design Clean and Clutter Free
There are a lot of great WordPress themes available on the market. The problem is that many beginners want to use a theme with all the bells and whistles. These themes are not always the perfect design for your website.
Bad website design stops your users from spending more time on your blog which decreases your pageviews.
Whereas a good design helps them discover more content, explore different sections, and spend more time.
12. Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster
In this era of instant gratification, no one wants to wait for a website to load. If your website is slow, then users will simply leave your website before it even finishes loading.
Search engines like Google also consider website speed and page load time as one of the important ranking factors.
To make sure that your website loads fast, you need to optimize your WordPress performance. This means you need to use caching, avoid unnecessary bloat, and optimize your images.
13. Start Your Email List Right Away
Most beginners spend too much of their time bringing new users to their website. However, more than 70% of users leaving your website will never return.
The trick to growing your blog traffic is NOT to just get new visitors, but you also need to keep existing visitors coming back.
How do you make sure that users return to your website?
You do that by asking them to subscribe to your blog.
Users can subscribe to your websites social media profiles. However, most social networks limit your reach, and your users can only see some of your content.
This is why you need to start building your email list.
The best thing about your email list is that you own it. No one can limit your reach, and you get direct access to your users inboxes.
Email marketing is the most cost-efficient and highly effective marketing tool at your disposal. You are losing potential subscribers each day without an email list.
Once you have an email list, you can send regular email newsletters to bring more visitors to your blog. We recommend using Constant Contact, SendinBlue, or ConvertKit.
14. Automatically Share Your Blog Posts
When we stress that you should build an email list, we dont mean that you should stop building a social media following.
Quite the opposite, in fact, we want you to continue building a social media following on all the important social platforms, and even find new niche platforms that you can explore.
The problem with social media websites is that you have to regularly post content to keep your profiles active and drive traffic to your blog.
If you do that manually, then youll soon be spending quite a lot of time on sharing content.
This is where Uncanny Automator comes in. It is a plugin that allows you to create automated workflows in WordPress.
15. Explore Other Social Networks
There are so many social media websites out there, but most of us spend all of our time on a few top platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Obviously, you want to focus on them to drive more traffic to your blog.
However, depending on your blogs topics you may have more success on other social platforms that are less crowded.
For example, if your blog is about building businesses, then you may find more engaged users on LinkedIn.
If you run a lifestyle or fashion blog, then Instagram may be the platform you should focus on.
You can always spend time on Quora to answer user questions which build backlinks and help increase blog traffic.
We recommend that you try spending more time on social networks other than the bigtwo. You may find a more passionate audience and a bigger following there.
16. Participate in Online Communities
Online communities are a great source of traffic mainly because they already have engaged users who are interested in the topics that you are discussing on your blogs.
You can find smaller communities on Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, YouTube communities, and more.
Warning Tip: Dont just start posting links to your articles. This is called spamming and moderators will instantly block you.
You should spend some time building your reputation, answering questions, joining discussions, and only then share your website if it is appropriate.
17. Make Your Own Online Groups
Another way to build a passionate following around your blog is by starting your own online group. You can use free platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn and invite your users to join in.
As your community grows, so will your influence. The active participants in your group will proactively help you promote your blog on their own social media profiles.
After some time, this little community can become a major source of traffic for your blog.
18. Participate in Q&A Websites
You may have noticed that sometimes years-old answers from websites like Stack Exchange, Quora, or TripAdvisor will still outrank more established blogs in search results.
Question and Answer websites are one of the biggest online communities on the internet.
The advantage of answering questions on these platforms is that your answer will remain live for a very long time which means that it can become a regular source of traffic to your blog.
Once again, we will not recommend you to just go there for posting your links. Instead, you should write actual detailed answers with links to your blog posts only if they fit in the context.
Friends they are still more to website traffic , but we believe this can help you get started. We hope these tips helped you increase your blog traffic. Good luck.
adex3g 1 year
