Some people build a side-hustle out of their writing skills and generate an excellent stream of revenue from blogging. Others turn their blog into a full-time business.
Whatever your blogging goals, there’s sure to be one thing you always want more of – traffic.
Without a healthy flow of traffic, you’ll find it hard to build up blog revenue and make your blog a success. After all, nobody wants to write into a void.
How can you get more readers to your site? Let’s take a look at some easy ways to boost your blog traffic.
1. Get a clear strategy
Get a proper content marketing strategy together to make sure you’re hitting the right notes.
If your goal is to improve traffic, you need to think about who your audience is and how you’ll provide them the maximum value through your content.
Then, how will you get your content in front of the right people?
Once your strategy is in place, analytics are vital. Without knowing your website stats, how will you know if your plan is working, or if your traffic is indeed increasing?
2. Build a community
You can build a community for your blog on social media, but you can also do so on your platform.
Encouraging comments is one of the best ways to do so. It could also boost your SEO ranking.
Try posing a relevant, personal question at the end of the post, the kind that makes readers want to contribute.
You can also include a call to action throughout or at the end of the post, asking readers to comment below with their favorite tip or their own thoughts.
Readers who feel engaged personally with your blog may be more likely to return.
Read also: How to Drive Social Media Traffic as a New Blogger
3. Optimize post titles
Some titles make you itch to click, while others are simple lack-luster.
What’s the difference? Emotional words and titles that promise the content will somehow improve a person’s life will make them more likely to click.
A headline analyzer can be a useful tool to help you refine your titles. It can be challenging at first, but it will make a huge difference.
4. Boost SEO
If you’re not already optimizing your blog for search engines, you should get started today.
Ranking higher in search engines means your content is more likely to be seen and more likely to be clicked. It’s one of the best ways to get organic reach for your blog.
If you’re not sure where to start, check out some SEO tips and tricks that you can implement now.
This may be something you’ve resisted. You know your 0 blog is insightful or hard-hitting, and you figure if you keep it real, your audience will find you.
These days, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if your content is buried on the third page of search results. Even the most artistic and intellectual among us also have to develop a head for business and effective self-promotion.
So, what are the search giants looking for? The same thing as your potential audience: high-quality, fresh content that’s engaging and relevant.
Google and other search engines are in the business of satisfying their users, not companies. So they’ll reward blogs and eCommerce websites that provide a demonstrable level of value.
How do they measure value? A lot of it comes down to visuals.
5. Using video to grow your audience
We live in a fast-paced, image-driven world. You can chalk it up to lack of time or an abundance of shiny objects vying for our attention 24/7, but it’s a fact that you can’t escape.
Content that finds the right balance between engaging copy and quality visuals will gain more attention than static content alone no matter how well done it is.
Why is that?
Search engines crawling the web have millions of pages of content to sift through, so they place priority on that which stands out with concise meta descriptions, keyword optimization and images.
Content with unique video and imagery, not duplicate or rehashed content, consistently ranks higher because it provides more perceived value to the user.
Fair or not, a two-minute video is more easily absorbed than 1,000 words of text. It’s more shareable, too, which is another metric used to determine ranking.
Marketing research shows that blogs that include video receive 258% more trackbacks than those that offer other types of images or text alone.
6. Guest post
Get some crucial links back to your website by creating them yourself. You can do this by strategically targetting other blogs and offering to guest post.
This could open up your blog to a new audience, as well as benefitting your SEO rankings through links.
7. Increase referral traffic
Referral traffic is very popular for small business owners as well as bloggers.
It can offer you a stable source of traffic and it can also help you to increase your business revenue and earnings. However, you will only see results in terms of money if you have a high-traffic blog that you monetize.
For beginners, increasing referral traffic is harder, but it is not impossible for them to achieve it. Nevertheless, you can do a lot of things to increase your referral traffic. Here are some ideas:
- Link building
Building backlinks is very important, but you need to make sure that you’re building quality ones.
This is crucial because if you have backlinks from popular websites, there is a higher a chance that people who are visiting their site will also visit your website. As a result, your website will increase its traffic.
On the other hand, if you want to check the quality of the links, you can use a backlink analysis tool to help you decide whether the website is trusted or not.
- Blog commenting
Commenting on others blogs will not only help you to build quality links, but you will also provide lots of referral traffic. But it can only be attained when it’s done in the right way.
That means you need to be careful where you are commenting so that you will not look like a spammer. If done right, this can bring you more visitors, which can then be turned into sales through your funnel.
- Social media
Advertising on social media is considered one of the best ways to increase referral traffic.
In fact, there are lots of ways to make this possible since more than 30 percent of referral traffic comes from different social media platforms like Facebook.
- Quora
Due to its growing popularity, Quora is considered one of the best places to drive referral traffic to your blog and grow your audience.
If you get involved in the discussions on this site by replying to questions with valuable insights, you are displaying your reliability as well as promoting your brand to relevant people.
What’s more, you are actually helping other people by simply answering some of their queries and some of your referrers traffic comes from them.
8. Encourage recurring traffic
People might love your blog, but the internet is a saturated place. Stay on the top of your readers’ minds and get them to engage with your content again and again.
The best ways to do this are through building an email list (and providing regular, engaging updates) and creating an active social media presence.
Don’t be afraid to promote your recent posts via these channels, as well as plenty of evergreen content.
