Learn how to increase blog traffic with the best tips and strategies that I used to reach 1 million page views!
Start with The Basics of Blogging
- What is a Blog and How Does Blogging Work?
- How to Start a Blog That Makes Money
- How to Name Your Blog
- 300 Blog Name Ideas to Spark Your Imagination
- 50 Lucrative Blog Niche Ideas to Consider in 2024
- How to Make Money Blogging
- Is Blogging Dead? Are Blogs Still Relevant and Profitable?
- How Do Bloggers Get Paid
- Blog Income Reports
- 5 Cheap and Effective Ways to Promote Your Blog
- 40 Tips for Beginner Bloggers to Kickstart Your Blogging Journey
Latest Articles on Growing a Blog
How to Increase Blog Traffic
In this day and age, every business needs a blog.
Whether you are just starting out and creating your first site, or you’ve had one for a few years and want to update it, chances are you aren’t bringing in the website traffic you’d like to.
Luckily, there are some ways to increase your blog traffic, gain attention, draw in visitors, and hopefully, gain some customers along the way.
Over the years, I took Let’s Reach Success from a hobby blog to an online business that earns me a full-time living. In 2019, I got over 1 million page views (as you can see from the image below).
With this guide and all the resources on my blog, I hope to help you achieve the same.
Whatever your blogging goals are, there’s sure to be one thing you always want more of – traffic.
Without a healthy flow of website 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 go through the top things you can work on to grow your blog traffic and make real money blogging.
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 increase blog 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? That’s when optimization comes in.
2. Optimize your website.
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:
- SEO for Bloggers: How to Rank Higher on Google
- 5 SEO Ranking Factors Every Blogger Should Consider
- Top Reasons Your SEO is Not Working
- 7 SEO Fixes You Can Do for Better Search Engine Ranking
- How to Install Google Analytics on Your Blog
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.
The keywords and key phrases that you use on your website are essential for bringing in blog traffic. In addition to basic keywords, you must also consider long-tail keywords for search engine optimization.
Doing keyword research will help you to figure out which long-tail words are best.
Consider local SEO as well, which involves using your primary keywords along with your company’s location.
For example, if you sell women’s clothing and your company is in Columbus, Ohio, you’ll want your website to use “women’s clothing in Columbus, Ohio” or “women’s clothing in Columbus, OH.”
Also, don’t forget to 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.
3. 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 and that’s how you increase blog traffic over time.
4. Become active on social media.
After you start a blog, your social media strategy can help to boost your website traffic significantly. It can help you develop a loyal following that provides you with monetization options.
Every post should have its own promotional plan, while you should also look to promote your older content and blog in general, to keep visitors flocking to your blog.
Designing an effective social media strategy requires research and thought, but it will be worth it to see those numbers jump.
Wondering how to increase blog traffic using social media? Create an account on each of the major social media platforms and ensure you brand it the same way your website is.
Post regularly, using relevant content in the form of memes, videos, and other images.
Remember to ask questions, answer questions, and otherwise interact with your followers.
The social media channel that works best for bloggers is Pinterest. Almost any 6-figure blogger out there brings a ton of their traffic directly from Pinterest.
In the past 2 years, I managed to turn that into another source of traffic for Let’s Reach Success.
Thanks to taking the course Pinterest Traffic Avalanche, I was able to grow my Pinterest account in as little as 2 months and turn Pinners into website visitors. That led to bringing thousands of people on my blog each month and increasing my income from advertising.
I also started using Tailwind – the best Pinterest scheduler, and it’s amazing feature Tribes, which allowed me to grow my reach even further.
In Pinterest Traffic Avalanche, I learned how to optimize my Pinterest profile and Pins, how to create a Pinterest strategy, and exactly what the creators of the course (Alex and Lauren from CreateandGo, who earn over $100K/month blogging) did to grow their Pinterest profiles to millions of views.
You can learn more about the Pinterest course here.
Read also:
- How I Increased My Traffic by 778% in 2 Months using Pinterest
- 7 Silly Pinterest Mistakes I Was Making
- 9 Pinterest Tips for Bloggers to Get 100K Page Views in 1 Month
- How I Grew My Blog with Tailwind
- How to Drive Social Media Traffic as a New Blogger
5. 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.
6. Build a better-looking website.
Looks are important and that’s why that’s another step to take when learning how to increase blog traffic.
Nearly everybody looks up companies online before purchasing from them now and almost 40 percent of consumers will stop looking at a website if they find the layout unattractive.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of design experience, though. Plenty of companies have drag-and-drop website builders that allow novice designers to create a gorgeous, functional website without needing to know a single line of code.
Remember, the internet is a wealth of information. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on hiring a professional web development team.
If you’re willing to do the work it takes to start, design, and grow a blog that earns over $5,000/month and gets 100K monthly page views, make sure to check out my premium blogging course Blog to Biz System.
In it, I teach all you need to know to build a real blogging business and make a full-time income as a blogger.
7. Update your old content.
Like most things related to technology, search engines often update how they look at your keywords. What worked for your website two years ago probably isn’t working now and may even be doing harm to your company.
To ensure your website is performing well, read about updated SEO policies from Google or other search engines and then implement them on your website.
This often includes updating static pages as well as changing any old blog posts to include newer, more relevant content.
I constantly update old blog posts and even deleted hundreds of them recently to make sure my site has only quality content and doesn’t have any thin pages which don’t provide value.
If you’re looking for an SEO course for bloggers, I recommend Stupid Simple SEO. I’m currently going through it and have made many changes to my site and content strategy in order to rank better in search engines and increase my domain authority.
8. Build relationships.
To get your blog out there, join a community that helps you network with other bloggers and promote each other’s post is an excellent way to draw in your own readers as well as to help others.
ProBlogger and CopyBlogger are excellent examples.
Another option is to connect with influencers.
If you’ve been anywhere on social media (but especially Instagram) in the last couple of years, you know that influencers are the next big thing.
Bloggers and social media users who have high reader or follower counts receive free products or other types of compensation to use your products, review them, and provide honest feedback.
This is a great way to get people interested in your product, but before you go this route, make sure you have something solid to offer. After all, you don’t want the honest review to be a bad one.
9. Guest post.
Another great way to increase blog traffic is to try guest posting.
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.
10. Use 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.
11. Have a redesign.
A blog redesign is a great way to renew interest in your blog and potentially reach a whole new load of visitors.
You can tease a redesign on your blog and your social media accounts to drum up some interest ready for your launch.
Make sure that you include a subscribe pop-up on your page to encourage those checking out your redesign to keep up with your latest posts.
12. Release an app.
Having an app might seem like a luxury for a blogger, but it could help you to increase your blog traffic, particularly among mobile users.
The hype around your app could be enough to generate some interest, and if you choose the right design, you could find your app taking off in the same way as websites like Bustle or Refinery29.
Choosing the right developer is important, take Lexel, an example of app developers with a good history of developing successful mobile apps, as the type of company you should be looking to work with.
Having an app can be particularly useful for bloggers who’ve incorporated a store into their blog, so it’s worth exploring the option if you really want to make a go of it.
Final words
Growing blog traffic is a never-ending process, so make sure you don’t leave it behind.
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.
I hope you enjoyed this guide on how to increase blog traffic. For more on building a full-time blogging business, check out my course Blog to Biz System.
