We continue our learning on how to start a blog. From the last article, you have found out how to promote your blog. Today we are going to talk about secrets and tricks to increase blog traffic.
How to increase the traffic to your blog? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. But there are dozens of ways to increase the number of visitors to any resource.
It would seem that you are doing everything right. Your articles are useful, which is exactly what every reader needs. This is how search engines rate content. But stop thinking that non-SEO content marketing works great. Also, don’t believe that you need only to fill your blog with articles to increase blog traffic.
It doesn’t work when you have a small blog, and you are only at the beginning of the journey. You need to use hidden reserves — there are ways to build visibility through your old blog posts. It doesn’t matter how many articles you have now — 10 or 100. If you don’t get traffic, try starting over.
Here is a convenient cheat sheet with useful blogging tips and tricks to increase blog traffic. Save this article for the future. Think bigger and expand your horizons. And remember, traffic limits exist only in your head.
Tricks to Increase Blog Traffic by Content Marketing Methods
1. Use Content Marketing and Content Design
Boring news and commercial texts do not hold the attention of visitors on the blog page. Fill texts with illustrations, infographics, videos. Experiment with the length of the texts, making them interesting to the target audience. Find a unique “formula” for content and regularly release it, distributing it wherever possible. A professionally written and designed article with the pleasure of publishing partners and online news publications. In addition, such material is sure to enter the TOP 10 search engines and will attract traffic for months or years.
Here are some of my favorite websites:
- Ouch! — The project of icons8. Here you will find free vector illustrations.
- Visme.co — A free tool for creating infographics.
- Mixkit — A great resource with free stock videos.
2. Lead Magnet, USP, Interesting Title
The site visitor first reads the title of the text. Remember, it depends on the title whether the user will get acquainted with the material or not.
Always follow those easy blogging tips:
- Come up with interesting and exciting headlines that can focus the visitor’s attention.
- Create a USP (unique selling proposition). Read the most famous USPs to get inspired.
- Write a lead paragraph — 2-3 sentences at the beginning of the text that intrigue the reader and explain what he will get useful after studying the entire article.
3. News Aggregator Websites
Who said that materials interesting to users should be posted only on thematic blogs or social networks? News aggregators of infotainment materials like Reddit are perfect for this. Of course, an advertising post will cause a stream of well-deserved anger, but really interesting content will be forgiven for a lot, up to direct links to a promoted site.
4. Invite Others to Your Blog
And vice versa. If you have a blog, then invite other authors to it. Attracting third-party authors to post unique content on your blog in exchange for backlinks. It is a way to grow your blog and increase its popularity.
5. Interest in the Opinion of Industry Leaders
Post an online interview with a professional in your industry. This increases the credibility of the blog in the eyes of visitors. Readers, and a respondent himself, can share a link to the material, which will increase the reach of the audience.
Tricks to Increase Blog Traffic with SEO
6. Install SEO plugin
For competent basic optimization without involving a programmer, you will need a plugin that will allow:
- create a site map for internal linking;
- analyze content – how effective is it for promotion;
- edit the robots.txt file (responsible for the visibility of the site in search engines).
The most popular WordPress plugin is Yoast SEO, which can be installed for free.
7. Keywords
To understand which keywords to use on specific pages in your blog, you need to form a semantic core of search queries. The following services will be very useful to you as a beginner:
Naturally, there should be several keywords. A text of about 8 thousand characters should have at least 4-7 key phrases. One of them (the same from the title) must be in the first paragraph. The main thing is not to start the text right away with the keyword.
8. Optimization of Title, Description, and Links
A title is a very first information that a search engine receives by scanning a page. So, it should contain the most important and most accurate information that corresponds to the content of the document. It should begin with a key phrase.
- A title should convey the content of a particular page, not the entire blog. For instance, if you have a blog about cooking, the title should cover the name of a recipe, and not the general theme of the blog.
- Meta description explains in more detail what the user will find on the page. Try to make it readable, informative, and less than 140 characters (with spaces).
- When forming links, it is important to create human-readable URLs. A link text should contain the page name and not a set of random letters or numbers that confuse the reader.
9. Image Optimization
The article on your blog should fully comply with the user’s request. This correspondence should be observed not only in the title and text but also in the images. The search engines evaluate them too.
There are 2 stages of image optimization:
- We write the name of the file and include the key phrase in it (use hyphens instead of spaces). You should do it before loading the image.
- Register the ALT attribute. It is set already after loading the image.
Tricks to Increase Blog Traffic by Attracting Traffic from Social Networks
If your target audience is aged 18-45 years, then with a probability of 55%, you can reach it on social networks. More than 3.5 billion people use social networks.
Among the most popular social media platforms worldwide are:
- Facebook;
- Instagram;
- YouTube;
- TikTok;
- Twitter;
- Snapchat;
- Pinterest, etc.
Each social network provides its own opportunities for promotion. Instagram is suitable for media content, posting photos about events or products. Facebook is a convenient platform for posting news, articles, products, and current offers. I recommend you to use the Social share plugin for WordPress. Thanks to this plugin, you can log in to the more than 20 social media providers and add social media buttons. It is fully customizable and available as a widget. The most fun of it, you can add social counters, as:
- WP Comments Number;
- WP Posts Number;
- Facebook Fans;
- Instagram Followers;
- Twitter Followers;
- YouTube Subscribers, etc.
Below I have described in detail techniques for some social networks.
10. Promotion on the Facebook Platform
Although this social network was created for communication between friends and family members, today, this platform can become a source of good traffic. Where visitors can come to your site from:
- from groups on similar topics on Facebook;
- advertisements;
- messenger;
- posts on Facebook;
- from your Facebook business page of a blog.
11. Promotion on the Instagram Platform
Only the lazy one did not hear about Instagram today. This social network is one of the best marketing channels for online trading, thanks to a large number of users and business-friendly features of the platform.
How to increase blog traffic using Instagram:
- Use your profile page or create additional for a blog,
- Place a link to it in the profile header;
- Add links to Instagram stories;
- Ask friends and subscribers to tell about your blog and share posts in their Stories;
- Collaborate with influential blogs that have a large number of subscribers;
- Buy Instagram advertisements.
12. Promotion on the LinkedIn platform
This social network is rarely considered as a source of traffic. However, by regularly posting your best articles on this platform, you can get a steady stream of visitors from this source.
What information to publish on LinkedIn to increase blog traffic:
- about the success of your blog (number of subscribers);
- about your participation in charity events;
- informational videos with a link to your blog or YouTube profile;
- about new interesting posts (like an interview or step-by-step tutorial).
13. Promotion on the Twitter Platform
This resource is actively fighting with the automation of spam, but it can also bring new visitors to you. By the way, this platform is one of the best for beginning entrepreneurs whose goal is to increase traffic. This will help you:
- use of appropriate hashtags;
- competent content marketing.
You can write interesting tweets here that will help you find a common language with potential customers. Do not forget to place links to pages of your blog in the articles and use the “click to retweet” function.
14. Try Pinterest
Using this resource can bring even better results than working with Facebook.
What do you need to do to promote?
- To attract the maximum number of visitors to your web resource, you need to make one PIN code.
- When posting a message, attach all the images that you have in your blog post. Even custom ones can be useful to you too.
Remember, images are the most important instruments on Pinterest.
15. How to Increase Blog Traffic with YouTube
- Create a brief description of your posts on YouTube;
- Add links to the description of videos;
- Add links to annotations to videos;
- Encourage other YouTube users to share links to your videos.
To attract visitors to your blog through this channel, you will have to work hard. You will need to publish one video per week at least for a year. Very good results are brought by cooperation with large video bloggers.
Speaking to an Audience
16. Create a Community
After reading the material, many want to express their opinion. Provide this opportunity to comment both on your site and in communities on social networks. The result will be the creation of a community around your blog.
Do not forget to your community:
- moderate messages
- monitor compliance with communication rules,
- entertain the community with contests, etc.
17. Take Part in a Talk
Pay attention to the target audience, and she will answer you the same. Read and respond to comments on your blog and social networks. You can also communicate on third-party thematic platforms. A successful comment will draw attention to you and your blog.
18. Use Email-marketing
Email promotion has long been proven to be effective. Therefore, you need to start it from the first day of the existence of your blog.
You will need:
- Newsletter email templates — the selection of templates is wide and suits for different purposes.
- List of email addresses for distribution. For starting, you can create this list to find your audience. Then newsletter plugin and design of newsletter templates will help you to get more subscribers.
Thanks to a newsletter subscription, your readers will never miss any post. The advantage of this marketing channel is that, unlike social networks, it is completely controlled by you.
Analytics
- Study Competitors. Follow the activities of competitors and try to “be in trend”. Moreover, studying such information will allow you to decide on topics that resonate with readers.
- Use Google Analytics. The functionality of GA provides a huge array of data on traffic to your blog. The analysis will allow you to increase traffic by optimizing advertising strategies and identifying the most interesting materials for visitors. Analysis of traffic sources will show which channels work better and which should be discarded.
- Exclude Your Traffic. If you have little traffic on your site, your visits can greatly distort your statistics. Fortunately, you can exclude your IP address from Google Analytics so that only the statistics of your visitors are displayed in reports.
- Ask professionals to promote your blog to increase traffic. I recommend you reach out to TemplateMonster, who can help you work with analytics, site or mobile app development, on-page SEO, and Google ads services. Besides, they can help you to create a social media brand and much more.
Tricks to Increase Blog Traffic Summary
Using the same methods of blog promotion limits its possibility. Look for new approaches, tools, and platforms for traffic growth.
Bookmark this article. Reread and implement the methods listed here on your projects. One of the main tricks to increase blog traffic is to take concrete and regular steps in this direction. And the result will definitely come.
I hope you liked my blogging tips. By the way, it will be very cool if you try or have already tried some methods. Please tell me about your experience in the comments.
Learn more about how to drive traffic to your blog in this great infographic from The Blog Millionnaire.
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