How to increase your blog traffic

Without traffic, no blog can survive and to get loads of traffic and that too which can convert into sales is something that cannot be achieved without applying proper techniques.

With so many new bloggers starting their blogs, it is getting pretty competitive to get good traffic and by good traffic, I mean traffic that you can convert into email subscribers or sales.

To add to this, if you search online for how to drive traffic to your blog, you will find numerous posts explaining different-different strategies, and when you apply those to your blog. Nada!

Traffic was the prime factor because of which my first blog failed.

Over the past few years, I learned all that I could and started this second blog and applied my own strategies and I am getting great results from it.

Here are the few pointers which you can use to build your very own blog traffic strategies.

Your audience comes first

This is the first and foremost thing that you need to understand if you want your blog to be popular.

Understanding your audience simplifies your blogging life on so many levels.

You begin to understand what your audience is searching for, what type of content you should create, which content upgrades will work, which specific keywords you should target for, etc.

Blogging is not about creating content that you think your audience will like, it is about what your audience would love to read.

I know this might sound confusing to you but believe me when you realize this, you will know what you are missing out, a key piece that all the successful bloggers are using and getting the pretty awesome amount of traffic every single day.

Coming on how to do this, you need to go to a social media platform that you are using and look for what type of content your audience is looking for, which keyword they search for, what type of comment they leave on different blogs, read their discussion on Facebook group pages.

Publish new contents regularly

This makes more sense because the major source of traffic for all blogs are solely social media platforms and search engines.

Since these platforms are always looking for fresh and quality content, more consistently you give to them, more favor you will gain.

But make sure you don’t do something like posting your content in a single week and remaining three weeks of a month you publish nothing.

Try to create a content calendar with publishing timeline and to-do list for every single post after you hit the publish button.

In my personal experience, regularly publishing new material about your blog benefits in surging your traffic to some level. I have posted content as often as 3 times a week.

I understand this may sound a little foolish and not all of you will be able to match the same pace and that’s fine.

The best thing to do is make a calendar, mark weekly deadlines, and adhere to those deadlines. Try posting fresh and popular articles every week to get more and more traffic on your blog.

My personal and most useful tip is to create as many new articles as you can but edit those articles in small batches, this will help you in time management and you will not get bored.

The last significant tip I’d like to share is “Quality is more important than the quantity”. Focus on creating good quality content rather than creating an “x” number of articles.

I remember hiring too many writers for my blog to create a large number of articles to attract traffic but I failed to understand the reason for low traffic and decreasing page views.

So better late than sorry, If you don’t want your traffic and content to suffer.

Your headlines matters

My old blogs didn’t fare well because I never paid attention to my headlines or subheadings.

This is generally one mistake most of the bloggers make initially due to a lack of knowledge and experience.

Making mistakes at the initial stage of blogging is fine and tolerable but if you don’t rectify your mistakes then it will affect your blogging business.

If you think about it, It is pretty dumb to spend only 1% of your time on headlines and sub-topics compared to spending 2-3 days on your main content.

If this is the repeating case of you then be prepared to no clicks on your articles and all your efforts will be in vain.

Try digging the internet to get ideas for creating eye-catching headlines that make everybody wants to click on your posts.

Your titles should evoke human emotions of excitement, jealousy, eagerness, etc.

Bear in mind that negative titles also attract people’s attention sometimes.

For instance:

How consuming carbs are preventing you from losing a few pounds?

OR Top 10 travel mistakes that are hurting your pockets!! Etc.

So keep in mind to spend a good amount of time on creating appealing headlines and sub-topics.

If headlines are something you are struggling with then do read 13 Sure-Fire Tips To Make Your Blog Post Titles Killer

Use Pinterest

Most of my blog traffic, almost 90% comes from Pinterest and it’s not like I was using it for a very long time.

Pinterest has many advantages over other social media platforms.

First and most important one is that you can start seeing results of your effort on Pinterest within weeks.

Yes! You heard me right, within weeks you can see your traffic steadily starting to grow.

But to get such results you need to follow some simple rules for your Pinterest profile, pin images, description, and your boards.

If you have chosen Pinterest to be your primary source of traffic then obviously you need to understand how it works and how you can use it to drive tons of Pinterest traffic to your blog.

If you want to start with Pinterest and learn SEO then do read Pinterest For Bloggers and if you already are using it but not getting enough out of it then head to Pinterest Tips To Get More Blog Traffic

Think SEO for long Term

As I have already told you that for any blog out there, a major source of traffic will always be either social media platforms or search engines mainly Google.

Both of these require your blog to be SEO friendly so that they can easily consume content from your blog and present it to your audience in a more presentable way.

If you don’t know what SEO is then you need to dig into it.

To put in simple terms, SEO is a set of rules that your blog needs to follow and a few extra information that you need to have on your blog so search engines like google can understand which audience group your content is best suited for.

If you are using WordPress then most of your SEO needs are handled by ‘Yoast SEO plugin’ and it is by far the most important, must-have blog optimization tool.

Do Keyword research

You made your post SEO optimized, likewise, you got your Pinterest profile, boards, and pins to be SEO friendly but the most important factor which decides your success is your keyword research.

Imagine this, every piece of content you have on your blog is SEO friendly, but the keyword you are targeting for is wrong, then what happens?

All those efforts won’t bring you any traffic and even if it does bring you some, that will not be your ideal audience since the content is not what they are looking for, only leading to increased bounce rates.

So do put effort into doing keyword research and the best way to do this is to follow your competitor’s keyword and choose for a similar one.

Go for long-tail keywords since they are less competitive and are easier to rank for.

But remember that any SEO changes will take a month to see some results so make sure you don’t discard your strategies before seeing their results.

Content upgrades

Who doesn’t love free stuff?

Everybody does.

Creating content upgrades are easy since you already have content, you just need to decide out of all that content, which part goes in the post, which one in content upgrade and which one in your email newsletter.

Many bloggers extensively use email marketing and provide more than 60% content in emails rather than in post.

But having an option to download a cheat-sheet while reading an awesome post, who wouldn’t go for it?

To take it to the next level you can have two types of content upgrades for every single post, the first one in the middle of your post and the second one in the end.

Also, when you are creating pin images for these posts make sure you mention about getting a freebie, this will increase chances of making your pin go viral.

Clean Up your blog

Have you ever stumbled upon a blog with average content and that is so slow and design is just so bad?

Have you ever shared content from such a blog? Well, I haven’t?

Now, imagine that the blog content is average, nothing special over there but the website is super fast and design is just wow.

Will you pin from this blog? Most probably yes even though the content is just average.

So from this, you can surely understand how the design of your blog and its speed can affect your audience engagement rate.

Make sure your blog is clean and easy to navigate, with no broken links, and all buttons are working well.

Lookup your competitors and try to match your design with them, but make sure you have some uniqueness in your design which is not too fancy but does make your blog stand out of crowd.

If you are stuck in deciding whether to make your design pretty or make your blog fast, go for a faster option because if your blog will be too slow, no one has that much time to hang around.

Nobody will ever want to just wait so that they can see some fancy images.

Engage with your audience and fellow bloggers

By now you should have prepared your content, your blog website is loading with good speed, easy and smooth to navigate through your site and SEO friendly.

You have shared your content on social media and everywhere you think you can.

Now is the time to enjoy blogging.

Engage with your audience on your blog or through email or social media.

Just not on your blog, go to other blogs where they hang out and leave a helpful comment.

And don’t limit it to just to your audience, engage with your fellow bloggers irrespective of whether they are in your niche or not.

Converse with them, ask questions, and add your comments.

This will not only help you in building brand awareness but will also allow you to stay up-to-date with what’s happening out there.