Whether you are a new or experienced blogger, the information this article contains will make sense to you. At least we hope to be useful. Running a blog ourselves, we know firsthand that a rare blogger is completely satisfied with their website traffic. The more you have, the more you wish. It’s a popularity trap. Once you get into it and there is no escape.
This time we won’t share our own experience as to increasing the blog’s traffic, although, many of the techniques we use are stated herein under. This entry is much deeper as it collects the techniques shared by bloggers from all over the world. You should only choose the methods of promotion that seem most efficient to you.
We know that the post is rather prolix, but we advise you to take time and read all points. It will be the first step towards your blog traffic increase as it also demands great patience and tedious work.
We would like to warn you at the very beginning. There is a serious danger to sacrifice the quality of content for the sake of promotion. Try to find the perfect balance as these two matters are so closely connected that one can’t exist without the other. What is the sense of promoting poor content? It will never go viral all the same. And vice versa, nobody will read your content no matter how genius it is if not promoted enough.
But let’s throw away long introductions and begin our long list of methods, tips, and tricks of blog traffic increasing. Be ready to spend months/years trickling along with little to no followers, but hope that namely, your experiment will bring quick results. Yes, in fact, all bloggers risk and experiment until they find the perfect strategies combination, which won’t work for ages, so it’s very important to track your traffic and insert necessary amendments in time.
Are you ready to start increasing your blog traffic right now? Just read on and you’ll find great solutions.
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- We guess it’s smart enough, to begin with an initial blog promotion strategy, where you register your blog and RSS feed with the proper sites and services so that they are notified every time a new post is published. This is a one-time setup before you begin publishing.
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- Steps to take.
- Set up a ping list. Start with the one at the WordPress ping list.
- Register your RSS feed with Google FeedBurner.
- Use a good SEO plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast or SEO Pressor, for instance.
- Submit your RSS Feed and Blog to Directories. Use Google to find 'RSS blog directories' then list your RSS feed in as many places as you can.
- Register for Social Bookmarking Accounts at sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.
- Sign up for a Social Bookmarking Automation Tool like Onlywire or Social Adr.
- Get an Autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse and set up Blog Broadcast.
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- Have an ongoing blog promotion strategy or a "traffic formula". These are actions you perform repeatedly each time you create a new post to publish.
- Create content that is relevant and valuable to your targeted audience. Don't write over promotional texts. If you are offering a product, the best way is to identify a problem your audience may be facing and then demonstrate how your product solves it.
- Optimize your post for search engines. The point is too extensive to discuss here, but you can go to Google for 'how to SEO optimize your blog posts' to find out how your posts should be structured.
- Have an Opt-In form in your post, either somewhere in the middle or in your signature. Also, have an opt-in form on your homepage that is visible "above the fold" (without your viewer having to scroll down).
- Ask for Shares, ReTweets, and Comments at the end of your posts. Don't assume your visitors are going to share out of goodwill.
- Check spelling and grammar before publication.
- Preview the post and then publish if everything seems okay.
- Update all your social media profiles with links to your article (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.)
- Post the link to your article, along with a brief introduction, to groups that pertain to your niche on Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social network in which you have a profile. Try not to auto-post too much, because that's seen as spammy. Personalize your introduction to the groups.
- Submit your blog post as an article to Article Directories: EzineArticles, Hubpages, Articlesbase, and Buzzle. Sometimes you may have to change the content around to avoid submitting duplicate content. It depends on the site. Some don't care, some do. Just make sure you link back to your original post (not your homepage).
- Bookmark your post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious either manually or using Onlywire or Social Adr.
- Locate the forums where people in your target audience discuss relevant issues. Go there and contribute substantive input to the discussions. Make sure the permalink URL of the post you're promoting is in your signature.
- Customize and send e-mails to your blog subscribers.
- Blog consistently. Try to blog 5-7 times per week. This keeps your blog broadcast e-mails in front of your subscribers. It also keeps Google aware that your site is not static, but dynamic. It keeps the ping services and RSS directories updated with new content from you. Just make sure your posts are well researched, relevant to your target audience, and worth readers’ attention.
- Write guest posts on other related high traffic blogs. Really terrific posts published on other people's blogs with a link back to yours can help you reach an instant traffic source at no cost.
- Syndicate the best of your blog content in alternative formats - e.g. videos, podcasts, documents shareable on Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshows on SlideShare.
- Get your avid readers to subscribe to your newsletter, Facebook page, Twitter, and/or RSS feeds so that you can have more repeat visitors when you update your blog.
- Make it as easy as possible for your readers who like your posts to share them on their preferred social networks.
There are many ways to use social networks to drive traffic to your blog. Since Facebook is the second most trafficked website in the world, let’s take it as an example of how you can use your Facebook page to drive traffic to your blog.- Use a short quote from one of your blog posts.
- Skip the link on your status update to make the Facebook post more readable.
- Share articles that provide a solution for your niche or a how-to.
- Host contests on your blog.
- Make an easy-to-read "weekly wrap up" blog post.
- Engage in "conversations" with other bloggers by responding or adding to the contents of other related blogs - you can either adopt the contrarian/debating approach or add to what's been said, whichever is useful.
- Post-email-gated content like webinars, e-books, and coupons.
- Win e-mail leads from social marketing campaigns.
- Design RSS feeds for your blog.
- Add opt-in pop-ups.
- Use your e-mail signature to get lots of people clicking through to your blog.
- Hook them with the subject line.
- Get click-throughs to your blog or blog post by making your e-mail content real. In other words, send visual newsletters and tease.
- Personalize your emails.
- Create clear call-to-actions, but not too many of them. Yes, you need to have them, but don't snap them everywhere you can. This is very important since you should be projecting to people that you want to help or share them something, not try to get them into your thing, they usually get annoyed by this and often don't make your blog posts seriously.
- Make a consistent scheduling calendar for your blog articles.
- Pay attention to keywording your content and linking to high traffic sources. YouTube and government sites are good and linking to photos also. Make sure your site description and keywords match your primary blog keywords, and that your keyword your photos.
- The condition of entry is the reason to visit your blog. You can ask questions, answers to which can be found on your blog, or create a poll where your fans decide what they want to see on your blog in the future.
- Collect e-mail addresses and inform your visitors about new posts. Promotions can capture e-mail addresses and you can use them in newsletters to notify the community about new blog posts. You can run contests on your Facebook page, or even on your blog.
- Use user-generated content (UGC) in your posts. If people see their content on your page they are more likely to share and engage.
- Get other people involved. Make sure to give other people credit and mentions within your posts. People like getting recognition, so give them something to promote - your content. Interview them, ask for quotes, or simply just praise them. Then let them know via Twitter.
- Utilize platforms that already have a large base. Get your content syndicated on platforms with an already built-in following, and use the content to subtly link back to your own blog, or use the Author’s Bio to link to your blog and social media profiles. Some good places to get syndicated are - LinkedIn Publisher, Quota Blogs, BusinessInsider, and Huffington Post.
- Be loud. Once you release great content, don't be shy about it - post it on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google plus, Hacker news, Reddit, etc. Just be sure that it's very high quality. People will appreciate the value.
- Earn traffic or buy it.How to earn it:
- build your reputation;
- network with other people;
- keep writing awesome content for a very long time;
- publish that content on your site and on sites owned by other entities or build those other sites yourself (all of which point back to your primary site differently).
How to buy it:
- pay for advertising;
- sponsor things related to your niche where your readers might be;
- pay for PR or promotional professional services;
- join social groups;
- invest in things that draw attention or create real news (like environmental, charity or political activism).
- Interact with people of similar interests on Facebook, Quora, Twitter etc., and create a targeted and strong network.
- SEO is significant but SMO (Social Media Optimization) is very important nowadays coz that gets your blog visibility.
- Use MyBlogU.com (free) to get their help in creating original highly sharable content.
- Keep submitting articles to ViralContentBuzz.
- Watch your analytics and social media shares very closely (every 5 hours: it's very important not to miss the momentum here).
- Enable StumbleUpon when adding your project, choose the best category, and put a minimum of 50-100 credits per VCB submission to allow more shares.
- Once you notice one of your articles driving 1000s hits within a day, invest $10-$20 into SU promoted stories to "help" it.
- Advertise. Make sure that people know what your blog is and where to find it. You can do this through social media profiles. Engage your readers and followers by including interesting posts and information alongside your links, though. Remember that spam will typically have a negative effect on blog traffic.
- Start small and pick a small niche target market. Become an expert. It may also limit the number of competitors, which will play in your favor.
- Participate in online forums/communities relevant to your blog. Beware, this takes time.
- Use tools like IFTTT (If This Then That) to automate your messaging. For example, whenever you post a blog on WordPress, IFTTT can spread the word through all your other social channels automatically. Read the blog platform's user manual - WordPress has some great advice on spreading the word.
- Use your blog content to naturally appear in search results. Avoid paying anyone for this service (if possible). This can be achieved by simply being smart about your existing content. This is free.
- Paid advertising costs money but does work (at a premium). Pay for relevant visitors to your page and not likes or spam. Google Adwords and Facebook frequently hand out free credit to experiment with their tools.
- Use analytics to work out where your traffic is coming from. Know your conversion rates. You are trying to make the most of those visitors who actually visit and stay on your site for more than 2 seconds.
- Good old fashioned e-mail is still massively powerful in pulling in traffic.
- Be sure to include your blog URL in all your messaging (email, social media, business cards) – brand everything.
- Network to other bloggers and people in your ecosystem. Share content and favors for mutually beneficial results.
- Diversify your content. Capture your audience through alternative mediums like books, videos, podcasts...
- Input time and perseverance. It will take time for any of these hacks to grow. Not all will work, at least not in isolation. Try different combinations.
- Take a decision yourself whether you are ready to bend the rules to build early traffic or not. But we couldn’t help mentioning the leveraged paid advertising, mass marketing (spam), and/or guerilla marketing as many bloggers use them.
- Promote your blog offline. Attend conferences, meet people face-to-face. Often people start reading a blog because they discovered its owner or team member in the flesh.
- Writing and sharing personal and real experiences is always popular.
- Participate in the communities where your audience already gathers.
- Make your blog's content SEO-friendly.
- Install analytics and pay attention to the results.
- Add graphics, photos, and illustrations (with link-back licensing).
- Conduct keyword research while writing your posts.
- Frequently reference your own posts and those of others.
- Participate in social sharing communities like Reddit + StumbleUpon.
- Incorporate great design into your site.
- Interact with other blogs' comments.
- Participate in Q+A sites.
- Enable Subscriptions via Feed + E-mail and track them.
- Survey your readers.
- Add value to a popular conversation.
- Aggregate the best of your niche.
- Uncover the links of your fellow bloggers and nab them.
- Focus on the headline.
- Always add pictures and videos.
- Read and comment on other blogs and social networks.
- Always answer questions and respond to comments.
- Add "tags" and "categories" to your posts.
- Start competitions and ask questions.
- Add some social network buttons to your blog.
- Build communities and pages on Google+. It’s a tested and working method.
- Connect with events that are related to your content niche, present yourself as a thought leader, and try to get invited or just attend such events.
- Give a try to WordPress + LiveBlog as it will refer users to your site each time you tweet about any content or the event and you will be riding that hash-tag wave. The beauty of Live Blogging is that you will not be thinking about how to get it into a tweet but more about the content. You have to warn your followers that you will do that upfront so you don't catch them off gourde or abuse their trust in you. Keep in mind that you have to do a lot of preparation for Live Blogging – some have a Word document with all the speakers, twitter handlers, full names, and the time and topic of each part of the event agenda, for instance.
- Get someone who has an established blog audience/social media presence to write a post on your blog. You can almost guarantee they'll end up promoting your blog to their audience.
- There are freelancers on SEOClerks who offer to increase the traffic of blogs for a small cost, so if you want to spend some money to get traffic quickly then go for it.
- Either be interesting or just don't bother.
- If get marked as spam – apologies, come back, and do it again.
- Get into monitoring everything. Set up keywords that are related to what you talk about on your blog and start monitoring them on Facebook, Twitter, and others. This helps in 2 ways: you learn what your target audience is more likely to read and you engage many people who usually go on your blog and browse your posts. In short, just interact with people who are talking about a relevant topic. You may use the Trackpad app on Anctu to track your keywords.
- Start following relevant people. One of the first things to do when you are trying to build up your community is to get relevant people to listen to you. Social media has become so noisy these days that it’s really hard to get some attention, but it can be done. Try to be exceptional, follow people, ask for following back, send them a DM and be strict on what you need from them and what you are giving in favor. What we want to say is, build up connections and after they grow stronger, start leveraging from them by trying to get them tweet and post about your blog posts.
- Create your hashtag or piggyback on popular ones. Create your blogs hashtag and try getting people into using this hashtag, focus on building community. Do this by adding #YOURHASHTAG into share messages on your blog and repeat 1 and 2 above. Except creating your hashtag, try finding out relevant hashtag that is easier to disrupt, don't find the most popular hashtag and then try to take over them, find less popular but active hashtags and share on them.
83. Don't force yourself to write because you need to write. This is not how it goes, since you will only be forcing yourself to post and in 90% of cases this will result with a bad blog post. Instead of that, get organized and write only when you have inspiration to do so, you don't need to publish it right away, keep it for a good time. It is really important to retain your blog visitors and getting organized will help you so, this reflects on your traffic a lot. - Share others blog posts. If a person is following you somewhere and sees you posted a link to an interesting topic, he/she will keep reading links you are posting, if it was a good read, of course. Start sharing relevant and good blog posts other people write, this way you will create awareness to your audience and increase your traffic points.
- Make sure you know what your blog is about and why. Then make sure your readers understand it. Usually, blogs that concentrate on one subject or one niche attract more loyal readers.
- If it's focused, updated regularly and your content is well-written, authoritative and error-free, your readers will be more willing to share it, therefore brining more new readers to it.
- Be honest when SEO optimize your blog. Irrelevant keywords may bring you extra traffic, but in the long term will work against you as people will feel cheated.
- Carry out giveaways, sweepstake, present coupons (printable or digital), include elements of game into your posts.
- Add banners of your websites on other sides.
- Mail or buy mailing lists.
- Make people hear about your website thru a magazine or Television.
- Submit your website to all major search engines.
- Blog hops are wonderful ways to meet other bloggers and to get people visit and possibly subscribe to your blog. Put 'blog hop' in you search engine and find a blog hop for that day. The blog hops will ask for your blog information like the title and the web address. Once you give them that information, you will see your blog in the blog hop. People put their blogs up there and look at other blogs. It's a wonderful way to find other blogs that are similar to yours and to get others with the same interests at your blog.
- You need to give potential readers as many opportunities to click through to your blog as possible.
- Ensure you send frequent tweets with tiny URLs, a footer on your email, links from all your social media profiles, a section in your e-newsletter and even a link reference on your business card.
- Look at your blog's SEO tools. If you use WordPress, for instance, there are many ways of optimizing the blog as a whole and each individual post. Write an 'excerpt' for each post and take a look at your category/tag set-up. Using a set of keywords, aided by Google Insight, will ensure that you are 'found' by people interested in what you are saying.
- Keep your posts catchy and short. Unless you write like Stefan Zweig or make speeches like Barack Obama, people tend to "flip the page" with long reads. Don't write academically.
- Research in relevant hashtags like #webdesign #wordpress. Use other social media and ask friends to share or more. Find your target group, which, in this case, are people who would be close to web development sphere.
- Try using interviews. The folks you interview will naturally link back to you, and if you interview trusted professionals in your industry, those interviews can help boost your credibility.
- Use sprd.in media tool to increase page-views. It converts all external links on the blogs into opportunities for engagement thereby increasing page-views by 10%.
- Invite random people; don't wait idly for people to notice your blog.
- Put funny or cool pictures with every post; throw in a couple of jokes.
- Invite people you actually know.
Conclusion
We hope your brain is not steaming yet. Don’t worry; the instructions have come to an end. Wrapping it up, we would like to wish you good luck, be patient, write awesome high-quality posts consistently for a while (not sure about the time-lapse) and never give up. Organic traffic will come, as long as you're doing a little research around search volume for your post topics. These things helped lots of bloggers to carry on despite all the hardships. Don’t ignore guest blogging and social media. The future of your blog is in your hands.
And don’t forget to leave your feedback on this compilation. Were the above tips and tricks useful for you? Are you going to use any of them? Maybe you have your own win-win formula of bringing traffic to a blog? Please feel free to share it, the community will appreciate that.