The Beginner's Guide to Increasing Blog Traffic

When you are starting a blog, the next question is how to get traffic. And the answer to this question can’t be short. To a great extent, the question on how to get traffic to your blog prompts multiple approaches, techniques, and strategies allowing to boost your traffic. This article serves as a crib sheet enlisting practically all the methods for traffic gain. We say “practically” as we can omit some ideas considering fresh methods are elaborated on almost every minute.

Keyword research

• Create as big of a seo keywords list as possible. Include it in all the types of search queries: those of high frequency, middle frequency, and the low frequency, then form a well-rounded structure of the site and start gradually processing the gathered keywords.
• Kparser can help you to find thousands of content ideas in your niche and expand the existing keyword list.
• Sort out the key phrases reasonably. Think over what words your audience will insert into the search bar when looking for the information that you offer on your site.

Internal and external content marketing

• Schedule your content. It is highly advisable to post not less than twice a week. Even when you do not notice any results of your efforts during one or two months, do not just let the foot off the gas. This is the fact you need to admit: you must not expect an immediate effect as it will take some time to get traffic.
• Choose a topic you understand and make certain this is also one of the themes which your user finds useful.
• Try to publish your materials around the same time. Thus, you help your audience elaborate a habit of regular blog reading and keeping in touch with the updates.
• Keep in mind that the uniqueness of your material is of great value. Every post should contain some new information, a new approach, or a new point of view. This factor influences search ranking to a great extent.
• Do your best to post content with viral potential. Decent examples of viral material are articles including bullet points, those which title contains a figure, animated graphics, articles dwelling on some unique experience.
• Organize your material properly. Every text should include a strong headline, a short but intriguing preamble, qualitative images with witty inscriptions, and some “fresh” or important facts to make your post more informative and visually pleasing.
• Try to bring out emotions. There is a set of tricks you can use to do it expertly.
• Form a list reflecting the rating of the most acknowledged personalities in your niche to describe what made them famous, add their photos and links to the profiles in social networks. With great probability, most of them will gladly share your material with their subscribers. Consequently, you’ll enjoy an incredible increase of your audience. Use the best social media analytics tools to monitor how your audience interacts with your posts.
• Interview one of the most acknowledged experts in your sphere and publish it on your blog.
• Creating a list of the posts related to your sphere which are shared most often is another method to boost blog traffic. Such articles are destined to get the largest amount of likes and shares.
• Save some material to your bookmarks that will be your flotation device when writer’s block will strike you out of the blue (by the way, it is never expected).
• Examine the content of your rivals. To understand what steps to take to get more traffic to your blog, observe your competitor’s posts regularly.
• From time to time, revive your old articles in different ways (use various approaches to do it efficiently).
• Become a content mentor. Announce useful publications from resources with high credibility in your blog.
• Subscribe to Google Alerts for the requests related to your market. Thus, you will receive all the new materials containing keywords from your domain and will always stay well-versed in novelties and general tendencies.
• Launch a forum on your website. It will help you to improve the bounce rate and create a community interested in your sphere. Thus, your site will start being ranked by the keywords of low frequency.
• Make guest posts. Just aim at the links as your primary goal – write to enlarge your audience (or you can chance upon some filter).
• Become an author of a column in one of the acknowledged websites in your niche. You will be impressed by how easy you can become a column writer for Forbes and through this, increase blog traffic.
• Become an active participant of discussions on forums and blogs related to your sphere using your real photo and name.
• Collect feedback. If you are selling some goods, give every customer a pleasant discount for their commitment to include honest feedback on your website.

You always have to be updated with all changes happened to your website. It directly affects traffic and leads generation. So use specialized SEO monitoring tools and get notifies about any correction is made. To check your website traffic you can try different tools:

• Alexa rank
• Ahrefs rank checker
• Majestic
• Similarweb

Social networking

• Create official pages in every popular social network. This means you must be represented at least on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Quora.
• Start working on Pinterest and Instagram. If you are selling something that can be viewed, the best possible presentation on these platforms is a must.
• Do not omit Stumbleupon and LinkedIn or any other resource offering you an additional way to get blog traffic. Though these are the networks of a narrower focus, they can help you to get acquainted with a part of your audience which you did not find a path to in other networks.
• Provide extended announces of your materials in social networks. It means, every such announcement should include at least the obligatory elements: introductive part, a photo, and your link.
• Utilize the paid approaches of promotion. PPC advertising, thematic advertising in social networks and within the resources which are popular among your audience, including banners on top sites.
• Insert some cute widgets into your messages. Some quotes related to your material or unexpected statistics can make the necessary impression on your reader that induces him to activate your link.

Other methods

• Indulge in co-marketing. Make deals with your competitors as for the mutually beneficial co-operation: include one another in the email-messaging, promote posts of one another on social networks, write guest posts, and so on, there are many options available.
• Start mailout. It is one of the most efficient instruments of traffic increase that also helps you to keep hold of your clients. It takes time to build a good email list, but your efforts will be rewarded.
• Promote your new posts when messaging. Your letter should not contain anything but the links to your most popular material for the previous week or just your resource, but a couple of proper links can do good.
• Ask other bloggers for help. You can gain more visitors using referral links. Just build relationships with bloggers like you, share your website and get referral traffic.
• Make use of news-jacking. Get acquainted with the practical guideline to master the approach and enable incredible traffic growth.
• Utilize the paid approaches of promotion. PPC advertising, thematic advertising in social networks and within the resources which are popular among your audience, including banners on top sites (according to the traffic statistics).
• Work on negative feedback. Do not delete them but always do your best and admit your fault if you are not right (and provide compensations if needed).
• Use schema markup. This is a general piece of advice from top search systems as it helps to get higher up in the search engine positioning. You can check how your website’s snippet will look like with the help of our SERP checker.
• Use rich snippets. This element attracts the attention of the user and increases the number of link activations on the search results page.
• You should work according to the rule: one day – one change on the website. To get more traffic to your blog daily, become a person who takes actions to get closer to the aimed top every single day instead of constructing some misty napoleon plans.
• Make the user’s happiness your goal. Optimize your site and presentation to satisfy the users, by doing so you send a valuable signal to the search engines: having come to your site, the user will find the information he is looking for and it will solve his problems.
• Employ offline advertising. Add links to your site on branded products (T-shirts, pens, bags, mugs), company vehicle, flyers, include in radio advertisement etc.
• Track the results of every action and implementation of novelties. Concerning web-analytics, track all the necessary metrics, monitor social networks and references to your brand on the Internet. You are the only person who can understand which techniques work with your website.
• Focus on the strategies which show good results. Do not just try to repeat every single action of your rivals, but first of all, try the approaches described in this article to choose those which are applicable to your business.
• Don’t be bent on one method only. Make your searches for platform growth a regular activity (the same with tools, techniques, and strategies).