We create blogs for people to visit and read our content. But most times, we find this is not the case and it seems like our blogs are not visible to our target audience. Here, we share seven ways to help increase your blog’s traffic:
- Be strategic with your content marketing efforts
Increasing your blog traffic is not just about creating quality content, it’s largely about being strategic about your content. This means you should ensure your content meets a specific need. It should be centred on your audience, what they love and what they want to read.
For ideas on this, you can check out Quora or any popular question-and-answer site to know the questions people want answered that relate to your blog’s focus. You can also try blog topic generators, keyword search tools or content marketing tools like Buzzsumo to learn more about what your target audience reads and what gets their attention. In all, be sure to incorporate appealing infographics and visual aids for your posts, to create content that people will want to read and share.
Also, to help your content marketing efforts, you should ensure you post evergreen content on your blog, one that will remain relevant even after a long while. You should also ensure your headlines are catchy and useful enough to your target audience to get clicked.
- Tailor your content to an audience likely to share
Try to tailor your content to and target communities that are active with content sharing. For example, great and useful infographics, interesting videos and remarkable collection of facts and articles that contain interesting information should be targeted at audiences who are potential content distributors (people who are sure to have accounts on multiple social networks) and heavy content sharers (people who are extremely active users and run blogs, sites or are growing their social network to influencer level).
- Find out where a large portion of your audience is
Google search can help you with this. You basically need to identify blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where active discussions and content about subjects within your blog’s focus are shared. A web-based tool like Google’s Display Planner can help you expand and be more definitive with your search. Once you’ve identified the communities, you can start participating in them.
But be careful not to rush into this participation, first attempt to understand the nature of the community and what is and isn’t appropriate in the community, to avoid mistakes when commenting and contributing.
- Install an analytics software
One of the best and free analytics software to install is Google Analytics. This tool will help you see where visits originate, the sources that drive quality traffic and what others are saying about you and your content when they link over. The great insights got from this tool will help to define your marketing path and help you put more effort into effective marketing paths. It will also help you know where you are succeeding and where you have an opportunity.
- Join social sharing communities
Social sharing sites present a great way to share your content. Aside the fact that they provide excellent inspiration for your blog posts, they also provide a platform that engages with other social sharing platforms and increase the likelihood of getting more fans and developing more links and traffic. You should be sure to be active on these platforms and engage with others, don’t just drop-by to simply leave links and upload posts and go.
- Guest-blog (and allow others to guest-blog on your blog too)
No man is an island. You should entertain the idea of guest-blogging on other blogs and allowing others to guest-blog on yours. Friends and professional connections can help with this, especially if you are just starting out with your blog and don’t have much bloggers interested in guest-blogging on your blog or allowing you guest-blog on theirs.
Guest-blogging is a great way to spread your reach and increase your traffic. You should ensure you do not get discouraged when you get multiple ‘no’ responses. You should also send samples of your work along with your request to guest-blog. In addition, rather than asking for a fresh contribution from someone with a ‘significant industry profile’, ask them for specific pieces they have written before that apply to your area.
- Optimise your blog for speed and mobile
If your blog takes forever to load, it can discourage readers from visiting your blog. Google’s Page Speed Insight tool can help you analyse the speed of your blog site and give you tips on how to improve it.
Most people who visit your blog are likely to do so with their mobile devices; you should therefore seek for ways to optimise your blog site for mobile. Consider using plugins like WordPress plugins to execute this.
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