Blogging can be fun and frustrating at the same time. While it may sound really fascinating to get your ideas, thoughts and experiences assembled into a beautiful blog but if the analytics show that you have no traffic, there is no point in spending your time and energies, even if you are passionate about the subject.
Ironically, my blog isn’t getting any traffic, remains the number one complaint after starting a new blog. Passionate writers put their hearts and souls into the writing interesting blogs but when the traffic does not materialize, they get burned out, discouraged, and eventually quit.
The funny thing is; driving traffic to a blog is isn’t difficult as it sounds. You can boost your blog traffic and bring in new hits without requiring too much of money and efforts. All you need to do is to put your efforts in right direction, otherwise you end up spending too much of time, efforts and money without seeing actual results.
In this article we are going to highlight some tips aimed at boosting your blog traffic. These tips are easy to implement strategies that you can use to increase your reader base and supercharge your blog traffic.
1. Make your blog discoverable
The first you need to do is to make sure that your blog is easily discoverable by search engines. Apply all the on-page optimization best practices so that it’s easy for people to find your blog. If you want your blog to reach a larger wider audience, you optimize your blog posts against keywords as they make it easy for search engines to navigate the vast seas of content and provide the relevant content to the readers. This not only gives your blog more exposure but connects you with the relevant audience you want to target.
A basic knowledge of SEO can boost the rankings and visibility of your blog. Here are some tips for an effective on-page optimization.
- Do an extensive keyword research, you can use tools like Google Adwords, and semrush etc.
- Include the keywords naturally in the blog post
- Use keywords in heading and sub-headings
- Optimize the Images. Optimized images appear in the images tab of search results
- Reference others with links
- Keep each post to a minimum of 600 words
2. Use the Power of Social Media
In terms of getting traffic to your website, social media is the biggest key. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that your blog is present and active on all potential social media platforms. Don’t hesitate to share your blog posts on your social media accounts more than once. However, in order to utilize the full potential of social media, you need to make sure that you share your content the right way.
Here are some tips for sharing your blog posts on social media so that you drive the most engagement, shares, and traffic.
- All social media work platforms work differently so optimize your blog for platform. Do your research and learn how to optimize your posts for each platform.
- Add a high quality photo for the featured image and write a quality mouthwatering description that drives readers’ interest.
- Create a sharing schedule. A schedule helps you keep a track record of everything and streamlines the posting process so that you don’t miss anything or end up over-sharing or under-sharing your content. Thankfully, there are a lot of social tools like buffer that let you automatically schedule your content to all your social media accounts.
- Timing of your posting also matters a lot. Buffer can even tell you when the best time for you to post based on analyzing your stats.
- Add sharing buttons to your blog. A recent study found that using social sharing buttons on posts leads to 7 times more mentions. People like to share interesting and informational content so let them share it direct from the website.
3. Add Click To Tweet Quote Boxes on Your Blog
You already may have the idea that people love tweeting things that make them look smart. This is a great opportunity to drive traffic and increase your blog reach and there is a great tool for it.
Click to Tweet is a graceful service that comes in the form of beautiful and sophisticated created call to action quote boxes that nudge your readers to tweet your content. The best thing is that the application and plugin are absolutely free. The plugin simply works by allowing you to add a small link next a particular phrase or sentence of a blog post that you think reader base would love to share on Twitter. Click to Tweet strips down the hassle and makes it fun for people to share any piece of your content they loved. This is how tweetable quotes help your articles spread on Twitter like wild fire and drive more and more traffic to your blog.
Even the Gurus of the blogging industry are capitalizing the opportunity. Neil Patel wrote a very short article with nothing but 50 short tweetable quotes in it, and it resulted in 17,452 visits from Twitter alone. All you need to do is to install the plugin and embed the quote box. It also redirects visitors who click on the links to the twitter page. This encourages your readers to re-share the selected part of your content across their Twitter feeds. So give your ideas the wings to reach hundreds and thousands of people and multiply the reach of your content far beyond what was possible in the past.
4. Create a Blog Series
The premier reason why people love blogs is because it tells them stories. This why blog series are so popular. It is a great way to acquire a consistent amount of traffic to your website by keeping your reader base engaged and converted all the time.
However, for this strategy to work, you need to start with a plan. Outline how many posts you can comfortably create from the original topic. Map out the content for each post and also make sure that you have enough content to fill the planned posts. I suggest you to also consider experts/guest posters. If you plan to do a series but don’t have the enough expertise to cover each and every aspect, consider inviting an expert to guest post for you on the topics you’re weeky on. This will not only enhance your credibility to your readers but will also multiply blog and will bring new hits.
5. Optimize Blog Posts for Mobile Phones
Over half of the earth’s entire population owns a Smartphone. The internet consumption on mobile phone has officially surpassed desktops and now more people use mobile phones as access route to the internet. So even if you are running a blog, it is very likely that a large amount of your reader base is consuming your content on mobile phone. So if your blog is not optimized for mobile, chances are that you might experience a high bounce rates and loose a large amount of traffic. So, its critically important for you take all the necessary steps and make your blog mobile friendly.
They say that Rome wasn’t built in day; similarly getting a consistent amount of traffic for your blog is not an overnight job. The process may sound a bit difficult and time consuming but patience is the key. Once you create a plan and put your efforts in the right direction, within a couple of months your blog will experience a significant boost in traffic.
Asad is a digital marketing strategist having more than 8 years of experience. Currently he is heading the marketing department of GO-Gulf – a Dubai web design company. His expertise includes online traffic generation, targeting relevant audience and conversion optimization. You can reach him on LinkedIn.