5 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic
Blogs are popular ways to create an online presence for personal and business reasons. You can build a blog for free and begin posting content right away. But, what good is that content if no one is reading it? Here are five ideas to bring in the traffic your blog needs to survive.
1. Post Fresh Content on a Regular Basis
No one wants to visit a blog day after day and see the same posts. Update your blog content at least once a week. This will be easier if you write several posts ahead of time and pre-schedule them to go live on the specific days and let the professionals help you develop compelling content and use automated posting services to build consistency.
2. Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share
When strategizing about who you’re writing for and what motivates them to engage with your company, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord (like this one), beautiful videos that tell a story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to share.
3. Make sure your content SEO friendly
Whatever you write, use relevant keywords. Keyword density between three and ten percent is good for getting higher page rankings in search engines. Base your keywords on a research you do to find the most popular words used in search engines for your niche.
Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. According to Moz, ” SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing.” In 2014, Google will see over 6 billion daily searches from around the world and that number is only growing, so make sure your content is SEO friendly.
4. Use Social Networking to Spread the Word
Twitter has 271 million active users every month. Facebook has over 1 billion active users. Google+ has over 300 million. LinkedIn is over 300 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world. Those that participate on these social media platforms fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog.
According to Moz, if you consistently employ a strategy of participation, share great and make a positive, memorable impression on those who see your interactions on these sites, your followers and fans will grow! And your ability to drive traffic back to your blog by sharing content will be tremendous. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch when SEO is a less consistent driver.
5. Frequently Reference Your Blog
This is where you spread the word about your blog. Talk to friends, family and even strangers. Give out business cards that have your blog address on them. Make sure your blog link is on your email signature, your website and all your social media profiles.
The Internet was not made for static, text-only content! Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines. When you reference your own material in-context and in a way that’s not manipulative (watch out for over-optimizing by linking to a category, post or page every time a phrase is used – this is almost certainly discounted by search engines and looks terrible to those who want to read your posts), you potentially draw visitors to your other content and give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.
Is your business currently and consistently blogging? Whether you’ve been blogging for a while and just need some advice or are completely new to the blogging world, let our expert team help you create blogs that drive others to want to do business with your company. Visit our Capabilities page to learn more.