If you are a blogger, you know that in order to make your blog successful, you need to have a consistent and growing readership and traffic to your website. But this is not as easy as it sounds, especially according to some retired bloggers who have quit blogging due to the lack of enough people visiting their blogs and reading their blog posts and articles.
Thankfully, there are many ways to promote your blog and thus increase its traffic.
Here are 14 ways to do that.
Publish, publish, publish!
This is rule number one for any successful blog. If you want to get more traffic – you will need to keep writing and adding more posts and articles to expand and improve the content provided. Businesses which publish 16 or more blog posts per month are getting 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads as compared to other businesses which publish five or fewer blog posts per month.
You should try adding one or two more blog posts to your weekly publications, and pretty soon you should start noticing a significant growth in the traffic.
Add longer content
Google, as well as the other internet search engines, prefer longer and more detailed and useful articles as compared to shorter ones. This means that by writing longer and more comprehensive posts, your rankings will increase and you will get more visitors to your blog.
An optimal word count for a blog post is 2,000 words, but try not to fill it with fluff and useless information because this can have the opposite effect and turn off many of your readers and visitors. People today are willing to spend time reading something which is of use to them, rather than spend their precious time reading the same sentence repeated and rewritten over and over again.
Plus, some research has found that articles which are 3,000 to 10,000 long are twice as likely to be shared as compared to shorter ones and that they get three times more links to their content as compared to articles which are 1,000 words long.
So, go ahead and try to write or expand your articles into longer, more comprehensive, in-depth ones and you will see the traffic surging pretty soon.
If you haven’t already – start up an e-mail list
Use an e-mail management tool or plugin to build up your mail list and you will see the immediate effect on your traffic each time you e-mail your readers about an interesting new blog post. The best part about e-mail lists is that they will continue growing over time, and will rarely decrease unless you overdo it with spamming your readers.
Write for more successful blogs
Guest blogging is a great way to attract more traffic. You should find blogs which are bigger and with much more subscribers than yours and submit your guest blog to them. In your bio, include a link to your blog, and you will see the number of visits to your blog growing pretty soon.
Optimize your blog for internet search engines
The truth is that no matter how many loyal readers you have, the number one traffic driving force to your blog is search engine traffic, namely Google as the leading one. Make sure you inform yourself about SEO and optimize your articles and blog to make them rank better for relevant keywords in Google and in other search engines.
Comment on other blogs
Interact with others by adding suitable comments to highly popular blogs on a regular basis. This will make you get noticed both by the blogger and by the readers and can lead to an influx of traffic to your own blog. You may even get an invitation to guest blog or to add a link to your own blog.
Use online surveys to ask your readers how to improve the content of your blog
Set up an online survey for the guests on your blog, and ask them what they would like improved, added or changed on your website. Getting feedback from your visitors and actually using it to improve your blog is a very efficient way to increase traffic, and also to gain more loyal readers who will appreciate your efforts and your interest in their opinion.
Go for blogger outreaching
Develop a plan to increase your blog traffic by compiling a list of relevant other bloggers and e-mailing them your article and asking them to share a link to it. This is a much more efficient way to attract visitors to your blog instead of just posting new articles and waiting for the visitors to find them.
Link other bloggers in your articles
By adding links to other bloggers in your blog posts and let them know that you linked them. You will see a massive shift in your traffic as a result of the shares of your post by these bloggers to their readers.
Create articles which feature the opinions of expert bloggers in your field
Interview other bloggers from your niche about a relevant topic, and then write a roundup article with all of the expert opinions compiled in one. Once you publish it, send a link to the bloggers featured in it, so that they can share it and spread the word among their readers. You will be amazed at the traffic increase from one such expert roundup article.
Post resource articles
Resource articles with links to authoritative sources can drive 10,000% more views than an average blog post, so make sure you publish resource articles on a regular basis to boost the traffic to your website.
Write features about influencers or popular forum owners
Write feature articles about leading social media influencers by interviewing them and asking them to share your post. Also, you can interview the popular forum owners in the niche and ask them to share your feature post. This will inevitably bring a lot of additional traffic to your blog.
Run a contest on your blog
Set up and host a blogging contest, by asking the participants to share your article via their blogs or by sharing it on social media. You can further increase the reach of your blog if you manage to find sponsors and ask them to blog about the contest as well.
Use social media
Post your new and recycle old posts on your social media pages and profiles. Make sure you have a strategy for your social media presence and post regularly. The recommended number of social media posts should be about two times a day on Facebook, three times a day on Twitter and Google+, and five or more times on Pinterest.
In conclusion
As you can see, there are some simple ways to increase the traffic to your blog, so don’t just give up if you are not seeing any results now. Just roll up those sleeves and start working on improving your blog content, increasing your reach, and improving your search engine rankings today. Pretty soon you will see the traffic snowballing.
Good luck and keep blogging!
