With so many blogs being created every day, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd and get the traffic that you feel you blog deserves. Whatever niche you are in, there will undoubtedly be hundreds or thousands of blogs competing for your traffic.
Writing fantastic content is no longer good enough to bring traffic through the door, you need to promote that content harder than ever to get traffic through sources like search engines and social media and turn those visitors into returning traffic.
Below are 5 ways to make your traffic surge and help you build your blog’s traffic beyond your mum, brother and great auntie’s cat. These will help grow your traffic from search, social media platforms and other online resources so that your blog becomes one of the authorities in your niche:
Do Keyword Research
In order to maximise your blog’s potential in search engines, you need to do keyword research to establish which phrases bring the best traffic in your niche. This can involve a variety of sources and can be as in depth as you like depending on how good your SEO knowledge is. However, for beginners the simplest approach is to analyse your competitor’s pages and use your own industry knowledge to highlight some key phrases, and then use Google’s Keyword Tool to further narrow the search and identify which phrases bring the most traffic.
Create Landing Pages
Using the keywords discovered in the keyword research process you should create landing pages for each of the key areas or ‘keyword clusters’. For example, if you write a travel blog about America, you can use the homepage to target the most difficult phrases like ‘American Travel Blog’ or ‘Travel in America’ and then create landing pages for each state to target keywords for those areas. It’s very difficult to rank one page for highly differing phrases as the title tag is so important in this process and you only have 66 characters to work with.
With optimised landing pages in place based on good keyword research you will be in a great place to earn more traffic from search engines for both headline and longtail keyphrases.
Write Guest Posts
Guest posts are a great way of gaining exposure for your blog as well as high quality links which will power your results from search. The key is to identify the best blogs in your niche and offer them great content. If you have high quality, useful posts written on well trafficked blogs then you will get a lot of click through to your own blog and people will remember you. It’s crucial that you provide useful content though, as no-one will click the link to your site if what you’ve written is of no help.
Don’t believe me? Hello, this is a guest post….!
Tweet, Like, Stumble
A great way to gain exposure is by building a strong following on social media platforms. Twitter is a fantastic tool for promoting your own material; just make sure you don’t overdo it! 9 tweets about other people to 1 tweet about you is usually a good mix. Use the platforms to interact as well; liking other people’s pages on Facebook, stumbling their content and retweeting them will draw attention to you and your blog and those people will more than likely return the favour when you promote your own content.
Interact and Promote
Commenting on other people’s blogs is another great way of building relationships and growing awareness of your blog. We’re not talking comment spam here, it’s all about constructive comments and interacting with people. Again, if you do this on blogs in your niche with a lot of traffic then you’ll get noticed pretty quickly.
Forums are another fantastic place to promote your content. Find forums specific to your niche and spend some time listening to the conversations taking place first. Then, when you’ve established a presence there start creating material that answers the questions people are asking. As well as getting a lot of clicks through your profile page you’ll establish yourself as an authority in the industry and start to get more people coming directly too.
These are just a few ideas to boost your blog’s traffic which, if all done individually, will certainly help you grow a strong readership. However, if you can push forward on all these fronts then you will find yourself with increasingly successful traffic figures. The key then is converting those readers into subscribers and customers, but that’s another post altogether…
Image Credit: Alan Trotter
13 comments
The best way to increase traffic on your blog is to keep experimenting with different things until you find what works for you!
I would also add that relevance is essential with keywords. As my boss once put it to me, if people find your site when searching for “gizmos” and find your site, but bounce off within seconds when they realize you only specialize in “gadgets,” the Google is going to realize your content is not relevant to that keyword.
Hi,
Nice info no doubt in that every blogger wants to see huge traffic on their blog post/site but often it’s not happens and we should teach from our mistakes and we should convert that mistakes into our success then you can see traffic will definitely increase on your blog post/site.
Beside that these ideas will help more for us specially “”Tweet, Like, Stumble”” in my opinion.
Very nice! Use social media as one of your tools to amp up your sites traffic! It takes work to be your very own SEO. This is why you need people to help you. You can always outsource people.
Guest posting is a great strategy. It gets your content in front of a new set of eyes that will click over to your blog if they see what they like. It’s about building out your online real estate and improving visibility.
Social Media can indeed be a great help. I appreciate this post very much. I also think that writing fresh and unique content on a regular basis can contribute a lot. Haven’t tried guest writing, though.
Interact & promote are very effective ways to increase your traffic
Hiya, Tom…tips are quite informative. I have not been quite knowledgeable about blogs and doing too much of commenting. But my friend insisted me to do this which really worked. I read you posts which is also making me understand to update my blog with good content and post the blog links to some other blog sites with good comments.
Hey Tom, how much importance do you put on ranking for your keywords when trying to drive traffic?
Thanks for the comments guys, glad the post was useful.
@SEO Blog Advice – ranking for keywords is certainly an improtant part of your strategy. If you can do it successfully then it can provide a great foundation of traffic which will come every day to your blog without having to spend time on social networks promoting where, if you are inactive for a day, your traffic will drop. That said, I think it’s important to have a variety of traffic sources for your blog so you are never too reliant on any one source.
i think keyword research is very useful to get quick and quality traffic.nice tutorial 🙂
Of all the suggestions you have listed, guest posting has got to be one of the best ways to increase traffic to your own blog and I love Twitter so that’s definitely up there too!
Content is the key to success of any blog. It is good to create quality content to win in the blogosphere.
Nice post.