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
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