There are two basic reasons that readers regularly follow blogs: useful information or highly engaging entertainment.
Information is certainly more commonly sought after in entertainment blogs, for example, information regarding car insurance discounts – but if your blog substantially lacks either one, you’ll need a different approach before you can build up your blog traffic.
The other crucial element for building and keeping an online audience: you must be an expert in the topic or focus of the blog. If a blog is all over the place, and/or has several to many unrelated topics, the blog audience will be very fragmented, and eventually opt for a more consistent writer.
Nevertheless, if a blog lacks authority and expertise in selected subject matter, there won’t be much of an audience at all. Perhaps more importantly, shallow content is now crawled and recognized by Google – shallow and lazy won’t cut it in search results.
So, if your blog is about car insurance discounts or just auto insurance companies, make sure your blog content is worthwhile, informational, and doesn’t just spout off the obvious.
Anyone can relay obvious information – be sure that whatever blog topic is posted, is not simple general knowledge.
If you can honestly say that your blog has a good, focused direction, and offers good information or entertainment, then proceed with reading the following suggestions.
1. Utilize SEO
This will require learning some SEO basics, but if you use SEO consistently in your blog, you will see results – BUT, SEO is not an overnight solution.
It takes time to move up in search results for a particular query (known as SERP rankings). Here are just a few of the many SEO :
- Targeted keyword content – Use keywords throughout content, the title of your blog post, and also very importantly, your URL.
- Links with anchored texts – Links that say to go “here,” or simply give the URL, do nothing to help your blog find its way into visible search results.
- Meta data – This is done on the html side or CMS set-up, and includes title tags, meta-tags (keywords) and meta descriptions.
- Related Posts – Link to at least one other relevant post within your own blog
Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
2. Social Media Promotion
Okay, this may seem like an obvious tip that anyone can think of. You’ve probably been posting links to your new blog posts on Facebook for a year…. just like everyone else. When all you do is post a link, it can get lost among the other 400 links posted on the status feed.
Use social media to promote your blog the same way you socialize on social media itself – interactively. Try to engage your social networks into your blog. Set up blog responses, opinions or some other interaction within or following your blog post.
For example, at the end of a new post on her auto insurance companies blog, Sally uses a voting widget, and asks her audience to vote for the best of 3 auto insurance companies. She then also posts the vote to her social media page, but links the social media page to her blog so her social network must vote on the actual blog.
3. Get Backlinks
This may be one of the most efficient ways to increase blog traffic, but there are two things to remember with this strategy:
- Be discretionary with whom you accept or request backlinks from – not just any site will help, and poor quality sites may even hurt your rankings (i.e. Links from Facebook, while not harmful at all, will not boost your rankings by themselves).
- Secondly, backlinks that count are one-way incoming links from sites that are relevant to your blog, and have an established audience and/or traffic flow.
Getting good backlinks can take some work and effort. It means sending out a lot of customized requests to a lot of high profile bloggers and website owners – but if you get even two or three incoming, one-way links from good sites, it can boost traffic flow significantly. There are many other ways to promote blogs.
Tip: Read a few of the most popular blogs and/or websites relevant to your blog topic. Choose a topic or that relates to that site and write something up. Then submit it to the proper person to request a guest author spot. Then you can link back to your website (but do not post the same article on your blog – very important. Do not duplicate the content). Guest posting can give many things including links and authority.
4. Consider the Competition
If you have a health/fitness/diet blog – then you’re part of the other 900 million health/fitness bloggers. The same applies to celebrity/fashion blogs, tech and gadget blogs, product or shopping reviews, and several other general category topics.
General topics like these may be easy to write about, but everyone is writing about them. Commonly repeated content will not build a clan of loyal blog followers.
If this is the case, consider going from the general interest, to a specific intrigue. Instead of having an “auto insurance companies” blog, focus on one or two specifics, like “car insurance discounts.” If you know your blog topic is extremely competitive, and there are a billion other blogs out there with the same topic, make yours unique by giving it a more specific focus.
There are plenty of other tactics and strategies for increasing traffic to your blog – these four tips are not a comprehensive list by any means. They simply give you a place to start. You must continue to read up on the ever-changing blogging world if you are going to get to the top.
Dana Y. is an online writer for some of the best auto insurance companies in the industry. When not working, she loves to find weight loss tips to share with her community.
Great post and excellent tips!
great heads-up on the “quality” of you backinks, not just quantity.
appreciate your work!
kx
The tips for building traffic is different by everyone. Good one to know the information you have shared.
Many think that SEO is very complicated. However, it’s actually very easy to work on it especially if you already know at least the basics of SEO. As a result, search engines will surely love your site and will help you direct visitors to your site.
Hi
To increase the traffic on your blog, we must use the some attractive links and photos which are valuable for users.
thanks,
Social Media is indeed a powerful tool to increase Blog Traffic.
Just remember that Spamming will not work for you.
Moderate your posts to promote your stuff.
Communicate with your client.
Engage and interact.
The main key to getting traffic, as mentioned in the article, is SEO no doubt. What you also need is patience for getting the results from your SEO. I remember losing my patience and it yielded no result at all. But as I waited I began to see some positive results!
Great article!!
SEO is really very vital, social media has been very useful for website promotion nowadays! Also, getting quality baclinks has been tough, yet we should remember to build our backlinks naturally. The competition must also be checked for us to know who are our rivals on rankings and to do effective strategy on how to outrank them.
Great to hear you enjoyed it! 🙂 Isn’t it great when you really start to see your hard work paying off – especially when avoiding the black-hat techniques?
Timing is everything with social media, and you have to put together shareable content before any social campaigns will really take off.
It is nice that every now and then, there are reminders like this. I mean for me, I sometimes forget some of the most basic yet very important part of SEO. Thanks for reminding me. I’m also happy to share that some of my keywords are now ranking and gaining traffic.
Thanks Juphet, Constant effort does provide returns and I am happy that you have already started seeing the results.
These strategies are common for building good traffic to your blog, I’d say SEO and building quality backlinks are amongst the most important. Very good post.
Dana,
Very good tips for driving traffic to your blog. Stay away from black hat SEO Strategies. Don’t expect results overnight. Hard work and writing excellent content that you are passionate about. Stick out from the crowd.
Yes, nobody can give results overnight. It takes its own time and effort. Many people get stuck in black hat SEO technique for quick results but it does long term harm.
SEO is indeed very important to everybody in order to build traffic. But some people are getting too busy with their on page SEO that caused them to forget to market their site to others. No matter how well a blogger optimized his/her site, so long that the world wouldn’t know the existence of his/her blog, everything will be pretty useless.
I agree Christina, promotion is as important as content creation or even more. If nobody is there to read it than it is of no use and off page SEO and other promotion methods does help in that.
These are good technical strategies for getting search engine traffic. However, I would start with writing good, compelling articles and then social media strategies as far as getting out in the community. That way, you’ll be getting traffic that sticks.
Social Media does help in gaining the loyal traffic, SEO can be hard at start and without a proper exposure and plan, people can waste lot of effort in it. Though it can lead to awesome results, if done correctly.
Comments are closed.