7 Steps to Increase Blog Traffic

If you are a small business ready to enter the world of blogging or you are simply someone looking to take your blog to the next level, you are going to need traffic to make it happen. While there is certainly something to the ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality, when it comes to blogging you are going to need to advertise, network and get chatty in order to bring in the crowds.

Great content is the pillar of any successful blog, but I can guarantee all the big ones out there spent a lot of time and effort getting where they are through more than just great writing.

Stop wasting your time filling your blog with awesome content that nobody reads and take these steps to increase blog traffic and get the recognition you deserve.

Step One to Increase Blog Traffic: Embrace Social Media

With almost 1.2 billion active Facebook users, 215 million active Twitter users, and 300 million active users on Goggle+, if you haven’t embraced your place on social media yet, you are seriously falling behind. Not only does social media drastically improve your online reputation, but it can provide one of the biggest sources of traffic for your blog. Read more about the Ways to Increase Traffic Buildup with Social Media

Once you have set up your accounts, be sure to also link your blog to each of them using clearly defined icons on your blog’s homepage that allow your readers to easily find you on each platform. Also, allow readers to share your content by using a social media plug-in or integrated software on your blog. Any time you post new content, you should share it across your social media accounts. Hopefully, it will be shared further, and if nothing else generate traffic to your new post.

If you aren’t embracing social media you are missing out on a goldmine.

Step Two to Increase Blog Traffic: Blog Design 101

If a blog has a poor design, it probably won’t attract much readership. Blog design in an extremely important aspect of blogging success, because if it doesn’t look good people will immediately direct their browser elsewhere.

Believe it or not, your blog’s design can affect your ranking in Google as well. A blog that is cleaner and less cluttered loads quicker. A blog that is visually appealing has a lower bounce rate.

Those types of details influence what Google thinks of your blog, and even if the search engine won’t be penalizing your blog for the color choice of the menu- it won’t hesitate when it notices that users don’t want to stick around. That ranking is important because it determines how easily your blog is found on Google.

Step Three to Increase Blog Traffic: Comment on Other Blogs

If you were a girl in high school, you learned quickly that in order to get the compliments rolling in, you first needed to compliment others. Commenting on other blogs has the same effect, but with one giant extra- popularity.

Each time you leave a comment on another blog, three things happen. First, the person who owns the blog clicks over to your blog in order to see who is commenting on theirs.

Second, other readers of that blog also click over to your blog out of pure curiosity. Third, and this is most important, that comment becomes an invaluable backlink to your own blog. Backlinks are an integral part of ranking well on Google which of course translates to even more web traffic.

For commenting on other blogs to be an effective part of your blog’s traffic campaign, each comment should be well-thought out and add value to that blogger’s post. A two-word comment that simply says ‘Nice post.’ is frankly, a waste of your time and of the blogger who wrote the post.

Step Four to Increase Blog Traffic: Guest Post

Guest posts are an excellent way to generate new traffic by tapping into another blog’s readership. Writing a guest post exposes other people to your brand, niche, or expertise in a particular subject. As the blog that your guest post appears on has obviously approved of you by allowing the post, you are also lent instant credibility with that blog’s audience. Know more about Benefits of Guest Blogging

The all-important backlink comes in here as well and can become even more powerful if you have been allowed to include your Google+ Authorship into your guest post.

Step Five to Increase Blog Traffic: Use Sharing Tools

Keeping up with a blogging schedule can be tough even for the most determined of bloggers. Besides the weekly posts you are trying to churn out, you also have to stay active on social media, write guest posts, comment on other blogs and manage to maintain your sanity throughout all of it.

Those who have made a full-time career out of blogging (and experience those huge traffic numbers) all have one very important secret in common- they have help. Let me introduce you to your new best friend, say hello to social network management.

Tools such as HootSuite or Sprout Social help you schedule out your blogging responsibilities all at once. While they can’t write the content for you, they do allow you to schedule tweets, Facebook shares, and even your blog posts to automatically update at the day and time you want them to. This means you can effectively set up a week’s worth of social media sharing and work in a few hours, one day a week.

Step Six to Increase Blog Traffic: Implement SEO

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, can be a real game-changer in the amount of traffic you are getting from the search engines. You have already begun work on your blog’s SEO through the awesome backlinks you received with those comments on other blogs and guest posting.

There are other easy ways you can implement SEO strategies on your blog, even if you aren’t well-versed on the technical side of the web. Read about these 15 Best off-page SEO Techniques 2018

Use the keywords that represent your blog in your content. Don’t stuff, use the terms naturally. For example, if you have a blog about home repair, you may want to include the keyword ‘broken kitchen sink’ into your article that details how to fix it.

Long-tail keywords are also highly effective. In this case, you could use a keyword such as ‘how to fix my broken sink without a screwdriver’. With long-tail keywords, you have less competition from other websites in the search engine and rank higher in the search.

Name your images and utilize the alt description of the image. If the image is a carrot, name it carrot.jpg and then write the alt description something like ‘orange carrot laying in a park’ or whatever describes the image best. This will help those images appear and be found in search engines, which can be a big traffic driver for your site.

There are hundreds of SEO practices, but these very basic tips should give you a head start.

SEO will make your blog Google friendly.

Step Seven to Increase Blog Traffic: Eat Sleep & Repeat

Going through steps 1-6 won’t benefit your blog unless you continuously run through them and improve as you go. Keep writing great content, sharing the content, writing content elsewhere, commenting on other content, scheduling more content, and optimizing the content you have, and you will soon see those traffic numbers begin to rise. Sounds easy, right?

Watch your traffic numbers slowly rise up.