So you’ve written a killer blog post — now what? Ever wonder how to drive more traffic to your blog? Or, how to get your posts read by more people?
The sad fact is that the vast majority of blogs do not see much traffic coming their way. It’s a harsh reality, but it’s true: most of them are read only by the authors.
However, the good news is you can change that.
The goal of this post is to provide you with free, simple, and yet effective strategies to drive more traffic to your blog, or even better, turn readers into email subscribers!
Why Blogging?
Blogging can be a challenging and sometimes discouraging hobby. Nevertheless, in my experience, blogging has been incredibly rewarding. It is absolutely worth it!
Blogging allows you to share life-changing experiences, express a unique perspective, offer valuable insight, gain new connections, provide support and encouragement, and be part of a larger community.
Blogs are easy and inexpensive to create, and you can work on them in your own time. With blogging, you can build up a community around yourself, create a voice for yourself and get noticed online.
There are hundreds of reasons why you should start blogging if you have not already started, but below are a few of the most important advantages of blogging.
1. Create A Reputable Identity
Blogging is the most effective and efficient way to build your reputation as an expert in your field. Your blog is the digital portfolio for your skills and expertise.
It only takes one post to start building social proof that you are an expert and that you can help people get what they want.
2. Make a Difference
People come to a blog for information, entertainment, or for a few minutes of escape from the pressure of their day.
Whatever their reasons may be, they’re about to read your thoughts and opinions, and you have a chance to make an impact on them that will last for far longer than their visit.
Blogging is your opportunity to give back—to be part of the conversation and contribute to your readers’ lives in some small way.
3. Grow Professionally
Blogging is your personal opportunity to exponentially grow both personally and professionally.
From building your personal brand to making valuable connections with colleagues and influencers, blogging will allow you to achieve a lot professionally.
Blogging is like having a professional mentor with whom you can connect, learn from, and grow!
4. Discover and Express Yourself
Blogging is a powerful form of self-expression. It gives voice to who you are and what you care about. Blogging can help you unlock passions that may have been dormant for so long, it’s like finding an old friend you never knew existed.
As a blogger, you’ll get to express your individuality through story-telling, writing words that express yourself in the way no one else can.
5. Freedom To Live Your Dream
We all have dreams. To travel the world, to take a year off work to rediscover what’s important in our lives, or to start a business that allows us to work from anywhere. It’s up to us to make those dreams a reality—it’s never too soon or too late!
Blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to build a presence as a professional writer while travelling the world on your own schedule.
6. Create a Passive Income
Start a blog and you can create a regular stream of income by earning from Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, sponsorships, advertising, referrals, sponsorship, and selling your own products.
When you build a blog, it’s an online business that can create a stream of income for you on autopilot. It doesn’t matter what type of niche you’re in.
See also: Learn How to Make Money With Blogging [New & Proven Ideas]
Why Do You Need To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog?
It is no rocket science that it takes traffic to make money online. Even though blogs are somewhat different from websites, the one thing that they have in common is that they all need a certain volume of traffic to generate income.
Traffic is the lifeblood of the blogosphere, and having more traffic is the key factor that guarantees the success of your blog.
More traffic to your blog means more visibility, a bigger audience for your content and an opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
If you have a business website, blog, or affiliate site, you want to attract as many visitors as possible. The more visitors to your blog or website, the greater chance that a potential customer will see your products.
13 Proven Ways To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog
To build a successful blog in today’s cut-throat competition, you must know about various ways to drive more traffic to your blog.
I’ve compiled a list of 10 surefire tactics that can help you attract more traffic and generate more leads to your blog. These strategies work whether you’re in the bootstrapping stage or running a profitable business.
Here are 13 surefire strategies to drive more traffic to your blog:
1. Make Your Content Readable
Design is great and all, but what about the content of your blog? Your content creates a visual experience which begins to form a personal connection with a reader.
If your words are difficult to read from an aesthetic standpoint, then your entire blog is out the window. The more legible your content is, the better your chances will be at getting more traffic from that blog.
Create an experience that paints a clear picture for your readers and you can be sure that they will return time and time again.
See also: 10 Tricks on How to Format Blog Posts That Google Will Love
2. Write Killer Headlines
Ever wonder why some blog posts just seem to leap off the page and get shared around the web, while others just quietly sink without a trace?
Your headline is one of the most important factors here—and it has the power to either really grab your reader’s attention, or fail to catch it at all. Learn how to write killer headlines that will have readers begging for more.
The key to writing great headlines is to think about how many people will see them, and the benefits that each group of readers will get from reading the article.
Each headline must offer a specific benefit and state exactly WHAT the benefit is.
3. Use The Right Keyword
Driving traffic to your blog is easy when you ask the right questions and use the right keyword.
If you have a well-written blog post that has quality content but won’t drive traffic, the reason why might be because you haven’t used the right keyword. Be sure to use the keyword in the title of the post and throughout the article.
Furthermore, use a keyword-related image file name when uploading an image. For example, jackfruit-new-fruits-to-try.jpg. Ensure you separate words with hyphens or underscores, and not space.
See also: How To Dominate Your Niche With The Best Keyword Research Tools
4. Use Quality Images & Infographics
Quality images and hold a great deal of power when it comes to getting traffic to your blog. In fact, the average click-through rate illustration is around 65 percent.
With quality graphics, you can increase your traffic by using pictorial representations of information, which simplify the message for potential readers.
Visuals are a powerful way to keep people’s attention, spark curiosity, and encourage social sharing.
5. Participate in Online Communities
People are online connecting with others and answering questions. You can be part of this conversation by participating in online communities such as Yahoo groups, Google+, LinkedIn group pages, and the many Q&A sites that litter the web.
Simply register with each one and begin sharing your expertise or answering questions regarding your niche. By adding value to others, you’ll gain traffic back to your blog because internet readers love to reciprocate.
Build rapport with your audience and generate a buzz for your blog.
6. Use Social Proof to Get More Traffic
Social proof is the trigger that makes people click on things. It’s a soft, persuasive force that persuades people to do something based on the sound of it.
Whether it’s reviews or images, Social Proof has the power to raise awareness, draw attention, and nudging people towards doing something. The more people who like, comment on, and share a blog post, the more influence it has on other people.
For example, if you post a great article on LinkedIn about how to improve your blog, but only have 100 followers, the article might not get as many shares because it seems like a weird (and smaller) idea to most people.
However, if you have 500 friends on Facebook who all share the same article, then those 500 people will spread the word about how awesome your blog is
7. Create Comprehensive and Useful Content
Although it may sound easy, creating useful blog content is one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish when trying to drive more traffic to your blog.
What is useful content? Useful content uses keywords but doesn’t over SEO’ it. It provides clear, unique and interesting information about a topic that the reader might otherwise not have known or thought about otherwise.
Creating comprehensive and useful content is essential to driving hundreds of thousands of targeted visitors to your blog. The more useful content a blog has able to offer, the more traffic it will drive from search engines and other sources.
8. Updates Existing Posts To Keep Your Content Fresh
You have to admit it. Readers are becoming more and more fickle when it comes to new content. It’s difficult to capture their attention, especially if they’ve been around your blog for a while.
Often times what can be helpful is updating older posts, that may be buried deep in your archives. This quick fix is a great way to give your blog some momentum and drive traffic back to your blog.
9. Make Your Blog Post SEO-friendly
One of the surefire strategies to drive more traffic to your blog is to optimize your blog posts for search engines. A great traffic source for any blog is SEO.
If you’ve been a blogger for a while, you have probably heard about optimizing blog posts, which means using a set of rules to rank # on Google search results.
The key here is to optimize each post for search engines in a way that builds on the overall content, editorial quality, and reputation of your blog.
See also: Best WordPress SEO Plugins To Rank #1 On Search Engines
10. Capture Visitor’s Email Addresses
Once you have the traffic coming to your blog on a regular basis, you need to capture those email addresses from your readers. This is the most sustainable way to give your readers the opportunity to subscribe for future posts.
Set up a lead capture section/popup that allows interested readers to give you their email address. This allows you to follow up with them before and after the post.
By capturing email addresses and nurturing a contact list of interested readers, you’ll have all the readers you need to drive yourself to the blogging stardom you deserve.
See also: 18 Best Lead Generation Plugins To Boost Your Email List 1000x
11. Encourage Social Sharing
If you neglect encouraging your readers to share your content, you’ll be missing out on increasing your blog traffic.
Once you publish a blog post, make it easy for site visitors to share the content with their friends and followers. You could do this by having strong social sharing buttons built-in in your blog’s design.
Today’s social media tools are easy to use and readily available – all you need to do is include them in your blog.
See also: How to Get More Social Shares: The Definitive Guide for Bloggers
12. Build Backlinks To Your Posts
Backlinks are sites which link to your blog posts in order to make them more appealing and draw in more traffic.
Building and managing backlinks can help you drive more traffic to your blog. Additionally, they’re a great way to gain credibility with search engines.
When an external website links to one of your blog posts (a backlink), it tells Google that your blog is a valuable resource on the internet. This increases your traffic, your rankings, and your page views – all of which means more money for you if your blog is monetized.
13. Be Consistent
When you publish new, high-quality content frequently, your blog has more chance to be discovered by readers.
Nurture your audience with fresh content on a regular basis. Publishing a blog post once a week helps establish a relationship with your audience.
A lot of us struggle to blog regularly, especially when we are juggling family life, work, and a blog. We stop blogging because it takes too long to create content and critique it for quality.
Instead of spending valuable time creating your own post, you allow other bloggers to post on your blog as a contributors or guest bloggers.
See also: The Nitty-Gritty Guide on How To Vet Guest Bloggers
What’s The Next Big Thing in The Blogging Industry?
There’s no doubt that blogging is a thriving business. On countless occasions, people have built blogs into million-dollar businesses. One of the biggest questions bloggers ask, day in and day out, is “What’s the next big thing?”
The next big thing in the blogging industry is video blogging.
Many organizations are already using blogging as part of their marketing strategy to reach out to more and more people, but video blogging is an untapped strategy that can make your product or services more popular than ever before.
Video blogging appears far more dynamic and attention-grabbing. It can explain more complex ideas in a way that is easy to grasp and understand.
Since video blogs can grab attention quickly, they have the potential to go viral quickly and drive more traffic as they get shared around the world among like-minded people.
The right video blog can easily give you the power to reach out to people from all over the world.
If you are looking to explore this trending type of blogging, here are 10 Proven Tips on How To Make Money Vlogging: A Guide For Aspiring Vloggers
Magic Of Right Timing: When Is The Best Time To Post a Blog For More Page views?
You’ve poured your heart and soul into writing a blog post. Now it’s time for the public to find out all about what you’re passionate about.
Typically, posts garner the most traffic when they are posted between 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM EST.
When posting to any blog, there are three main goals. These goals include getting the best page views for your time, email subscribers and most important links to your blog. Posting before or after these times can be counteractive to your goals.
For more information, check this out: What Is the Best Time to Post a Blog and How to Test it? (Key Facts Explained)
FAQs
How many blog posts do you need to get traffic?
You can get traffic with as little as 5 blog posts. However, you should write as many blog posts as it will take for you to get a steady flow of traffic to your blog.
Where can I promote my blog for free?
There are many promotion options for bloggers, and many of them are free. Some of these options include link-back buttons (which will link the blogger’s site back to yours), web directories, social media, Q&A sites (e.g Quora), guest blogging, and commenting on other blogs.
How do I discover my target audience
The best way to find your target audience is to ask questions and take notes of the answers. What is it that you want out of blogging? Is there a niche that you’d like to fill? What age group do you want to cater too? What gender are you going after?
Is blogging still relevant in 2021?
Yes, it is, and in fact, it’s bigger than ever. Regardless of your niche, blogging provides you with a platform to build authority and credibility and offer your readers valuable content and helpful ideas. You can use these elements to increase traffic to your blog and turn your visitors into raving fans.
How many hours a week do bloggers work?
Bloggers work an average of 15 hours a week, but some of them work as many as 40 hours a week.
Conclusion
Anyone who’s done it will tell you – starting a blog is hard.
I have personally failed to get that big, beautiful blog up and running on more than one occasion. Those failures were not due to a lack of time, effort or willpower. It was down to the simple fact that I was doing it the right way.
The above strategies will save you time, effort, and frustration that comes with failing many times. Also, don’t make the mistake of settling with one strategy thinking it will help you drive more traffic to your blog.
Go all-in with the 13 strategies, put in the work, and get ready for a massive boost your blog is about to be embarrassed with.
Lastly, if you’re running your blog on the wrong platform, you might never get any increase in your blog’s traffic. For this reason, I encourage you to check out the Best Blogging Platforms That Will Help You Blog Like A Pro.