Dave LandrySo you have a blog, and you want people to visit it. While that is a great goal, there are millions of people who also have blogs and want people to visit it as well, making it an extremely competitive market. There’s only so many pieces of content the average viewer can consume on a daily basis.
You’ve done everything the experts have told you—used SEO best practices, engaged your audience, written quality content with catchy headlines, but you still haven’t gotten the traffic you wanted.
Look no further—here are some clever ways to get more blog traffic.
1. Try Guest Blogging For More Content
You’ve heard the saying quality over quantity—but you can still have both. Posting quality content frequently can give you the edge you need over your competition.
However, you can’t expect fresh ideas that call your audience to action to come out of your own head frequently—so why not have somebody else do it?
Guest blogging is a great way to bring fresh content to your site, and if this guest blogger is well known, can even attract a new audience to your site.
However, guest blogging can be risky—some people even say it’s dead. Some people pay guest bloggers to game the system and ultimately write for machines rather than for human audiences.
If you want genuine traffic to come to your page (and more importantly, keep coming to it) and avoid the wrath of search engines when they find out you’re just loading as many keywords as possible into your content, make sure you write in a conversational tone while keeping keyword saturation to a healthy level.
2. Make It Readable On Mobile
A lot of blog platforms have mobile apps now, but you still need to make sure your content is viewable on mobile. If your blog is unreadable on a mobile device, people will move on to the next piece of content they can find that is.
This will mean resizing your images to be viewable on mobile devices. The most important part of this strategy is that the mobile audience is 24/7, while the desktop one isn’t—desktop users are tethered to their devices at home or work, while you can engage a mobile audience any time you want.
3. Use Social Media
SEO best practices only go so far, but social media can cover the gaps. You should establish presences on social media networks and make sure you know their audiences.
If you are writing for a niche audience such as IT professionals, you can try LinkedIn or even sites such as Stack Overflow.
If your audience is more general, you can stick to Facebook and Twitter for the most part. However, you need to draw people to click on your links—you need a good headline, because a bad one will drive people away. You want to engage your audience here as well, but don’t overdo it.
4. It’s Who You Know
If you know someone influential, you can have them link to your blog. If you don’t, get to know them—engage them in a conversation about their industry or even their interests that don’t have anything to do with their industry. Influential people can increase blog traffic exponentially. Think of it as a product endorsement, much like an athlete endorses a brand of clothing or sportswear.
5. Do The Math
Analytics tools can help significantly. Who is viewing your blog? If people from Europe are viewing your blog, create content about what one can do there on a weekend. If people viewing your blog are between the ages of 18 and 29, relate to twenty-somethings in your blog posts.
That way you have more control over what is working and what isn’t—analytics toolsaren’t very expensive, so it won’t dent your wallet too badly if you’re just starting out.
What Else?
At the end of the day, these are just five of the many things you can do to increase blog traffic. However, you’re still competing with millions of bloggers, so you need to also see what they are doing and how to improve on it. Getting blog viewers is not an easy task, but it can pay off in the long run.
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