5 Steps on Building Traffic to Your Nonprofit Blog [Infographic]

Alan Rita — January 23, 2017

Raising awareness is one of the top priorities of nonprofit organizations. You need people to support, uphold, and take action to pursue your goals. More importantly, you need their donations to keep these pursuits alive.

The only problem is that your budget can be really tight, especially for a nonprofit blog. To raise brand awareness, you need to develop a solid promotion strategy that’s not only cost-effective, but is also sustainable in the long run.

Without further ado, here are seven steps you should try to bring traffic to your nonprofit blog:

1. Start with Content

Your content will be the most important tool you have for growing your blog. You need to express your dedication as a nonprofit blogger by consistently publishing quality content. This could be anything such as news updates, opinion pieces, to actionable advisories that will get your audience more involved.

Apart from written content, you should also incorporate other content types in your strategy to compel and engage your audience:

• Real Photographs – A good start is to provide real photographs from fundraising events, volunteering projects, or anything else that’s happening behind the scenes.
  
• Videos – To ignite your audience’s emotions, you can take a step further and create video content. You can click here for a simple guide on how to create compelling video content for your blog.
  
• Infographics – If your goal is to share important data or step-by-step instructions, then you should consider using infographics. Not only are these helpful for conveying information, they are also highly shareable in social media networks.

2. Look for Nonprofit Social Media Influencers

Every blogger knows that having a social media presence is one of the best ways to build your authority. But rather than depending on your own online sphere of influence, you can leverage the presence of influencers to reach a larger audience with your message.

One way to look for influencers is to use a tool like BuzzSumo – a content research tool that will help you find the most popular posts in your industry as well as who published them. All you need to do is to provide keywords like “nonprofit projects” and check who created a particular piece:

Take note that you need to conduct multiple searches and list down the top influencers with reasonable social reach. To do influencer outreach, you can refer to this guide from Neil Patel and Aaron Agius from Quicksprout.

3. Run Polls and Surveys

Giving your audience a voice is one of the ways to get them more involved. Today, there are several tools you can use to run polls or surveys with ease. The best part is that some of them are free, so you don’t have to worry about funding.

Social networks like Facebook and Google+, for example, have built-in poll and survey features you can use to encourage participation in your followers. Alternatively, you can use a standalone tool like Google Forms to have a better view of results.

4. Post about Your Blog Everywhere

Nonprofit or not, relentless promotion is the key to being heard online. Aside from your blog and social media channels, you should write posts about your blog in other places that get a steady stream of traffic.

Writing an article on Wikipedia is one way of doing this. Not only can you bring readers directly to your site, gaining a backlink from Wikipedia will also benefit your SEO. Just remember to cite valuable sources and provide data-rich information to maximize your article’s chance of being approved.

If you have existing posts in your blog that you’d like to share, here are other websites you should consider:

• LinkedIn (for general content)
  
• SlideShare (for presentations)
  
• Pinterest (for infographics)
  
• YouTube (for videos)

5. Launch a Newsletter

Building an email list is a proven strategy for promoting content, nurturing leads, and maintaining brand awareness. For nonprofit organizations, a newsletter is all about providing relevant news and reminding the audience that it’s never too late to make an impact.

Whether you’re trying to raise funds or awareness, you need to pay close attention to your newsletter’s design. Here is an infographic from iContact on the essential parts of a nonprofit newsletter:

Final Words

Lastly, don’t forget to track and measure your results. Remember that, even with the best content in the world, sustainable success takes time and the willingness to try something different. Perhaps you should consider investing in SEO once you have the budget. But until then, you should leverage affordable methods of monitoring and growing your brand. You can refer to this post for brand monitoring tools you can use for your nonprofit blog.

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