How to increase your blog traffic

It is thought that over 152 million blogs exist on the internet – most will be dormant ones that have been abandoned by their owner, but there will be millions more that will be active. Have a click on WorldOMeters to see how many blogs have been written today, my monitor is currently telling me it is 2,639,745 worldwide – that is an almost incomprehensible amount of blogs. With so many out there, blogging about similar topics, creating noise and choking SEO it is no wonder some blogging sites struggle with traffic.   This time it may not be the content, but more being lost in the fray. To increase your traffic you will have to think strategically, implement a few different tactics that alone won’t make much difference but together will increase your traffic – good luck!

Getting your blog out there to readers

Share more than once

Don’t think that sharing once is enough anymore, you will need to share the link to your blog multiple times to get any significant traffic to it. You must change the wording of the social content for each post so it doesn’t look like spam, but share the link prolifically to spread the word – I would say share a few times for the first week published, then the next day, then the week after, one month after and then two months after.

Get influencers to write for you

People want to read what experts have to say – if I am reading a topic on healthy eating I want it to be from someone who at least attended a nutritional health course at some point. Reach out to people through your network or on social media and ask them if they would be interested in being a guest blogger on your site. Most people are open to some self-exposure and are more than willing to; this will add credibility to your blog and increase traffic too.

Repurpose your content

This is a little time consuming but very effective for getting the most out of your blogs. There are many different assets you can create: podcasts, SlideShare presentations and eBooks to name a few. You can also host these assets on your blog and more readers will come to you from different avenues too. Record a blog and add it to iTunes as part of a series or create a series of blogs into an eBook that can be offered out in PDF over social media as giveaways.

Growing your readership base

Interact with other blogs

Use social media to take advantage of other people’s posts. Within your topic of blogging, search out thought leaders and influencers and comment on their post something relevant and then include the URL to your blog. For example you have a fashion blog, Vogue on Facebook have just shared a post about Autumn/Winter 2016 you could comment something like: “Can’t wait for the graphic black and white look, check out my blog to see what you should be wearing! www.fashionblogger.com/winter2016”

Add your blog to blogging forums

This is an easy way to increase followers, add your blog to a blogging forum will see your blogging peers coming to check out the competition – and if you’re lucky sticking around as a loyal follower too. Check out the best ones here.

Write catchy headlines

With so many blogs out there you will want to stand out; creating catchy, punchy titles is a way of grabbing a reader’s attention quickly and drawing them in. There is an art to writing engaging titles, follow these four steps to start:

• Start with a working title that you can hone down into a shorter one over time
• Keep it accurate to the blog you are writing, don’t make bold claims to just get a reader
• Add a classification to your blog title: [Interview] [Podcast] [Infographic] will let a reader know it isn’t just a run of the mill blog
• Use punchy language such as Things People Hate, Who would do that, Amazing, Brilliant

Growing your follower base

Get an email subscription list

Today just about every business I know has a mailing list, from hotels to my local florist. It seems just about everyone is growing their email list as part of their marketing strategy; emails are one of the most important ways you can communicate with your customers and make sure they stay loyal to your business. There are a few rules to bear in mind with emailing them, you shouldn’t spam them and keep the email days consistent each week. Have you noticed For Working Ladies is every Monday morning to give you that Monday Morning Motivation?

Get a pop-up plugin

To gain these followers, rather than buying data lists of people who don’t want to be marketed to, add a pop-up plugin to your blog. This will prompt followers to your site to register themselves to receive your mailing list – this type of data is invaluable – you will have a data set of engaged readers who want to be aware of what you are writing about. The pop-up just enables you to capture the details smoothly and with little intrusion.

Let me know if my tips helped your blog traffic? Comment below.