How to drive traffic to your blog. Every blogger and writers biggest question.
If you were unaware, blogs are much better than normal web pages for a number of reasons.
A few being the speed at which blogs are indexed, pings, track backs and the ability to submit to blog directories & normal directories.
With that being said, here are 8 effective ways for how to drive more traffic to your blog!
How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: Table of Contents
1.) Write Effective Headlines
This sounds so simplistic, because it is. Yet, too many new bloggers and businesses fail to master it.
So what consists of an effective headline? Anything that accurately describes your blog post while leaving the reader hanging. Leave them with no choice to but to click on your link so they can find out what it is you’re talking about!
This can sound confusing, so here’s an example.
“What 10 Studies Say About the Best Times to Post on Social Media.”
This is a simple yet effective title and you can definitely get more creative.
With that being said, a title like this is perfect because you’re going to entice your reader by telling them that there’s studies and data that prove what you’re telling them.
They’re going to want to really see the proof and data that supports what they’re trying to figure out.
A headline that wouldn’t garner so much attention would be something like; “How to Find the Best Times to Post on Social Media.”
This headline provides no value, no hook, nothing enticing. You can find numerous headlines that probably say the same thing. Stay away from these shorter, boring headlines.
2.) Include Relevant Inbound, Outbound Links
Search engines LOVE internal and external links. Not just any links though.
To get the most out of linking in your blogs, you want high quality, relevant external links.
3.) Guest Blogging
Not familiar with guest blogging? Well it’s one of the best techniques for growing your blog and gaining new readers. And FAST!
Here’s how it works, you write a blog post for a third party website in your niche. In the post you link to your website either in the article or at the end with an ‘About the Author’ section. They then share that post with their audience on their blog and you’re brand is exposed to a larger audience.
This technique will help you gain more readers and more subscribers. But most importantly, will help boost your website up the rankings!
There’s so much more that goes into guest blogging and there’s different ways to do it. So to learn the ins and out you can visit Adam Enfroy’s blog here.
He covers exactly how he grew his blog to over 500,000 readers in just a little over a year with guest blogging.
4.) Comment and Leave Feedback on Other Blogs
One of the best ways to get eyes on your site is by commenting on other blog posts in your niche. This is a great way to show authority in that niche while “promoting” your blog.
The best practice for doing this method would be to leave a comment under questions that people have about the post.
In doing this, you’ll show you have authority and knowledge in your respective space. After answering someone’s question, you can plug a link to your blog and explain how the link can help them answer their question more in depth, etc.
5.) Comment and Leave Feedback on Forums
6.) Write about the Right Topics
Blogging and creating any sort of content is a great start, but if you’re not blogging about relevant topics that don’t attract much search volume, or don’t flow or make sense, your blogging can almost be sort of pointless.
And trust me, search engines notice too!
In order to figure out what people want to read about and what people are actually searching for, you’ll need to do a little research.
Use tools like Google’s keyword planner to research topics and see their search volume, PPC, etc. While maybe not the most accurate and in-depth, it’s free and gets the job done.
Comparing different topics and their search volumes will give you a good idea on what content is more searched for and what keywords to use for the posts you decide to make from your research.
You can find a few other great keyword tools that give you far more data and longtail keywords, etc than Google’s keyword finder right here.
7.) Keep Your Blog Posts Updated
Updating old blog posts is HUGE for SEO and your search rank. Therefore, you should always be updating older blog posts with newer information.
After all, this is easier than writing a completely new blog post. It saves time, content is already formatted how you want, etc. and all you have to do is plug in newer and updated information.
Updating old blog posts can increase blog traffic up to as much as 70%. You can learn how to get the best out of updating your blog and how to do it correctly with Text Request’s article on updating old blog posts.
8.) Posting Your Blog on Social Media
Obviously social media is great for gaining traffic, specifically Pinterest and Instagram. So, how do you choose which one to use? Use both!
They can be equally effective and drive the same results. But, depending on the amount of followers you have on each platform, you can see a big difference in results.
Here’s how we like to determine which one to go all in with. First, do you have at least 10,000 followers on Instagram? If so, you should easily be hitting great traffic numbers with just Instagram.
Why? Because having over 10,000 followers allows you to link your blog right to your story, something you can’t do with under 10,000 followers.
Have less than 10,000 followers? You should still be pushing your blog on Instagram by putting it in your bio, but with that being said, Pinterest may be the one to really focus on.
Now You Know How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
If you consistently put these tips to use you will see the growth of your blog traffic.
It may not happen overnight, actually we guarantee it doesn’t happen over night. It takes time like any other blog or business. But with that being said, these are some of the best practices you can use to grow your blog not only larger, but faster as well!