Six Comprehensive Strategies for Increasing Blog Traffic

You have a blog and have been writing consistently for weeks, months, or even years, but your traffic is still underwhelming. You’ve invested time and effort, so why isn’t the audience flooding in?

Blogs aren’t “set it and forget it” assets—they require ongoing work beyond writing and posting to build a growing audience and maximize views.

The six key pillars of blog traffic growth are: Calendar, Content, Social, Engagement, SEO, and Advertising.Each of these areas provides strategies that every blogger can leverage to significantly boost traffic levels.

Calendar

Create an editorial calendar: Create a writing calendar and stick to it. This could be writing Monday-Friday, as an example, and could even include different subjects or themes for each of the days involved.

Regularity: One your editorial calendar has been established, do not  – under any circumstances – stray from this calendar. If you plan on a vacation, write posts and schedule them for the days you’ll be absent.

Your schedule is monitored by search engines: As you start posting on a regular schedule and with frequency, search engines will begin scraping your site with the same regularity. Your posting schedule sets the schedule for search engine bots. Imagine that!

Content

Know your material: If you’re writing about how to get rich online and, in reality, you’re flat broke and know nothing about online businesses, readers will know. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in your field, but you should be passionate about your blogging niche, be able to provide interesting, relevant, and educational information, and be knowledgeable in general.

Know your audience: People who are interested in the topic you blog about – this is your audience. This can vary from blog post to blog post. For example, one post may be geared toward those who understand technical terminology within your field while another post may be geared toward potential new audience members who don’t know much about your topic but want to know more.

Imagery: Include images in your blog posts. Try to use your own photos or manipulate stock photos to create a cohesive look. People are visual and often initially attracted to the imagery.

Video: Selfmade videos are a powerful way to bring people to your blog. Video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo allow you to upload your own videos, providing you with bits of code to place those videos on your own blog while using their bandwidth and video speed strength. Better yet, these platforms have the ability to drive traffic straight to your blog on their own.

Lists: With long-winded articles, people can get bored which, in turn, can cause a high bounce rate. Break up your content into smaller, readable portions such as lists and shorts bursts of information within subheaders.

Evergreen: Make sure your articles can withstand the test of time. A blog post about “The Best Places to Eat in Portland, Maine” written ten years ago will most certainly have no relevance today when restaurants come and go. Either refresh your posts that have gone stale (updating them yearly) or write “Evergreen” posts that will withstand the passage of time.

Guest Contributors and Posting: Encourage guests posts from those in your field who are admired or well known. In the same vein, offer to contribute guests posts (with a backlink) to blogs within your field of expertise.

Social Media

Inspire curiosity with a great title: Sharing your blog post on social media will display the title and a snippet. That title should be amazing. Create an irresistible blog title that will cause people to click the link with urgency. They must know more!

Find your people: Find groups and communities on social media platforms devoted to your interest or a variation of it. When you find your people, share your posts there and like-minded individuals will follow.

Social sharing buttons: Include social sharing buttons on your blog posts. It makes it easy for people who want to share your information to do so.

Reshare old content: Recently updated content or blog posts that are suddenly relevant again can be reshared on social media platforms. Think about using this strategy at least once per week.

Engage

Use a comment system: Allow readers to leave comments and encourage the use of your comment system by asking readers questions and/or their opinions.

Employ giveaways: Contests and giveaways can have a viral effect, especially if you set a condition for entry by requiring the post to be reposted, liked, or tweeted by the entrant.

Use USG (User Generated Content): A common way for bloggers to gather USG is through Reddit. Pose a question to people in your related interest groups, and utilize their answers. The same method can be used on other social media platforms.

Encourage email signups: Add an email sign-up box on your blog that captures emails to be used by an email system such as Constant Contact. Sending monthly recap emails remind your audience of your existence and brings back readers.

SEO

Use keywords: Use the most relevant keywords multiple times in your copy, in your headings, in your metadata, and in your image alt tags. Don’t overdo it, but make sure they are used more than once.

Use links: Linking to high-ranking, relevant, authority sites is a powerful way to signal to Google and other search engines that you can be trusted.

Crosslink your articles: A great way to “connect the dots” and create a hierarchy of related pages within search engine indices is to crosslink your own posts. Link to related posts that might be of value to the reader for the current post.

Write long articles: If you’re looking for better rankings on search engines, write long articles – the longer the better. Google gives a nearly disproportionate amount of weight to longer articles – the more information, the better.

Advertise

Spend the money: Advertising online can cost a pretty penny, but the stakes are worth it when building your audience. Online advertising delivers highly targeted traffic straight to your site, readers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. It is definitely something to consider.

Each fundamental strategy for blog traffic growth has multiple facets, and each of these facets can be discussed in great detail. Conduct your own research on each facet and work to employ all items in your daily blogging schedule.

Happy blogging!