There are various reasons why blogging is one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Apart from boosting your search engine rankings, having a blog supports your social media presence, improves your credibility, and is a great lead generation tool. Unfortunately, creating great blog content isn’t enough to generate search traffic; you need to put as much effort into building your blog audience. To help, here are 7 strategies to help you increase blog traffic.
1. Aim for Consistency
You can try publishing five times per week, but if the quality of the content is poor, it’s only going to damage your brand. To avoid this, you have to create a sustainable content schedule. Publishing one high-quality new blog post per week is better than creating two average ones. Your editorial calendar should be based on your content goals and the amount of time and resources you have.
To ensure you have enough time to research, create, and promote content, use a content calendar so you can organize your schedule. To find out more, visit our guide to creating a content calendar.
2. Make Content Easier to Find with SEO
If you’re waiting for blog readers to find you, you might be waiting a long time. You need a solid promotion strategy to get your blog content in front of your target audience.
To make your content search engine friendly, you need to carry out some keyword research to determine the best search terms to optimize each blog post, also know as performing search engine optimization. These will be terms that have a good number of monthly searches and are most relevant to your blog. For a WordPress website, a plugin like Yoast will help. Otherwise, use Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush to identify keywords.
In your website design, check for the following common mistakes to see if your design is helping or hindering your search engine rankings. Also, if you are only focused on optimizing the blog content for Google, check out this article to understand why it would be a good idea to optimize for Bing as well.
3. Focus More on Content Promotion
It’s smarter to find more people to consume your existing content than it is to create more content. A clear content distribution and promotion strategy is key:
- Repurpose each blog post into content suitable for each social media platform. For example, create YouTube video tutorials related to each post.
- Send your email subscribers links to every new blog post.
- Share posts multiple times across social media, at different times of the day and week.
- Each time you share a post on the same platform, highlight a different part of the post that resonates with your target audience.
- Update existing, evergreen content and promote the posts again.
- Use tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance.
- If your budget allows, try a pay-per-click campaign to accelerate search traffic.
By adding easy-to-use social media sharing buttons, you’re increasing the chances of readers sharing your content. There are plenty of WordPress plugins to help like AddThis and Monarch. For standard websites, try AddToAny and Sharaholic.
Many bloggers make the mistake of sharing new posts only once on each platform. To maximize content exposure, share it multiple times in multiple places.
5. Make Content Visually Appealing
According to Searchmetrics, blog articles with images get 94 percent more views. Visuals help to increase click-through rates on social media, as users tend to notice images first when they’re browsing channels.
When you’re promoting blog content on social media, attach a striking, relevant image to the headline. One study showed that tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than those without.
Are you optimizing content for mobile? In this article, you will learn why the mobile-friendliness of a site will play a more influential role in determining rankings for your website content.
6. Allow Readers to Easily Subscribe
Attracting new subscribers to your email list is an important part of your blog strategy. It means that whenever you publish new content, you’re going to reach interested readers and increase the chances of people sharing your content.
However, unless you make it easy for users to sign-up, your email list is unlikely to grow as fast as you want. Add a simple sign-up form to your blog menu, include a subscribe button at the end of every post, or consider adding a pop-up when users reach the end of a post.
7. Start Networking with Other Bloggers
Reaching out to other bloggers is a great way to increase organic traffic, shares, and engagement on your blog. But remember that there has to be mutual benefit. Take the following steps:
- Share other people’s blog content on social media.
- Leave helpful comments on other blogs.
- Join online communities such as Facebook and Linkedin Groups.
- Identify blogs in your niche and reach out to the blog owners with ideas for a guest posts. Offer to write a relevant article in exchange for promoting the content on your own blog. This is also know as guest blogging and if done right can end up being a great way to boost organic traffic to your blogs.
Growing a Blog Takes Time
Growing your blog audience involves strategic planning, content based search engine optimization, and ongoing promotion. Remember that even the most successful bloggers started without any readers at all.
Even if you’re new to blogging, you can follow these seven strategies to steadily increase your blog traffic. The key is to be consistent in your efforts and track the results with analytics tools like Google Analytics. Through the referrals tracking section, you can find out which sources are sending you the most organic traffic (and/ or paid traffic) and focus on these channels to maximize results.
Do you need quality content to support your content marketing? Constant Content connects you with thousands of professional writers able to create articles, ebooks, product descriptions and other assets to tell your brand story, drive SEO and win sales.