“As a writer and blogger, I can always use extra help learning how to increase my blog traffic in as many ways as possible. That is why I always look to the “professionals” of TruConversion and Mike Dane, PR Manager and my buddy.
Here is a new guest article he has shared for all of us to gain more traffic to our blogs. All this back -link and SEO stuff can sure be confusing, so I always welcome Mike to help us understand it all. He is the expert” . . . *Cat Lyon*
PR manager at TruConversion.com.
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Increase Blog Traffic
Starting a blog is too easy. Maintaining it is even easier, but getting visitors to the blog is a tough challenge. When over 2 million blogs are published each day, your blog has very good chances of getting lost in the crowd.By following a set of tips you can lower the chances and increase the number of visitors to your blog. The strategies are:
Value-driven content
You are recommended to write more content and longer content. But there’s hardly any point writing content that lacks value. Content on your website should be of value. Who decides whether the content is valuable or not? Your readers.
To get success in blogging, you need to understand a reader’s psyche and think from his end. Ask yourself the following questions:
Why is he coming to your site?
What type of content he expects to see on the blog?
Is he getting what he wants from your blog?
Unless you find answers to these questions, you can never get more visitors to your blog. Check the sources from which visitors are coming and you can anticipate why they are visiting the blog, observe which posts are getting maximum visits to get a sense of what visitors want to see in them.
Use Google search console aka Webmasters tool and Google Analytics to know what keywords are sending traffic to your blog from search engines. Target those keywords and write content around them.
Sharing strategy
Sharing your blog on one or two social channels is not enough. The majority of bloggers, be it an individual or a company, forget about the blog after sharing its link on social networks. That’s a grave mistake, never do that.
If you want to increase the blog’s reader-base, share the links on multiple networks coupled with different texts, at different times and with or without highlighting images and multimedia elements (depending on the blog).
The timing is very important. See the infographic below:
Immediately after writing a post, publish it on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The same day, after 2 hours, share the post on Twitter again, do the same next day, next week and for next two consecutive months. Twitter posts only have 140 characters and get buried down easily, thus this strategy.
On Facebook, your post keeps showing up on other’s news feeds, so once you post it on your wall, don’t re-post it until the next month. Rand Fishkin promoted this strategy in his Whiteboard Friday clarifying that tweeting the same post after a month gives off the message that the post is still contextual.
Apart from timing, hashtags are important. Highlight the key-phrases with which people search by using hashtags as they are critical to social media success. Do this on all networks and you’ll positively see more engagement on your posts.
Guest posts and interviews
Writing guest posts is a wonderful idea for all bloggers out there. Guest post tick all checkboxes – SEO, social share, safe link building, networking and interaction with readers.
If your posts are informative and insightful, reputed blogs wherein posts get hundreds of shares may accept them. Any idea what that spells out? You, as the author will get recognition and your blog will get it too.
Source
With just one stone, you kill five birds. The links pointing to your site, in the author bio and the organic ones in the body will ratify your SEO efforts. The blog’s popularity will fetch social shares and ensuing interaction with other bloggers and thought leaders in the industry. It all depends on the quality of your posts. To excel in guest blogging, you need to write high-quality content.
Similar to guest posts, interviews help you create networking ties with other bloggers. As you publish interviews of other bloggers on your blog, those bloggers will promote the posts, bringing traffic to your blog.
Write unique posts
This might sound like a no-brainer. All your posts are unique and original. They are copyscape certified, so no question of plagiarism. Why does this even have to be mentioned in the first place?
Well, what you understand by uniqueness may not be what uniqueness really stands for in the blogging context. Maybe your post wasn’t copied from anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean it’s unique.
The topic of the post makes it unique. Cover a topic that’s new and interesting at the same time. Make sure very few people have covered the topic. Writing on such topics gives you the first-mover advantage. Whenever someone will write on it in the future, he will reference your article. If he links your post, Google will acknowledge it as link-bait-worthy and you as a thought leader.
Besides that, your post may come in top search engine ranking whenever someone searches with keywords pertaining to that topic. For better visibility, anticipate possible keywords, keep 1% density of them in the post and highlight them in the meta properties.
Retain your readers
While getting readers is important, retaining them is even more important. The reason nine out of ten bloggers find it difficult is they take their readers for granted. A change in approach is necessary for them.
A blogger needs to visualize himself as the CEO of a company. CEOs can do everything in their capacity to convert leads to sales, let alone be retaining the existing customers. They never take any of their customers for granted.
A blogger needs to display the same approach. He needs to take each single of blog visitors seriously. The best place to interact with them is the comment trail. But most readers don’t post comments, they leave the site after they are done reading a blog post.
One way to make them interact is telling them to do so in the article. Finish the article with expressions like “Let us know what you feel” or “Share with us your opinion on this.” The problem is this strategy is new anymore, readers have somewhat become immune to it.
A better way to make them interact is to end an article with “Let us know your problems in the comments and let’s see if we can solve it.” But in that case, you have to write “How-to” type posts that deal with specific issues, not anything generic. A third way that persuades readers to interact is holding contests and offering giveaways. Many bloggers do this and if done correctly, it can make a blog popular among readers.
Blog well!
Mike Dane of TruConversion
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Cat Lyon's Reading Den For Authors & Readers 