how to increase blog trafficInterested in how to increase blog traffic? How about doubling your traffic over the next 3 to 6 months?  Sound appealing?

If you write content that is relevant to your target audience, and the traffic to your blog is increasing as a result of this, you will be in a better position to build your leads pipeline.

To build traffic to your blog requires some up front investment and significant effort but as the blog grows in popularity it gets easier to keep the traffic growing.

Momentum is key in blogging.  You write, promote and optimize content consistently and over time momentum builds and so does traffic.

The following shows our traffic over the last few months.  The gradual trend is up.    The main dips in the chart are at the weekends where traffic naturally drops.  Over the holiday period (December)  it was a lot quieter but the overall trend is a continuous increase month by month.

 

Google analytics report
This is how our traffic is growing

 

How to increase blog traffic

That’s all great Ian but what about my traffic?  Very good point!

We love practical actionable information on this site so here is some!  Have a look at these ideas that will help you grow your blog traffic significantly.

 

1.  Increase your Email Subscribers

As you build up your email subscribers every time you send out your email newsletter a percentage of those subscribers will click on the links and come to your website.

Always keep building your email subscribers.  I recently read an article from my friend Syed Balkhi who is an expert Internet Marketer and this was his number 1 piece of advice for businesses:

“My #1 advice for small businesses is to create your blog or website and focus on building an e-mail list” – Syed Balkhi

Syed recently built a plugin called OptinMonster for growing email subscribers on WordPress.  If you use this plugin you can either create a popup that appears when someone is browsing your website or have an image displayed on the footer.    Within these your visitors can subscribe to your email list.

We use the popup which appears only when you attempt to exit the site.  This is so smart.  When you move the mouse outside the main window a popup appears asking you if you want to subscribe.  This is a great way of building subscribers.

I’m split testing a couple of different options at the moment to see which gets me the highest conversion, here’s one of my popups:

 

OptinMonster
You can set up multiple popups to see which works best for you

 

2.  Optimize Your New Content

There have been plenty of articles saying SEO is dead.  This is not true.  We still get over 70% of our traffic from Google and for some posts we get a few thousand visitors a month. Why?  Quite simply because each post is optimized.

Optimizing your content for SEO is just about building a basic process for every piece of content you write.

  1. Do your keyword research using Keyword Planner – read our Google Keyword Planner article.
  2. Find keywords that have reasonable traffic but that are not that competitive.  To understand competition you need to understand domain and page authority.  This is a ranking system that rates web pages and websites out of 100.  The higher your number the easier it is to rank within Google.  Check out OpenSite Explorer and find out not only what your domain authority is but also your competitors.
  3. Write content and optimize it.  We did a post recently on the best WordPress plugins and the WordPress SEO plugin came out on top as one of the most popular plugins.  If you’re on WordPress consider using that plugin to help you optimize your content more effectively.

Book a coaching session with me and I’ll help you understand it or read up on the articles we have on our blog!

 

3. Create Content that Stands Out

You can’t create amazing content all the time but at least once a month you should write a killer post. This could be an awesome guide to x, an infographic, a group post from a range of experts, etc.

a) Do your keyword research and target a term that’s a little more competitive than normal and gets more searches – Use Google Keyword Planner.

b) Optimize this post.

c) Link to this post from other posts on your site, this will give it a little lift.

d) Check your excel spreadsheet or OutreachPlus and contact the sites that promoted your content before. OutreachPlus is a tool for managing your email outreach campaigns. When you reach out to sites you need to track who you reached out to and the results you generated from your outreach emails. You are trying to build up a great target list for future posts!

e) Write a guest post on a high profile site around a similar topic and link back to this content.  If you’re not getting enough links from other people then why not build the links yourself!

The posts that get RazorSocial a lot of ongoing traffic are generally posts that took a long time to write.  The shorter posts may get shared in the short term but people are more likely to link to a reference article.

 

4.  Promote Your Content

You could have amazing content but if nobody knows about it then you will not get links back to it and links are key to increasing your ranking.

We covered an article recently about Blogger Outreach tools.  We showed a process you could follow and tools you could use.  As mentioned above, you could use OutreachPlus to manage and track your outreach.

Social media is also an important way of promoting your content. For example:

a) Somebody sees your article on Twitter and then they write a blog post and link to you.  Only for Twitter, you may not have got that link.

b) You share on Twitter and this content gets retweeted to lots of new people who never heard of you before.

Proactively build your social media traffic, interact with your community and share out your content.  Build a process you follow and implement tools to support this process.

 

5. Optimize Your Old Content

You can always squeeze some more traffic out of existing posts so don’t forget about them.  You can:

a)  See what posts get good traffic and do a little more optimization on those posts.

b) See what posts are not getting enough traffic, link to them from other posts, do guest posts linking to them and promote them again on social media.

c) Change the keywords you are targeting – Imagine you created a great post and you are targeting keywords that are really competitive.  After a few months, you get nowhere.  You do a search for those keywords and you are nowhere to be seen.  How about reconsidering the keywords you are chasing and go for easier keywords to rank on.

 

6. Write Popular Content

You don’t always have to re-invent the wheel.   I don’t think you’d get too far on this bike!

re-inventing-the-wheel

You don’t have to constantly come up with new and innovative ideas for your blog.

One of the best ways of getting links, shares, and comments is writing content that has been popular for someone else.

It’s not about copying their content.  It’s about finding really popular content and writing a much better article.  Your article could take a different slant, it could be more up to date or it could be more in-depth.

If you use a tool like Topsy you can search for articles based on keywords that have the most links to the content.  If the content gets a ton of links then it must have been popular.    Or you can use Social Crawlytics to find articles on your competitor’s site that has the most shares.  These are great articles to start with.

This is a search on Topsy for the ‘Infographic tools’.  I’m looking for posts that have the most links to it.

 

topsy results
View a list of the most popular content

 

Are you going to re-invent the wheel or do what works!

 

What’s next?

Building traffic on a blog requires a good process, tools to support this process and a lot of work.  But once you put the groundwork in place your blog will keep growing and it’s much easier to write content for a site where your traffic and leads are growing all the time!

Here’s what’s next, pick one of these!

a). Implement some of the tips above on how to increase blog traffic.

b). Submit a comment below.  Ask us any question, tell us what you think of the post or just say hi!

c).  Read this other article: 7 Tools to drive more traffic to your blog

 


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