6 Simple Ways to Generate More Blog Traffic

The Internet is where everyone’s at and in today’s digitally connected world, we love to live our lives out in the virtual space as much as we do in the real world. Blogs help tell our stories to our online friends and fans and let us share our opinions and discuss with strangers from all corners of the world.

According to MyMarketingDept, there could be over 128 million blog readers by the end of 2013 from the U.S. alone.

There are millions of blogs already existing on the Internet, and everyday new blogs pop up trying to steal the spotlight away from the ones that have been around for a while. In the blogosphere, it’s not just enough to have something interesting to share – you have to know how to share it effectively enough to catch more readers’ attention.

And with search engines like Google constantly updating their algorithms to filter out the fluff, you need to stay on top of your game and continuously keep changing your online strategy to maintain your rankings.

But, if you implement the following techniques, you won’t have to worry as much about getting your website more visibility:

Post engaging content regularly:

According to HubSpot, 92 percent of companies that blogged multiple times in a day acquired customers through their blog and businesses that blog over 20 times a month get 5 times more traffic on their sites than businesses that blog less than 4 times in a month.

No matter whatever is the purpose of your blog, to ensure success you need to be willing, to put in enough effort to keep it active. This means you will have to post fresh content at regular intervals. Constantly putting up new content will not only help you attract more visitors to the blog, but it will also let Google know that you are a serious blogger and not just random spammer.

You can also use curation tools to manage your content sharing process. Such tools help ensure that you are able to generate fresh content with minimal time investment.  Curation essentially involves putting together the most interesting content from the internet, sharing links to the same and adding your own spin to it.

So, even if you have a busy schedule, your blog readers will still continue to receive new content frequently.  You may incorporate the following in your content to make it engaging:

• Focus on what your readers want. Features of your services and products are important; however, talking about the benefits your visitors will obtain is far more convincing.

• Always use Active words; they help visitors contribute and participate in your website rather than just passively read it.

• You must create “extras” that go along with your content for example downloadable eBooks, embeddable infographics or interesting images etc.

• Every page must have at least one call to action within the content. Without a call to action, the visitors can’t take the next desired step in the conversion process.

• Make sure that you have an extremely catchy title to go with each and every post you share on your blog.

• Try and include your target keywords in the title and subheads.

• It’s a good idea to choose a topic that’s in news or is being discussed actively in your niche.

• While writing content, follow the rule of sharing new information in every sentence. This will help you avoid redundancy and create a truly informative post.

• Keep your sentences short and to the point.

Optimize your blog’s content and let search engines know of your blog:

Even if you don’t know too much about search engine optimization when starting out, you should use a few SEO tactics to ensure your blog’s visibility. A simple starting point is to narrow down the most relevant and effective keywords you can use to generate more traffic and feature them regularly in your blog’s content.

There are many tools available online to help you gauge the effectiveness of various keywords and phrases. Find the ones that have the maximum impact on your blog’s visibility and use them wisely like Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In addition to using SEO tactics, make sure that you submit your blog’s link to major search engines. This way, sites like Google, Bing, etc. will know when your blog gets updated and even your new pages will show up in search results. You may also use the following pointers for better optimization:

• Utilize keywords in the Title, Headings, Subheadings, First paragraph, concluding paragraph, anchor text, title tags and meta descriptions.

• Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog.

• Optimize the images included in the blog. Include keyword in the file name and also, fill the other text field with a short, keyword rich description of the photo.

• Use social media to create connections with potential and current customers and to broaden the reach of your blog post.

Leverage the power of internal links:

A simple example to help you understand just how powerful interlinking can be is Wikipedia. To increase your blog’s visibility and get more traffic, you can reference older content in your newer posts. There are many benefits of using such interlinking techniques.

Firstly, it will ensure that even your older content continues to get visibility through the new posts which feature their links. Also, it’s something search engines like Google love – interlinking coupled with strong (but not exact match) anchor text for your page significantly improves your blog’s search rankings.

And when you run out of ideas or are stuck with a bloggers’ block, you can repurpose some of your older content and interlink to the posts to give a fresh take on something you may have written in the past.

Feature your best posts on the home page of your blog:

This is one of the most effective marketing strategies to attract more visitors to your blog. Have a list of the most read and most commented articles on the main page of the blog to let your visitors find material that is of greater relevance to them.

It will not only give your best posts more publicity, but will make it easier for many of your visitors to find what they have come looking for on your blog.

Open up your blog to guest bloggers, and guest blog yourself:

A great way to make your blog more popular is to invite other bloggers to write guest posts on your blog. This way, you can leverage their traffic on to your blog and generate greater awareness about your own blog. To get noticed further, you can also go a step ahead and start guest blogging on other related blogs as well.

The more you guest blog on other, possibly more popular websites, the higher the chances of your blog being noticed by more people becomes.

However, before you start with any guest blogging campaign, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

• The site you choose to write a guest post for must have a decent PR ranking; a PR of 2+ would be a good place to start.

• Checking for a site’s Alexa metrics is also a good way to judge its quality.

• Make sure you read at least couple of blogs on the site to be sure of its content quality.

• There should be a real person or business behind the blog. Google doesn’t like sites built only for the purpose of hosting guest posts. A good way to figure out if the blog is authentic is to take note of the author names, as well as the About Us page. If most of the posts on a site are written by guest authors, it maybe a good idea to skip it.

• Check the social metrics of the blog; its Facebook fans and Twitter followers will give you an idea of the blog’s popularity and social influence.

Interact with your readership often:

Your aim as a blogger shouldn’t be merely to attract more visitors but also to retain the existing visitors. A simple way to build a loyal fan following for your blog is to engage in discussions with your most active readers who post comments on the blog.

Read each comment that is posted on your blog and respond to as many of them as possible to build relationships with your blog’s readers. This will further encourage more people to check out your blog posts regularly.

These tips will hopefully help you not only attract more blog traffic, but also build a loyal follower-base. Good Luck!