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Blogging has evolved from being a mere way of journaling to being a powerful way to connect with people worldwide. It has become one of the most cost-effective ways to market your business.
However, you must know how to get traffic to your blog for you to succeed at it.
While driving traffic was easy a couple of years ago, today it’s a different story. That’s because the competition is stiff – with over 455 million websites hosted on WordPress alone.
And that’s why you must know how to get more traffic to your blog.
How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog – 8 Proven Ways
Ready to drive an avalanche of traffic to your blog?
No matter your niche, these 8 proven traffic generation tips will help you grow your blog. So let’s get to them, shall we?
1. Create Relevant Content
It’s no secret that the main reason people visit websites is that they’re looking for relevant content. This is content that is timely and valuable to your audience. Approximately 70% of marketers state that the creation of relevant content is the most effective tactic for SEO.
How do you create such content?
Because content plays a pivotal role in driving traffic to your blog, we’ll dwell a bit longer on this section. Here are a few tips to help you ensure your content is exactly what your target audience is looking for:
- Know your audience. Understanding what your audience needs is a major part of creating engaging content. Audience research will help you know your readers’ goals and pain points. Factors that will help you create content that aligns with your brand while engaging your audience.
- Conduct keyword research. Keyword research gives you insights into the search queries your readers input to find content. Finding high-traffic, low-to-medium competition keywords is crucial to blogging success.
- Searcher intent. Besides keyword research, you need to understand why your readers are looking for content. Is the intent informational, navigational, or transactional?
- Competitor analysis. This is checking out what kind of content your competitors are creating. What’s working for them and what’s not working?
Once you have all this information, create content that’s better than what’s currently available. You can use Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique and create more in-depth content than your competitors’ content. Or you can go with the pillar and cluster model where you create one epic piece of content and create other related pieces of content that you’ll link back to the pillar piece.
One brand created a $6 billion business using these content creation techniques. Yes, you read that right $6 billion. Canva has mastered the art of driving traffic to their blog and other digital assets.
Using a combination of the above content creation techniques, their blog traffic increased by a whopping 226.47%. And yours could be headed in the same direction too – if you’re strategic about your content creation.
Tip – If you’re a WordPress user, the Yoast SEO plugin is a great tool for optimizing your content for on-page SEO. Use it to tweak your content and you’ll certainly give your content a traffic generating advantage.
Tip #2: Also consider using some AI writing software to speed up content creation, especially if you decide to go with the pillar-cluster content model. You can find top AI writers here if you want to explore that option more.
2. Guest Blogging
Another powerful traffic-driving technique you must add to your arsenal is guest blogging. This is a traffic-driving strategy whereby you create blog posts to publish on websites other than your own. This is a great way to tap into the traffic of your host website.
But because all traffic is not equal, you must carefully choose the site to publish on. If you want to get the right traffic, pick websites that:
- Are related to your niche. This ensures you reach an audience that’s interested in your content.
- Have a significant amount of traffic. Such sites increase the chances of an uptick in traffic to your site.
- Have a high domain authority. This increases the chances of your blog post ranking high on search engines.
Paying attention to these details will ensure that your guest posting achieves its goals of driving more traffic to your website. Besides these factors, make sure to create valuable content that will encourage people to check out your website.
An interesting case study on the power of guest blogging is that of Ryan Robinson. Here’s how his traffic was impacted when he published a guest post on Buffer:
Granted, the traffic spike was temporary, but consider what would happen to your blog traffic when you consistently publish guest posts. That’s what Ryan does, and he now attracts over 300,000 visitors a month to his blog (and averages about $40,000/month in revenue from his blog).
3. Publish or Participate in Expert Roundup Posts
Expert roundup posts are so-called because they aggregate content or opinions from different experts on a particular topic.
This type of content is a traffic goldmine for one main reason – you tap into several influencers’ traffic sources. That’s because once your roundup post goes live, each one of them will promote it to their network. And many of their followers on social media will share it as well.
Of course, the result is a huge boost in traffic.
To pull off a traffic generating roundup post:
- Pick a topic your audience is interested in
- Find the right contributors (popular, willing to promote the article)
- Craft a headline that contributors and readers can’t resist
Need an example of how an expert roundup post can drive massive traffic to your blog?
Tor Refsland’s is a classic example of driving more traffic to your blog by creating an expert roundup post – 20,231 views in six days to be exact. Apart from the massive surge in traffic, the one roundup post resulted in over 1500 social shares and 185 new email subscribers. Not bad for one post – and only six days to drive such an amount of traffic.
4. Update Old Posts
Many bloggers wrongly assume that they have to publish new content to drive more traffic to their blogs. That’s not 100% true. You can still leverage old posts and use them to drive traffic to your blog.
How?
By updating your old blog posts.
A traffic-boosting content update can include (among others):
- Optimizing content keywords
- Rewriting some content and adding new sections
- Updating links and stats
- Add new visuals and optimize them for SEO
By refreshing his old content, Brain Dean of Backlinko saw a 260.7% increase in his organic traffic. Getting such a traffic boost from a piece of content you’ve already created is something worth rejoicing over as the ROI is bound to be pretty high.
Strive Content Calendar includes a post revisions feature that will let you schedule your updates as if they’re new posts.
5. Social Media
With close to 4 billion active monthly users, social media is a great place to promote your blog.
The keys to successfully driving traffic to your blog from social media are to build an engaged following and create content tailored to each platform. Other tips include:
- Identify platforms your audience frequents.
- Signup for said platforms and optimize your profile.
- Implement social sharing buttons on your website.
- Don’t be afraid to ask readers to share your content.
- Use an auto-posting plugin to automatically share a post when it goes live or social media scheduling tools to create a consistent cadence of delivery.
- Tag people/blogs you mention in your blog post. This encourages them to share your post.
Tami Brehse’s case study is a great example of how one blogger increased her blog traffic by 50% using Twitter alone. Social media’s advantage is that the snowball effect it can have can easily lead to your post going viral. And, of course, virality = tons of traffic.
When it comes to using social media to drive traffic to your blog, you can either rely on organic sharing or by paid promotion.
6. Delete Under-performing Blog Posts
Yes, you read that right. Sometimes, to boost your traffic you have to delete some blog posts. Of course, this strategy is only relevant if you have tons of published blog posts on your blog.
While deleting blog posts may seem counterintuitive, there’s a reason why it can help you drive more traffic to your blog. One of the factors Google uses to rank content is user signals. If a post gets a lot of attention and dwell time, Google deems it valuable and ranks it high. On the other hand, posts that don’t get any traffic send “bad vibes” to search engines, thereby negatively impacting your blog.
And that’s why Ahrefs deleted 49% of their blog posts (266 blog posts) in 2015. That bold move resulted in an 89% increase in traffic in just three months. They did this again recently and deleted 31.7% of their blog posts and had a 7.57% boost in traffic. They talk about this in detail in their post on how to conduct a content audit.
Sure, it takes guts to delete blog posts you invested time and resources to create. But let’s face it, some blog posts just fall flat. And though they may be well written, as long as they don’t bring in traffic, they might as well not exist. And that’s why you must take the bold move of culling them for your blog’s overall good.
7. Build Backlinks
Link building is a great way of building the authority of your blog. But more than just helping you build authority, they are also a great way to drive traffic to your blog. And this type of traffic, called referral traffic, is valuable because it consists mainly of warm leads.
We’ve already talked about two great easy ways to build backlinks – guest posting and expert roundup posts. Another (more laborious) effective way is to run an outreach campaign. You can research a variety of backlink analysis tools to find one that suits your needs and budget, but here is the specific process and tools that I use. The basic steps involved include:
- Curate a list of sites driving traffic to your competitors’ blogs. This can be easily done in the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool.
- Find the pages (on your list of sites) responsible for the referral traffic. One of the best tools to use here is the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool.
- Using the Ahrefs tool, filter your list by traffic volumes. The higher the volume, the better the site is.
- Armed with your final list, send outreach emails (use A/B tests to see what subject lines and messaging work best) asking them to include your blog post in one of their relevant resources.
While this may take time and effort, the fruit is well worth it. Shane Barker is one blogger who has used backlinks to successfully drive more traffic to his blog – sometimes increasing traffic by as much as 12X.
One of the best things about traffic generated through backlinks is that it’s usually targeted and relevant. As a result, it will help you achieve your blogging goals more efficiently.
8. Get Your Technical SEO Right
You may do everything in your power to drive traffic to your blog, but if your website is not technically sound, all your efforts will be in vain. After all, your website is the foundation of all your traffic generation efforts. And technical SEO is the bedrock of all your traffic generation activities.
What is technical SEO?
Putting it simply, technical SEO refers to optimizing your website’s technical aspects to increase its rankings on SERPS. The three main aspects of technical SEO you must get right are:
- Site speed. User experience is an important factor Google uses to rank pages. Because of this, site and page speed are important elements of your website to get right.
- Site crawlability. Crawlability refers to how easily search spiders can access and crawl your blog.
- Site indexability. This refers to a search engine’s capability to analyze and index web pages into its index.
Optimizing your technical SEO will result in your website and blog posts ranking well on search engines, resulting in an increase in traffic. Nick Eubanks validates this in a case study on a website whose traffic he helped increase 4X by optimizing its technical aspects.
Bonus Tip – Email Marketing
Nearly 90% of content marketers state that they use email engagement to measure content performance. No matter what critics may say, email is not dead. If anything, it’s becoming a more effective marketing tool. And it can be used to drive more traffic to your blog. Research shows that you’re 6X more likely to get click-throughs from email than from tweets.
So, yes. Email is a very effective way to drive traffic to your blog.
For this traffic generation strategy to work, however, you must first build an email list. With a database of interested readers, all you have to do is email them a synopsis of your latest blog post and link to it in the email.
Another way to use email to drive traffic to your blog is by participating in joint ventures. This is where you group up with other bloggers and cross-promote each other’s content to your email lists.
Now That You Know How to Get Traffic to Your Blog – Do It
Getting a significant amount of traffic to a blog is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more blogs are being published every day. This is why you need to be strategic about how to get more traffic to your blog.
Armed with these tips, you’ll be able to improve your chances of being a successful blogger – if you implement them.
So, go ahead and boost your blog’s traffic!
