Want to Increase Your Blog Traffic? Follow These 3 Steps…
In this article, I’ll be showing you three easy ways to get more traffic to your blog. These methods are mostly free and can help you rank better in search engines and also get more shares.
I’ll also be sharing a few real life examples of how these strategies helped my blog reach 21,000 pageviews/month.
When I start working with a new digital marketing client, one of the most common things they ask me is, “How can I get more traffic to my blog?”
These online entrepreneurs correctly recognize that traffic is one of the vital factors for their online business to succeed. If people aren’t visiting their website, then people won’t be buying their products.
In fact, on any well-structured website, traffic and sales correlate quite directly. That means that if you can increase your traffic, your sales (and income) will rise as well!
Considering how important traffic is, it’s really too bad that when most people check their analytics, this is what they see:
Any chance this looks familiar?
Well, you aren’t alone. In fact, out of the 175 MILLION blogs that are currently online, over 70% of them receive less than 200 pageviews per day. That’s less than 5000 pageviews/month!
But even if your traffic is doing “alright,” wouldn’t it be better if you could double or even 10X the number of visitors you’re getting?
After all, that could mean a significant increase in your blog’s income!
Well, the three strategies I share in this article can do just that.
1 | Roundup Posts
Back in 2015 and 2016, I was consistently publishing content on my home organization blog. It was good quality, long-form content, and I was getting great feedback from my readers.
In fact, about 10% of my blog’s audience liked my posts well enough to comment or even email me to tell me so. Considering that the standard response rate for blog posts is about 2%, this was significant. It showed me that my audience LOVED what I was writing about.
Problem was, I wasn’t able to reach many new visitors. I had a base audience of a couple thousand people who consistently read my blog, but I wasn’t growing beyond that. I’d found an enclosed circle of readers — and none of them were exactly influencers.
So sometimes they would share my posts, but that didn’t ever result in very much traffic.
Then, one day, I published a post that changed everything.
The post was a roundup post that featured 12 of the top home-organization blogs on the web. Inside the article, I wrote about my favorite blogs in my industry.
Now, obviously, this is an article that would be pretty interesting to my audience. Clearly they enjoyed reading home-organization blogs (mine), so they’d probably like to know about more such resources.
But the real power of that post was in the fact that it appealed to influencers. Those twelve bloggers I featured were totally delighted to be featured as one of the “top 12 home-organization blogs on the web.”
I shared my article (publically) with each of them by tweeting them a link and also sharing it on their Facebook page.
Honestly, I didn’t know exactly how they would respond. Since they were very popular blogs, and I was practically nobody, I thought they might just ignore my article, or quite possibly even delete the link I had shared.
But that was exactly the OPPOSITE of what happened.
In fact, several of them reached out to me to say “THANK YOU!” and many of them commented on my shared post or even shared it again themselves.
And my blog’s traffic did this:
Moral of the story: Roundup posts are a great way to get a bunch of influencers interested in sharing your blog with their followings.
2 | Promote your blog on Pinterest
There are two main ways that bloggers try to get exposure for their sites: social media (sharing) and search engines (SEO). Those were my main strategies for a long time as well.
However, last year I realized that there was ONE particularly interesting intersection between these two worlds. One that could be leveraged to get WAY MORE exposure for my blog — and with it, way more traffic as well.
Pinterest.
Pinterest is a social search engine. In fact, it’s effectively the ONLY social search engine.
This means that not only do people search Pinterest to find exactly what they are looking for, but they also share and like the content that they find interesting.
This unique combination of sharing and searching is a goldmine for blogs that are trying to drive traffic.
In fact, when I started marketing my blog on Pinterest, my traffic tripled within just a few months.
They key tactics for successfully marketing your blog on Pinterest are:
Pin frequently: at least 20 – 30 pins per day for optimal results.
Join group boards. Group boards allow you to share you content with thousands more people than you’d otherwise be able to reach.
Pin eye-catching, conversion-optimized images. People aren’t going to click if they don’t even notice your pins. They also aren’t going to click unless you tell them why they should.
Just so you know what to expect, Pinterest marketing won’t start working overnight. It does take a few weeks before you start seeing results. However, once you do, your traffic tends to snowball and climb very quickly.
3 | Add videos to your blog posts
Did you know that Google owns Youtube? This means that Google wants to support and grow Youtube as big and strong as possible.
Because of this, Google has a strong interest in promoting blog posts that feature Youtube videos.
Also, Google knows that people appreciate multimedia content. In this modern age, people are very distracted and are used to being constantly stimulated. If they click on a blog post that is just simple text, they’ll likely click away before they even have a chance to get to the good stuff.
However, if the blog post features plenty of relevant images — and, better yet, engaging video content — they are much more likely to stick around.
So Google has a twofold motivation for promoting articles that feature embedded videos: they get to promote their baby (Youtube) and their customer (the searcher) is extra happy.
Plus, you get the traffic. (And your visitor gets great content!)
It’s a win-win-win-win. 😀
So take advantage of this symbiotic situation, and add videos to your blog posts! You’ll rank higher, get more traffic, and develop a stronger relationship with your audience.
In fact, when my friend Jessica Stansberry implemented this strategy and started adding a Youtube video to each of her blogs, she started seeing them rank on the 1st page of Google in less than 36 hours! Talk about crazy effective!
Even More Traffic Strategies for Your Blog
Want to learn even more ways to drive visitors to your blog? Check out this video:
Learn from Your Analytics
Once you’ve got a few traffic strategies that you’re applying to your blog, the best thing for you to do next is to study your analytics. Study them hard, like there’s a big test coming up — because there kind of is.
The test is the question: can you increase your traffic even further?
And the answer is: Yes — if you double down on your best traffic source.
When you look at your analytics, you’ll probably notice that 80% of your traffic comes from just one or two sources. This is very valuable information!
It’s generally much easier to double your efforts on those strategies and see your traffic double then it is to try to 10X your efforts on methods that really aren’t producing significant results in the first place.
For me, I noticed that most of my traffic was coming from 1) Pinterest, 2) Google, and 3) direct referrals (other sites linking back to my blog).
Every blogger will find a different way to get traffic that works for their exact niche. The important thing is that you’re aware of what this is, so that you can focus on doing more of what’s already working.
Bonus Traffic Tip
Okay, time for a bonus tip, because this one is just too good to NOT mention.
Did you know that you can actually use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your blog — effectively for FREE?
Sounds crazy, I know! But with a strategically designed sales funnel, you can run Facebook ads to get traffic to your blog and at the same time make sales that more than cover your ad spend.
That means you’re making profits + getting more pageviews (+ growing your email list!), all at the same time!
If you’re interested in learning more about exactly how this to use Facebook ads to drive tons of free traffic to your blog, then simply enter your email address below. I’ll be writing a detailed article about this strategy this week, and I’ll be sure to send it to you when I have it finished.
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