So you’ve boarded the very long, steaming blog train, and it’s increasing in speed with every moment.
There are plenty of other people in the carriages – some in cattle, some in business and some even in first class. It’s not going to be easy to take those thoughts from your head and build them into a successful blog website – but it can be done.
There’s some friendly competition out there and some more active sites that are going to be harder to beat. But entering the blog world and having your say on what matters to you the most is an excellent occupation, and you have every chance of building and maintaining a successful blog that will slowly attract a steady, loyal following of readers and viewers.
There are plenty of success stories out there to take inspiration from, so its good to do your research in those early stages and make sure that everything is on track for the best possible outcome.
Here are seven ways that you can increase blog traffic, giving your page a great chance at becoming a popular online blog.
Pick Those Topics Carefully
Every great blog starts out with those thoughts that are spinning around in your head.
You’ve got to start somewhere, so finding your niche through the things that you are most passionate about will help you figure out exactly what you want your blog to be about.
But there’s more to it than just jotting random, unrelated thoughts on a piece of paper and translating them into a blog post. Because you’re posting online and hoping to have a following of readers, you’ve now got people that are investing their time into what you have to say.
This means that part of your job now is to research the topics that you’ve chosen.
This way, you’ll quickly be able to hone in on the exact demographic of readers you are wanting to attract to your blog, focusing on how to keep them coming back.
Within your chosen niche, its good to choose topics that are currently trending – searching online what’s trending within your chosen niche will help you stay relevant.
If your chosen demographic is continually getting the latest and greatest from you, they are much more likely to keep coming back to read your most recent posts.
Search Engine Optimisation
You’ve chosen beautiful blog theme and taken the time to make it look all pretty and inviting.
This is one of the more enjoyable things to take the time to do and will get you inspired within your niche to produce compelling, relatable articles. But there’s a little bit of technical stuff you’ve got to remember when you’re building your website.
Because you want people to see your blog, and not have too much trouble finding it, you will want to make sure that its easy for search engines to read the content so that it has a better chance of turning up in relevant searches.
Luckily, if you are building your blog through WordPress, they already have a decent structure for SEO which can be further enhanced with plugins.
Recommended: Yoast (Free)
If you aren’t making your blog through WordPress, then you need to get a bit tech-savvy and remember to be creating a neat, clean website that is SEO friendly, giving it the best chance of being picked up by major search engines and therefore increasing that traffic.
Recommended: Take an Udemy course on basic SEO
Securing A Guest Spot
If you’re still reasonably green in this online game, you’ll know little about what it means to “self-promote.”
There is an extensive range of topics covered underneath this umbrella. Let’s focus on the one that’s going to take you furthermost away from your content. We all know that there are already some thriving blogs out there, seen by thousands of followers each day – and for someone just starting out, this thought can be somewhat depressing.
But instead of seeing them as this mountain of success that you’ll never reach the top of let alone climb over, let’s look at it a different way. These incredibly affluent blogs can give you a leg up in building traffic to your website.
A lot of these pages are actually on the lookout for people to do a guest post on their site, especially if you’ve done your research and consider yourself somewhat of an expert in your field.
If you are lucky (and persistent) enough to feature on one of these well-known blogs, their community of loyal followers will consider you legitimate and be more likely to visit your blog.
Pro Tip: Do email or social media outreach offering your guest post to relevant websites.
I Feel Pretty
Let’s backtrack for a moment and put some credibility into the most natural part of this job so far – making your blog look pretty. We are creatures of visual habit, and thanks to the booming advertising industry maintaining a monopoly on all of our senses, we can make some pretty damning first impressions when looking at images and layout of something online.
As we all know, first impressions are everything, so the more aesthetically pleasing your blog looks like from the get-go, the higher your chances of increased blog traffic.
The more professional you make your blog look, the more likely people are to take you seriously, and consider it worth their time reading what you have to say.
The key here is to remember that less is more.
While it’s hard not to go all out with the colors and the images and the font, its good to remember that people only have so many hours in the day, and the last thing they need is to be overloaded with stimulation and information.
Keeping it easy on the eye, clean and straightforward will increase your chances of getting returning page visits.
Recommended: Genesis Framework for WordPress. That’s what this blog uses.
Building A Community
We all know by now that creating and building a successful blog is just as much about the community that is helping it grow than it is the content which is making it readable.
One of the most critical aspects of a successful blog is how you interact with your readers – this will determine how quickly you grow in popularity.
A niche is usually created out of a personal passion, and a problem within that particular passion. People don’t search the internet for answers that they’ve already got – they’re looking for like-minded people struggling with the same problem so that they can better understand themselves and their issue through someone else’s expertise.
Regularly engaging with your audience and learning what it is they’re struggling with will help you define your target audience better and help you become more efficient in your quest for traffic.
If you spend your time focusing on the demographic that is best suited for your niche, helping them with the problems they are facing within that designated niche, you will only attract more people within that demographic who are looking for similar answers.
Pro Tip: Reply to every single comment and message on your blog and comment on other blogs in your niche.
Plant Where You Want To Grow
Once you’ve sorted out the layout, coding, technical analysis, statistics and all that other stuff that is a must if you want a well-oiled machine, you’ve got to rinse and repeat.
This means knuckling down on a consistent basis and producing content that your readers want to see.
Once you’ve got all your ducks in a row, there’s nothing for it but to write and publish.
Successful blogs maintain their success by being consistent about when they post and how many times they post.
Some sites, particularly news sites, publish several times a day, but typically a blog contained within a niche will require a post 2-12 times per month.
The more active you are on your blog, the more people you will attract, and the faster you will increase traffic to your site.
Your readers want to be able to rely on you for consistent content – if they know, they are getting something new often, and they will be more likely to make repeat visits to your site to see if you’ve posted again.
Slacking off and missing those regular publish dates will reduce your audience’s interest.
Quality Over Quantity
There’s a phrase in the blogging world, abbreviated to “P.E.A.C.”. This stands for Practical value, Entertaining, Awe-Inspiring, and Credible.
What this means is that the content of what you write and publish is one of the most pivotal factors in attracting a steady stream of traffic to your blog.
Your readers are taking time out of their social media platforms and working days to visit your website and have a look at what you’re writing, so it needs to be high quality.
While you may think that knuckling down and hurriedly churning out post after post is the singular way to get viewers attention, its also just as crucial to remember that they are deserving of quality content to read.
Remembering “P.E.A.C.” is an excellent place to start when thinking about how you’re going to produce an expert opinion in the niche that you have chosen to write.
It’s no good being consistent with posts every day if the quality of your content is low, uninteresting and irrelevant. Your followers are looking for something relatable, easy to read, easy to understand, but helpful – remember, your content needs to be the answer to their problem. That way they’ll keep coming back as you keep producing content as they become convinced that what you have to say is worth reading.
Go Forth
It’s a tough game out there in the blogging world, but not an impossible one.
Once you’ve started your blog, it takes grit, determination, and motivation to be consistent with the seemingly dull aspects of building and maintaining your website. It can seem overwhelming at first, but the harder you work and school yourself on what it takes and with all the right research, the easier it will become.
By applying these methods, it won’t be hard to see why they all play an essential part in slowly but surely attracting traffic to your blog. Once the hard yards are out of the way at the beginning, it primarily becomes a waiting game – instilling those practical habits that you endeavor to maintain day in, day out until you start to see those view numbers steadily increasing.
You’ll get as much out of blogging as you put in, so the more effort you put into growing and keeping a loyal, friendly community, the higher your chances are of them hanging around and become regular customers.
There are lots of ways to do it poorly, and only a few ways to do it well, so just make sure you set yourself up for success from the get-go.
