If you’re looking to grow your website or your company’s blog you should know that these days creating high-quality content is no longer enough to achieve online success. “Build it and they’ll come” might have worked when the internet started but with thousands of blogs popping up online daily, creating content without putting any effort into marketing will very likely lead to a failure.
If you want your blog to succeed, you must use multiple marketing tools and strategies to make sure people can easily find and follow your blog. Below are few tips you can use to help you in increasing blog traffic.
1. Create Niche Specific Blog. Instead of covering generic topics, pick a specific area you’re knowledgeable at. That theme needs to be specific so that you can easily maintain your focus and continue to add relevant content. A blog about weight loss, for instance, may be difficult to maintain. A blog about weight loss using herbal remedies, on the other hand, is far easier to keep going; although it is a specific topic, there are no shortage of diets utilizing herbal remedies to write about. Also, your blog will catch the attention of those who wish to lose weight utilizing herbs.
2. Keywords rule. Master them and you will master your market: This really is an extension of the preceding tip. Keyword research allows you to find out what subjects in your particular niche are trending. It is far easier to tailor your message to touch upon subjects your target market is already interested in than it is to try to convince people to be interested in what you want them to be interested in. Of course, if you are blogging about a niche of particular interest to you, this won’t prove very difficult.
3. On page SEO is crucial to your survival: Keep up with constantly changing SEO rules. It seems SEO rules are changing on a weekly basis these days, but certain things remain steady; main keyword in the post title, 2-3% density, keyword are bolded, H1 tags containing your keywords, etc. You want to make sure that your blog posts have a good mixture of keyword density and readability. The density will help search engines find and rank your blog. The readability will ensure that people actually read your posts. Don’t get so caught up in optimizing your posts that they are clunky and unreadable. On the other hand, don’t get so folksy and friendly that Google and the boys don’t see your content as relevant and worthy. Learn the rules of on page SEO and write accordingly.
4. Talk about yourself and others: Reference relevant blog posts that are related to the topics you blog about written by others. Use proper anchor text that contains keywords to create links, internal and external. Google loves relevant links, and they will help increase your authority (and PageRank) in their eyes.
5. Join blogging communities, or online communities of people interested in your niche: Blogging communities are a great way of talking about your blog and getting readers, comments and links. So are forums and other niche communities (like the ones you find on Ning). You don’t want to get spammy, though. Become a valuable contributor to the ongoing conversation, and use your signature file (for forums) or the area in which you are allowed to ask for comments on your latest post (blogging communities) to get traffic to your blog.
6. Utilize social networks: Share your blog content with your followers on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you have pictures in your blog posts (and why don’t you), Pin them on Pinterest and provide a link back to your post; allow others to re-Pin. Share your posts everywhere, socially, and don’t just stop with the networks. Open accounts at social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg, and bookmark your post. If you are using WordPress, utilize a plugin that allows your readers to share and bookmark your posts.
7. Utilize analytics: Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic and analyze to make improvements. A good analytics application not only allows you to know how many unique visitors your blog has had, but which pages get the most traffic (keyword research heaven), how long visitors stay at your posts and pages, and a wealth of other information that will help you up your game. Google Analytics is free, my friend. Use it.
These are just few ways you can increase blog traffic , there are many other tools you can use that we will cover in later blog posts. Remember that good content, plus good optimization mixed with social media will definitely boost the amount of traffic and exposure your blog will receive. So write high quality posts on a consistent basis, and use above mentioned tips and with some work you will surely see your traffic numbers continue to grow.
