14 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t have to be difficult to drive traffic to your blog. There are plenty of readers out there who are interested in what you have to say; you just have to know how to get their attention. We’ve compiled a list of fourteen ways to help you do just that! Start to implement them now and watch your blog traffic grow!

1. Be Consistent

One of the easiest ways to increase blog traffic is to post diligently! This will help condition your audience to keep coming back to read more. Not only does consistent and regular blogging inspire your blog audience to keep coming back, but it also helps build your reputation with search engines. Google, for example, pays attention to what you publish. The more consistently you put out blog content, the easier it will be for Google to understand how to rank your website. Try to publish two times a week. If that’s too difficult, then do once a week. However, if you can do more, try three times a week. Find a posting frequency that works with your schedule or budget. Then commit to that schedule.

2. Use Catchy Titles

First impressions are everything, and the title of your blog post will be your audience’s first exposure to what you’re writing about. Use a title that will capture their attention, while at the same time, clearly indicating what they can expect to read about, and the benefit(s) that they will gain from doing so.

3. Know Your Audience

If you own a painting company, it probably won’t make much sense for you to write a blog post focusing on your political opinions. In the same way, it wouldn’t make sense for a politician to blog about fashion and beauty tips, or a massage therapist to blog about car parts. Understanding your audience is crucial if you wish to drive traffic to your blog. Have a clear content strategy that’s designed to provide your audience with the information they need and want. Similarly, bouncing around from one subject to another is more likely to confuse your audience than to keep them engaged, so find your focus and stick with it.

As an example, we focus our blog content on digital marketing topics. We do bounce around between the different types of digital marketing (blogging, SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, etc.), to keep things interesting. But, almost every post will fit into the overarching theme of digital marketing. And if a post doesn’t fit into the theme, there is an extremely good reason for it. In your case, what would be the general theme and what specific topics should you write about, that fit into that theme?

4. Promote Through Your Social Media Accounts

According to an article by Medium, people spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes a day, on social media. Chances are, your audience is on social media. And if they are, it would make a lot of sense to promote your blog posts on social media. Consider regularly sharing every blog post on your own social media accounts, whether they be company or personal profiles. Also, keep in mind that there are automation tools that can make it very easy to push your posts onto social media, either automatically or with very little effort. If you choose to use an automated approach, make sure the social media posts are crafted according to best practices. To learn more about increasing engagement on social media, check out our blog post titled Increase Engagement on Social Media.

5. Use Photos & Video

Including graphics for your written posts, or short videos as a supplement to written content, is another great way to attract a larger audience. Photos can help draw your audience in, and if done right, they can also help boost SEO. Videos help to expand your reach by making you more accessible on YouTube and allowing your audience relate to you in a different way. But, if you use photos or videos, be sure to do it correctly.

One of the biggest mistakes we see with companies who are new to marketing, is improper use and acquisition of images. This can hurt with branding and can even lead to serious legal repercussions. Before you do anything with images, take a look at our blog post titled Need Images for a Marketing Piece? Follow These Do’s and Don’ts.

6. Make Your Content Readable

Pictures and videos also work to break up text sections, which help to make your blog post appear much more readable. Another simple way to do this is to add headers, numbered lists and bullet points.

Another point about having readable content is to assume your audience reads at an eighth grade level. Not sure about that? Check out this blog post by Lanternco: https://lanternco.com/creative-blogging-ideas-for-business/blog-reading-level/. There are many other articles that give this same type of recommendation, and we believe it’s sound advice.

One more tip about readability: When you write, do so in the same way you speak. For example, most people use contractions. While students are often taught not to use contractions when writing papers in school, because it’s not professional enough, that doesn’t quite hold true in blogging. The more conversationally toned you can make the blog post, the easier it will be for your audience to read it. So, write in the same way you talk. Contractions are not aren’t bad.

7. SEO

We cannot say enough about using SEO in your blog posts. Creating a keyword strategy for each post is imperative if you want to drive traffic to your blog. Choose a word or phrase that potential readers might use to find your blog post and strategically incorporate it throughout the content. It should be found in your title, a sub-heading, scattered throughout your content, and coded on the backend to at least one of the images you use. To help illustrate this, the keyword phrase we selected for this blog post is “drive traffic to your blog.”

We often come across a great blog post somewhere on the internet and think “If only they took a little extra time to do SEO, they would get so many more views.” Once you know what to do to optimize a blog post for SEO, you can easily include it into your blogging process. Please take the time to do this. We recently published a blog post that specifically talks about how to write a great blog post. You can click here to read it.

8. Collaborate With Other Bloggers

Search for other bloggers whose content and audience compliment yours. Ask if you can guest post on their blog and offer to have them do the same on yours. Building your audience is exponentially easier when you have additional people working with you toward the same goal. Additionally, guest blogging is typically a great way to get more links to your website. And that takes us to our next point!

9. Use Links

Another great way to broaden your reach is to include outbound links to other sites when you mention a product, person or business. For one thing, Google looks for this and for another, you may put yourself in a situation where the product, person or business site that you mentioned returns the favor and offers a link back to your site.

Giving links to other websites is certainly a good idea. But, make a point to try and get other websites to link back to you. This can be a tremendous way to drive traffic to your blog from third-party websites, while also enhancing your SEO. Taking it one step further, see if there are any websites that would be interested in syndicating your blog, and sharing it through their own website. For example, theBrokerList has graciously allowed us to setup an automatic feed that pushes our blog posts onto their website. All we have to do is publish the blog post on our website. Then, theBrokerList does the rest from their end.

10. Share Buttons

Let’s face it; we are a society that is heavily influenced by our peers. It stands to reason, then, that if a friend of ours shares content, we are much more likely to read it ourselves. This is why share buttons that allow your readers to promote your content on their own social media platforms are so important!

11. Run Ads

Although this method to drive traffic to your blog is not free, it doesn’t have to be expensive either. For as little as $10 you can boost a post on Facebook and increase its reach considerably. A big benefit to this is that the results are immediate, whereas generating traffic organically can take weeks or months to see benefits. Be advised, however, that running ads that don’t directly focus on selling a product or services is often considered a waste of money with a very low rate of return on investment. If you’re looking for a traditional return on investment, this might not be the best move. But, if you’re looking to grow brand awareness, or wish to focus on a more non-traditional return on investment, then this can be a great option for you.

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12. Email Marketing

Sending out regular emails is a great way to keep your audience up-to-date with all your business has going on. Rather than focusing on writing all new content for each email, consider including snippets to one or several of your blogs, with links back to your blog posts. Do you want to get started with email marketing, or improve your current email marketing process? Here are a couple great blog posts that can help:

• How to Craft an Effective Email Marketing Campaign
• How to Create an Email Marketing Funnel 

13. Conduct Giveaways

Offering your readers incentives for sharing your content via their own social media accounts is a great way to expand your reach and grow your audience. Giveaways can be products, books, services and more! If your business doesn’t have anything to give away, you might consider partnering with another business and offering to promote their product or service in exchange for them sharing your post and mentioning you to their audience.

14. Interact with Site Visitors

Lastly, be a constant, interactive presence with your audience. End your blogs with an invitation for your readers to leave a comment or answer a particular question regarding the content you wrote about. If they do leave comments, reply back to them and let them see you are truly engaged.

Some bloggers prefer not to include a comments section with their blog posts. This is true for us. However, you can still give your readers the opportunity to interact. At the end of each of our blog posts, we include a contact form, and encourage our readers to connect with us via that contact form. This is usually the last thing we say, when we finish a blog post.

Now That You Know How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog, What’s Next?

The next step in implementing your action plan, to increase your blog traffic and outreach, is to pick one or two of these tips you can do immediately! A great place to start might be setting the intention to write two blogs a week and choose the days which they will go out. Once you’ve consistently done this for a month or so, add on something else! Taking baby steps will help you to form new, business-savvy habits, without overwhelming you. Happy blogging and good luck!

Do you have questions about anything mentioned in this post? Or perhaps you simply need help with your digital marketing? If so, let us know by connecting with us via the contact form below!