7 Proven Techniques on How to Get Traffic to Your Blog

Nowadays having a blog is very common because it’s so easy to build one. Without any programming skills, you can start a blog with platforms such as the popular WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and many more. While it’s easy to start up, building a successful one requires much of your time and efforts. Any successful site will need traffic to it, which then drives leads and conversions. So how to get traffic to your blog that are targeted and high-converting?

I believe anyone who owns a site would love to know how to increase website traffic. For new starters, I always get never-ending questions like “how to get traffic to my website?”, “how should I be driving traffic to my website?” etc.

There are tons of ways you can do that but you may not have the resources to do all of them. It is also not time-effective to do all of them. You need to focus on a few and do them well. Below I will list out and share all the effective traffic driving methods that I use to get blog traffic.

#1 - Optimize Your Blog for SEO

how to get traffic to your blog

I know there are a lot of debate going on whether to write contents for humans or for search engines. I want to take this opportunity to voice out that you should always be writing readable content for humans, but at the same time do your part to optimize it in such a way that Google loves them.

Organic traffic are highly-targeted traffic as you only optimized the search terms that your content is targeting for. For example if your blog post is about female shoes, you may wish to optimize for high-heeled female shoes, red color female shoes etc.

Here are some resources you can refer to increase traffic to your blog.

#2 – Enter the Social Media Arena

There’s no need for me to emphasize how important social media is. Look at Facebook, they have more than 1 billion users. Twitter has over 280 million users while Google Plus has more than 300 million per month. There are still tons of social channels which add up to driving billions of traffic.

How to Get More Blog Traffic From Social Media Platforms?

When you have great quality content you can hook up and leverage on connections that have huge followers and fan-base. With them sharing your content to their audience, there is unimaginable amount of traffic your blog would be gaining.

Start connecting with users and following those who are in similar industry as yours. A good tool to do that will be FollowerWonk. Share your own content, share the expert’s content. Every content with superior quality has a chance to go viral and get re-shared.

Be proactive by interacting with the community and audience. Earn your trust and make a positive impression for others by consistently participating and contributing. Over time, it’s almost a sure thing that your followers will grow and that will drive traffic back to your blog.

#3 – Guest Blogging

Increase blog traffic

Guest posting is a great way to earn trust, authority and build your brand. When you guest post on other blogs, it not only just earn you links from your Author Bio but also helps to drive traffic back to your site.

How to increase blog traffic through guest posting?

· The first step is to look for blogs or sites that are related to your niche. After you have shortlisted a list of them, go through their blog posts to roughly get an idea of what kind of content the audience loves. A shortcut will be to look for the “Most Popular” tab or section if the blog has it. Those content are usually with the most comments and social shares.

  • If you are just starting out with a relatively new blog, it may be rather challenging for bloggers to accept your guest post. When you are new, this means your followers are little and that doesn’t entice bloggers to contribute a post to your site either.
  • Do not get discouraged because that’s how things work. Be persistent, continue to look for other opportunities while at the same time grow your content and followers. You will find that when your profile and experience grows, you will have more guest post requests accepted and that’s where you can have another shot at those who rejected you the first time round.
  • It is always helpful to include some links to the guest posts you have done on other blogs in the past in your guest pitch. Even a screenshot will do. This will help the bloggers to understand your writing ability and higher chance for them to accept your requests.
  • Use tools such as BuzzSumo to get more ideas of the contents that are largely loved and shared by audience. The tool can help you discover more opportunities in social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Linkedin.

#4 – Authoritative Blog Commenting

How to get blog traffic

If you already have a blog, you should know that there are spam comments almost everyday right? Most of them just want a link back to their products or services.

However if you want to build yourself an authoritative brand, it’s not the links that matters. It’s how you contribute, value-add and get people to notice your blog.

How to get blog traffic by commenting on other blogs?

Just go to any popular blogs that are related to your industry and have a read at their blog posts. Normally with popular ones, you can find quite a number of comments after the article. Most of them will be something like ‘Good job John, that was really a great article!’. Needless to say, that was some lazy commenting and nobody will pay attention to it.

However if you could add on some value to the article by providing some additional tips, advice or mini-case study, that comment will stand out from the rest and will draw the audience’s attention to it. When they wish to find out more about who you are and what you do, you will be driving good traffic to your blog.

So again if you can leave an insightful and helpful comment, it will certainly siphon some of the blogger’s site traffic to yours. Who knows if the audience enjoy your content more than that blogger’s, they might just follow you instead from then on!

#5 – Participate and Be Active in Q&A Sites

How to get more blog traffic

This is an often overlooked and underrated method on how to increase traffic to your blog. Everyday there are estimated thousands of people who are hungry for information asking questions on Q&A sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers, Stack Exchange and many more.

So how to get more traffic to your blog by participating in those Q&A sites?

Those sites are actually great platforms where you can establish yourself as an expert. However you should not be answering any kind of questions asked on the sites. Rather you should selectively choose those questions that you think you can provide value to the community and in turn drive traffic back to your blog.

Here is a short guide on what you should look out for when answering questions on the Q&A sites.

  • Good visibility for the questions. You would want to answer questions that constantly have traffic to them. For example, you may find some questions which are related to your industry ranking very well in search engines for certain search queries/keywords. You would want to try answering them as the search engines will constantly send traffic to it when people are searching for answers.
  • Look for high stats of the questions on the Q&A sites. Questions that are popular should have high view stats, so you would want to answer the questions as they will provide high visibility too.
  • You may find some questions are frequently asked but the answers presented are not as complete or as comprehensive. You can take this chance to show your expertise by providing some value-added insights, this means that your answers could be relatively longer too.
  • Another strategy when answering questions is to look for those which you already have blog posts on. So when you attempt to answer the questions, try to provide good insights but at the same time don’t provide the complete answer. Instead provide a link to your blog post so that users can click and visit your blog for the complete information.
  • For all answers that you provide for the questions, try to leave your signature at the end of the answer with a link back to your blog. For example:

John Louis
The Expert in Social Media
www.YourBlog.com

Although the link may not be dofollow in most cases, people will be interested in what you have in your blog after reading your insights thus driving traffic to your site. Just always remember to provide relevant value and you will definitely get some loyal audience from these sites.

#6 – Create Powerful Lead Magnets

How to increase traffic to your blog

If you think that when visitors come to your site they will come back to visit again automatically, you may be wrong.

While it is true for some cases, this is not going to happen for all of them. Why? Because the internet is full of information that distracts people from somewhere to another.

How to get traffic to your blog with lead magnets??

To keep your audience coming back for more, you have to get them into your subscriber lists. It is important to capture leads so that you can email them whenever there’s an interesting blog post or when you need some feedback etc. To let your visitors give away their email address, you got to give them something that is so attractive that they are willing to do so. These are called lead magnets and below I will go through some of the most powerful ways you can create them.

  • Content upgrade at the end of your blog post. This is one of the most effective methods to capture leads. However this is also very resource consuming as you will need suitable and ‘upgradable’ content to attract your audience.
  • Discount/Promo codes. If you are selling digital or physical products on your blog, you can set up opt-in forms to collect emails. In exchange, you will offer your subscribers a discount coupon or time-limited promo code for the items they are interested in. This works really well as your subscribers think you are doing them a flavor and helping them to save money.
  • Cheat sheet and ultimate list. People respond very well to cheat sheets and ultimate lists so they can be effective lead magnets. They are somehow different to short guides and reports, in fact they are short and to the point. For example, the list can be something like ’10-Step Checklist to Step Up a Successful Blog’.

#7 – Buy Blog Traffic

This is a method that you will see marketers seldom do. One of the reasons is that you need money and resources to make the campaigns successful. However if resources are used correctly and effectively, it can help in driving traffic to your website consistently.

Use Facebook to Drive Quality Traffic

Recent years, many businesses are getting into this popular social platform to advertise their products and services. There are no signs of advertising activities slowing down for Facebook. In fact, it’s forecasted that more and more businesses will enter into this area in a bid to increase their traffic and revenue.

Buy blog traffic

How to use Facebook to get traffic to your blog?

Besides advertising on the platform to gain eyeballs on your services and products, you can even use Facebook ads for getting Facebook likes, increasing opt-in leads, boosting your page content etc. But the better ROI to use the ads would be getting traffic back to your site because that’s your own property while Likes and Fanpage still belong to Facebook.

Here are some of the advantages why you want to use Facebook ads to get more blog traffic:

  1. You can set your own targeting based on geographical locations, gender, timing, salary ranges, similar interests etc. This makes the ads very relevant and targeted, thus those that visit your blog after seeing your ads will be quality traffic.
  2. Retargeting ads are possible with Facebook. The purpose of retargeting ads is to increase your brand awareness and target those people who came to your blog before. This is mostly done to turn them into potential customers. 
  3. Enable you to get more email subscribers. You can’t expect a visitor to become your customer straightaway the first time he lands on your site. The best way to increase ROI is to try getting him into your email list and start building relationship by offering them great value content first. When they trust you and believe that your products can help them, it will be easier to market to them.

I hope that you have digested the above ways to get more traffic to your blog. Those are some of the kick-ass methods to really drive tons of traffic to your site. Although there are still so many techniques out there, I always believe you should focus on only a few of them and do them well. Once you see results from them, you can outsource them and expand into other methods. Most importantly, plan and take massive action!

 

Daniel Su