Want to learn how to increase blog traffic and reach an even bigger audience than ever before?
Instead of sitting and waiting for traffic to come to you, you can utilize many different blog marketing strategies to grow your blog. The great thing about blog marketing is that there are countless opportunities when it comes to promoting your content.
We’ve compiled some of our favorite ways of increasing blog traffic in this post and we guarantee that if you invest some time into them, each one will help you attract blog traffic.
Steps to take before increasing blog traffic:
Before trying any of our methods for increasing blog traffic, you should first ensure that your articles are set up for success.
Here’s how you should prep your articles for success:
1. Write quality content
The truth is, you’re not going to be able to increase your blog traffic if your content is no good, so make sure you output quality content!
When your readers come to your website, they expect to gain some sort of value from it. If you think about it, people work because money has value. People go to concerts because entertainment has value.
So what kind of value will your blog bring to a reader? Well, that’s for you to determine before you hit the publish button.
As long as your post can bring some sort of value to your audience, your post is on the right track!
2. Choose your titles wisely
Make sure you optimize your post titles for traffic so that people will actually click on your links when you promote. Bad titles don’t get clicks while well-crafted titles do because they stand out from the rest. It’s especially important to stand out in this day in age because of how much spam we get.
3. Check for grammatical errors
Grammar mistakes are embarrassing. What if you wrote a sentence that doesn’t make sense? That could be the difference between a reader staying or leaving. It’s good to double or even triple-check your writing before you start going around sharing it. You can use Grammarly to check your grammar.
4. Track your blog
Setting up tracking on your website will enable you to see how much traffic you’re actually getting on your blog.
Simply use Google Analytics to track your blog and then regularly check blog traffic by viewing your dashboard.
Once you’ve obtained your Google Analytics tracking code, you can use the Monster Insights WordPress plugin to implement it on your blog. This plugin prevents Google from tracking your own page views so that you get the most accurate results!
If you’ve accomplished all of the tasks above, you’re now ready to start generating lots of traffic on your blog!
How to increase blog traffic – 14 Methods:
1. Share content with your personal network
When we think of increasing blog traffic, we usually get so caught up in using social media or promotional methods that we forget to promote our blog through the followers that are already loyal to us—our friends and family.
If you ask your friends and family to promote your blog posts, we’re sure they’d be more than happy to!
This small amount of traffic should help you jump-start your blog traffic even a little bit and get people talking about your blog.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you really want to increase blog traffic, then you’ll need to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). It’s undeniably one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog
SEO helps you create a more sustainable blog by enabling you to rank on search engines (ie. Google) for phrases that your audience is searching for.
For example, if you wrote an article on “How to Train Your Dogs,” then ideally, you want to show up on the first page of Google when someone searches for “How to train dogs.” If you rank on the second or third page, you likely won’t get very much traffic because nobody will be able to find your article.
If you optimize your posts for search engines, you can expect them to rank high on the search results page and bring you tons of organic traffic. If you choose to ignore SEO, your posts will be buried deep within the search results and nobody will ever find your posts.
Learn more about SEO in our SEO for Bloggers guide. Using this guide, you’ll rank for hundreds of new keywords within months!
3. Use Pinterest!
If you’re not using Pinterest, you’re missing out on a TON of traffic.
Aside from SEO, Pinterest is currently our second favorite way to increase blog traffic. The platform has become a consistent and reliable traffic source for us over time.
We started using Pinterest in January of 2018 and now it’s bringing me hundreds of visitors and sometimes over a thousand visitors to our site every day. The numbers are increasing daily!
If you’re interested in setting up a Pinterest account, we highly recommend that you purchase the Pinteresting Strategies course by Carly from mommyonpurpose.com. She shows you the Pinterest strategy she uses to consistently drive over 250,000 page views to her blog every month! Since we started using her strategy, I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of Pinterest followers, pin shares, and pageviews on our own blogs.
Looking for free tips? We’ve got your back. Check out these resources to help you start your Pinterest account:
- How to Get 728 Repins On Pinterest In Just 2 Weeks
- Pinterest Group Boards: How to Get 15+ Invites In Just 2 Weeks
4. Enable push notifications
Push notifications are one of the hottest ways to increase blog traffic by bringing visitors back to your website with the push of a button.
You’ve probably seen push notifications on a few websites yourself lately. It’s simply a prompt that asks if you want to receive notifications from a website. If you click “allow,” you will receive a notification in your browser right away whenever the site makes a new post. The site can also send you custom messages.
You can definitely utilize push notifications on your blog to connect with your readers as well!
If you’re using WordPress, you can use the OneSignal – Free Web Push Notifications plugin to get started with push notifications.
Simply create an account and follow the instructions they provide and they’ll get you all set up with push notifications in no time! It takes approximately 20 minutes.
5. Join Facebook groups
Did you know Facebook has groups for practically every niche?
Whether you’re into health and fitness, cooking, travel, technology, or any other industry, there’s a group out there for you. You just have to find it.
Joining a group that allows you to post your blog links will give you access to the members of that specific group for promotion. Some groups have hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of members that you can target with your blog posts. These groups will help you increase blog traffic.
We like to promote our content on multiple Facebook groups whenever we write a new blog post!
The only catch is that most groups have rules that you need to follow. You might only be able to post links from your blog on certain days.
Based on a little bit of analytics research Marie from Girl Knows Tech conducted using UTM parameters, she found that the Boost Your Blog Facebook group brings her the most traffic out of all of the groups she’s involved in. See the image below.
Girl Knows Tech – Facebook Group UTM Parameters
You can check out her article on How to Analyze Facebook Groups Visitors with Google Analytics to learn how to track Facebook group traffic for your blog too.
One important thing to remember when you join Facebook groups is to be respectful to other members. That means you don’t want to overly promote your blog posts because it’s spammy and will drown out what other people are trying to share. You’ll probably get kicked out of groups for that.
Try to comment and share other people’s posts too.
6. Collect subscribers and push out newsletters
Collecting newsletter subscribers is one of the best ways to increase blog traffic. Having a list means you can send your subscribers emails to let them know when you publish new posts.
You can use an opt-in form like this to collect subscribers:
MailChimp is an excellent email marketing tool you can use to manage your email lists for free (up to 2,500 subscribers).
To integrate MailChimp into your blog, we recommend using a premium plugin called Convert Plus. This plugin is a one-time purchase and has similar features to other tools that you would normally pay more than $20/month for. It’ll let you create beautiful subscription forms that you can add to your posts, widget bar, or even have as a pop-up.
Some tips for maximizing newsletter sign-ups:
- Try to include a form on each page so that people can sign up and receive your updates from anywhere on your blog. This can be done via a popup or widget bar opt-in form
- Be sure to include a captivating headline in your opt-in form! Just putting “subscribe to our newsletters” doesn’t really make people want to subscribe. Instead, offer a freebie to your readers to give them the incentive to subscribe
Keep collecting subscribers because one day, your newsletters are going to be one of the top blog promotion methods that will increase your blog traffic and blog income!
7. Answer questions and build a reputation on Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer site that many people use to gain and share knowledge. It’s a great place to build your reputation and promote your content!
As you can see from the image above, I’m pretty active on Quora having provided answers to 81 different questions. You can also see that our answers have a total of 56,600 answer views so far! 5,800 from this month alone.
If you know a lot about your niche, you can provide in-depth answers to other people’s questions and include links to your blog posts to receive traffic.
The cool thing about Quora is that your answers stay on Quora forever after you answer one person’s question, someone else might look for the same question in the future and find your answer.
Neil Patel talks about how he attracted 9872 visitors in one month from Quora. So be sure to check out his strategy in his post.
Answer enough questions with detail on Quora and you too will build a really good reputation for yourself and increase blog traffic over time by linking back to your blog content.
8. Utilize Instagram hashtags and your bio link
Instagram is a social media platform that has a high reach potential. If you create a good presence on Instagram, it can become a great way to promote your blog posts.
Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags in your post description and you can use them to directly target your audience. A good way to find strong hashtags to use is by checking to see what hashtags are being used by the top influencers in your niche. Then steal those and create a list of hashtags for your own posts. You’ll notice an increase in engagement in our posts.
To further Instagram engagement, you can add multiple links to your Instagram profile. Check out our post on How to Add Multiple Links to Your Instagram Profile. It’ll teach you how to advertise all the posts you think your followers will love and increase the chances of them signing up for your newsletter or sharing your article.
Also, check out Marie’s story on how she got 15k followers on Instagram! She offers excellent tips to help you engage with your audience. Since writing that post in October 2017, she now has 25k followers.
9. Add social sharing buttons to your posts
Adding social sharing buttons to your website will give your audience an easy way of sharing your content with their peers.
Rather than you doing all of the work, let your readers promote your blog posts for you! This can help you exponentially increase blog traffic.
A social sharing button plugin we like to use is called Social Warfare. It adds hovering social media sharing icons to all of your blog posts and lets your audience share your posts via Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn. These are some of the most common sharing platforms.
Another great tool for getting more repins on Pinterest is the Pinterest “Pin It” Button plugin. When it’s enabled, your readers will have the option to pin your photos when they hover over them.
10. Schedule automatic posts on social media
Scheduling your posts for your various social media accounts will help you save a ton of time, which can then be used for other important things like writing more content and promoting your blog posts.
For automatically scheduling Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts use Buffer. For Pinterest and Instagram posts, use Tailwind.
Both of the above are amazing, free tools you can use to help you automate your social media accounts. They also offer premium services, so be sure to check them out to see if they can offer you any value.
To make auto-scheduling even easier, you can also download their official Google Chrome extensions so you can schedule posts from any page with the click of a button.
11. Internal link to your other posts
Internal linking simply adding a link to your article that points to another link on your website.
Think about it, if you start adding internal links to all of your blog posts, your readers may end up reading multiple articles in one visit! This is a no-brainer strategy for increasing blog traffic.
It’s a common technique used among bloggers and is used to increase the number of page views per visit. Ideally, you want your readers to stay on your blog longer right?
Adding internal links is simple. Most often your posts will relate to one another, so all you have to do is add links to all your blog posts that lead to your other blog posts. Do this enough on your blog and your posts will end up promoting one another and it will grow your traffic significantly!
You’ll notice a lot of internal links on this post leading to our other posts.
12. Use Flipboard to curate your posts
Flipboard is a content curation app that collects popular content from social media, news feeds, and other websites and displays them in a magazine-style format.
The app allows readers to follow their favorite topics of interest and then flip through articles in those categories.
If you create an account, you have the power to create your own magazines and publish your own content on them to start collecting readers.
Harsh from ShoutMeLoud shows how he was able to get 3,000+ visitors in one day just by using Flipboard to drive traffic. Be sure to check it out.
13. Engage with users on Twitter!
Twitter is a platform that lets you easily engage with others and join conversations by tagging people and using hashtags.
Twitter Tip #1
A great way to promote yourself and get others to promote you at the same time is by tweeting a link to one of your posts and then tagging everyone that’s involved in that blog post. So, if you linked to 3 other websites in your post, you should tag all three of them in your tweet.
In return, the people you tagged might retweet your tweet or share your blog posts. In that case, not only will you reach your own audience, but theirs as well! Even if they don’t retweet or share your post, you’ll still get recognized and possibly form a relationship or two down the road.
Twitter Tip #2:
You can also participate in Twitter Chats to get to know other bloggers in your industry! Every day, there are designated chats that you can participate in by using the chat’s hashtag. Gabriela Cardoza has a huge list of Twitter Chats and explains a little more about them in her post!
Be sure to participate in a few chats to get your name out there to maximize your blog promotion potential!
Twitter Tip #3:
You want to stand out as much as possible on Twitter which is why you should be using Twitter Cards. Twitter Cards allow you to use bigger images when you tweet links to your blog.
14. Network with bloggers in your niche
Networking and becoming friends with bloggers in your niche can help you promote your blog posts in a couple of different ways.
The first way is to provide each other with blog marketing strategies. Since you’re in the same niche, it makes sense that the successful promotional tactics used by one person will work for the other as well. Sharing ideas gives you the opportunity to help each other grow.
The second way is by providing links to each other’s blog posts. You’ll find many bloggers out there that do that today. These are called “backlinks.” Exchanging links with someone will give you both the opportunity to earn each other’s audiences and obtain a higher post reach than before.
Also, from an SEO perspective, the more backlinks you have going to your blog posts, the higher the rank of your posts on Google for various keywords. To find out more about backlinks, check out Brian Dean’s Definitive Guide to Link Building. He has an entire website dedicated to helping you get more backlinks on your blog!
Conclusion
If there’s one thing we want you to take away from this blog, it’s that there is no “one” blog marketing strategy that will work effectively on all blogs. Since every blog is different, some promotion techniques may work much better in generating blog traffic than others.
If you’ve tried all of the strategies above but still aren’t getting any traffic, you’re probably doing something wrong! Our article 7+ Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Blog Traffic will help you with that.
We hope this blog post inspired you to try some new ways to increase blog traffic. It’s now your time to find out the best way to promote your blog posts!
Let me know what you think of this list in the comments and repin the image below to help teach others how to promote blog posts and find their blog promotion strategies!
