Increasing blog traffic is one of the major concerns of bloggers. After all its one of the important measure of your blogging success. Increasing blog traffic was one of the first articles i read online and it feels really good to write something about that i have learned over time.
To summarize the entire post in few words, I believe the major contenders in increasing blog traffic are your blog posts frequency (quality post with proper SEO) and posting timings. These few factors play the vital role in driving traffic to your blog.
And yea, consistency is a backbone too! So lets start with our exciting list of the top 20 ways by which we can boost our blog traffic.
1-Starting Off- Choosing Your Blog Platform
This can play a huge role in your blog's future performance and in determining your blogging success. Many top bloggers often use their own custom content managing systems. This means that they wont be using the popular blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger and instead, they would make out their own blogging system, with posting tools, their own set layout of blog, their own custom commenting system etc.
This can be tricky for the beginners. So for this purpose, most recommend to use the popular content managing systems like WordPress, Blogger, Typed etc.
Just to know, there is nothing like perfect blogging platform. Its basically about fulfilling your needs. Some might be satisfied with Blogger and some with Typed/WordPress. So it depends. The posts below would better help you out in using one for yourself.
So find out which one suites you best and then move on.
2-Make Your Blog As a Sub domain Of Your Website
As blogs are getting popular due to the way they present information and their interactive nature, many websites (companies) opt in for making a blog for them self too. Notice how we have
Facebook blog or Twitter blog.
The whole point of the story is that in case we own a website already and we wish to proceed with having a blog too, then its a wise idea to get register your blog as a sub domain of your website. Why to start all over all with your blog?
Having a blog as a
sub domain in (
blog.yourwebsite.com) would help out your website in gaining more visitors in future (as blogs attract a lot of traffic due to their interactive nature and the way they are updated regularly, unlike a website).
The page rank of your website (the
Google ranking authority), that you have already gained over the years would flow toward your newly build blog and make flourish faster as it would if it had a separate domain name. (
www.yourblog.com)
Say if you are just starting out with a blog and you don't have a website history, then you obviously would start out with an independent blog domain.
3-Proper SEO For Your Blog And Every Individual Post
Posting with consistency over a long period of time would give you success, in terms of traffic, loyal readership and revenue. But that's not it. 1000s of posts with wrong search engine optimization (SEO) would not help at all.
We want every post to go out in the competition and rock the world. For that, its a wise idea to choose proper title tags or your blog and post pages. The following two articles would help you out acheive this.
To summarize the Title strategy, its a wise approach to make your blog post title appear in the following order: (post name | blog name) e.g ( How to make money online | Mybloggertricks ). Choose proper keywords, that are friendly to human eye and are not just for the search engines.
4-Show Yourself Authoritative Even If Your Are Newbie
This might feel odd but its just how many top bloggers started off. No one in the world is perfect when they first launched their blog. So say you blog about cricket. And as i mostly say, that one could never get blogging success if hes not passionate about the topic he writes on. So its the first test you have to put yourself in.
Consider that you are a huge fan of cricket and know quite a bit about it. So as you blog along, you read more articles online related to cricket and then you share your knowledge with your readers in a way that you already knew it. So present what you know in a way that you know it well. Thats the main point i wanted to make here.
It doesn't mean that you spread out wrong information (as you are a newbie). Its just that learn along and present it wisely.
5-Participate In The Community (Forums, Blogs)
This can be helpful to some extent. But i also believe that many beginners get distracted with this strategy and loose focus on the posting frequency part (that is the basics). Consider a news paper company. Take
NewYork Times just for an example.
News paper is kind of a blog, that is updated regularly (on daily basis). If you would get a newspaper the next morning with old news, would you consider having it again? Even if we consider that the NewYork Times were busy in making relationships with other bloggers, newspapers and community to increase their scope.
The content is what people come to your blog. So do participate in blogs commenting systems (blogs of your choice, relevant to your niche) but schedule a time limit for it in your entire day plan. May be an hour or so. I personally don't do it on regular basis (to be honest. I try to focus on developing content for my blog).
To find blogs in your relevant niche, say you blog about dogs food, then search in Google like, Top dog foods. That would bring a lot of blogs up. Start following them and participate.
6-InBound And Out Bound Linking
Linking content is really important too. Though this might not directly increase your traffic, but this would indeed increase your page rank (as discussed before) and then would bring quality search engine traffic for sure.
In bound linking is basically when you link your post with some other post on your blog. Notice how i shared other old relevant post that were shared on
Mybloggertricks in the past. This is inbound linking. You can directly mention old posts like (you might also like bla bla) or make the link within the sentence. Take an example of the next sentence.
It is always important to know
How To Inter-link Pages Smartly To Flow The PR Juice To Ever Single Page!. See? You can make the link part of your sentence too. Its works the same. In this way, the page rank that your present post have gained would flow to these linked posts, resulting them to get higher ranked in search engines.
7-Increasing Post Frequency With Guest Bloggers
There is a limit to the number of posts that you can mange to write in a single day. May be 3-4 maximum. So why not to take help of other guest authors that would help you out in the process. This is the general idea. But to note, you wont be getting any guest bloggers in your early blogging days and no one would feel like posting and associating them selves with a newbie blog.
So you have to do the initial hard work of posting regularly (or you can hire paid bloggers too) and then seek on guest bloggers.
8-Posting Timings
Hell important. Take on an example of this blog. There is nothing to hide guys. We feel like sharing our experience through these posts. :)
So now days i normally publish posts around 11-12am. (which makes up 8-10am in US, from where most of the internet traffic lands on). This is the time where most of the people check on blogs (as per stats). I may visit
mybloggertricks in my office once a day, and if there is no new content (even if the authors would post later in the day, i wont get to read it).
So its wise to publish out the article when most of the people tend to read it. So coming back to timings, when ever i get late in post, we tend to see a decrease in the Alexa rank! So posting on right timings would increase it dramatically.
9-Consider Using Ads When You Get Setup
Imagine a blog with no or less traffic is full of ads. What impression would that give? A clean blog with clear cut content gives out a more positive feel. That doesnt mean you should not monetize your blog, but i believe that as due to the low traffic, the Ads wont make you any considerable money, so why not to give a clean look to blog until you get some loyal traffic.
That would be the time to introduce the Ads.
10-Always Talk Hot!
Many of the readers here at MBT shared their views that how we published a post on Christmas Gadgets. Christmas is near so why not to talk about it? Its hot. This is one of the strategies of flowing traffic towards your blog. There is nothing to hide. Thats how the world of blogging works.
In fact this is what blogging is. What if a SEO blogger doesn't tell the top blogging techniques to their visitors? So if there is a particular dog disease out in the world, and you blog about dogs, do write about it.
11-Content Layout- Addition of Pictures/Media
The recent version of this plugin almost covered everything for WP SEO. You can now have even more easy interface and setting for your website. It has many SEO features, but some of them are following:
