Why Increase Blog Traffic
Many people run blogs for the purpose of their monetization. Getting more traffic significantly increases the chances of generating a decent income out of your website, let alone new professional opportunities, bigger outreach, authority and more.
That’s why bloggers are always eager to increase their traffic and find new sources. But traffic is not something solid, it comes from different places, and to increase it, you’ll need to understand how it works.
How to Drive Traffic to a Blog
There are many ways to get blog traffic, starting from the type of content you create, up to using different SEO and other social media marketing techniques. In this article, we look at six traffic sources you can use to achieve your goals.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic traffic comes from search engines, and not through backlinks to your website from other domains. For example, someone is looking for a good travel agency in London and they don’t know if it exists at all. They type a word or collocation in the Google search field and get different links, and by clicking on these links, they bring organic traffic, except for ads placed on top of search engine results.
If you take a look at the picture below, you will see the sign “Ad” on the left of links. Such traffic is called “paid,” and we’ll refer to it later:
Organic traffic is very important for blog promotion as it natively brings new people to get acquainted with your product or service. It is one of the best traffic sources, and the more you have it, the higher you rank on search engines.
Boosting organic traffic requires a lot of SEO work, including building backlinks, optimizing your website, enriching content with relevant keywords and so on. Here is a little help for you to start building up relationships with Google.
Backlinks From Other Websites
A backlink is a link to your website placed on another domain. Backlinks positively affect your PageRank, if they come from reputable sources. To increase this kind of traffic, think about creating a good article that will naturally bring backlinks. After working on content, try to implement the following techniques:
- Find the sites in your niche that have broken links to the sources they are referring to. Inform them politely and suggest posting a link to your website instead.
- Visual content is users’ favorite. Infographics are shared more often than usual text content. Create nice images, generate a shareable link and embed code so that it could be easily inserted into someone’s post or article. Thus, you will likely get high-quality backlinks in a short span of time.
- Google sites that welcome guest articles. Don’t forget to attach the links to your social network accounts and blog so that people can track you. For example http://www.theuktravelguide.co.uk/:
- Follow your competitors’ activity. Analyze what sources they get more backlinks from (make use of special monitoring tools).
- Build up internal links. It increases PageRank and allows people to easily navigate on your blog. Remember to keep the most relevant materials one-click away from the home page.
- Seek bloggers making roundup posts. Perhaps, they would be interested in you next time.
- Offer to write testimonials for the products and services you use and reach out to manufacturers. If your review is nice, they will be likely to publish it, and you will receive one more backlink.
- Email influencers and journalists from your niche and offer cooperation.
- Find sites that accept donations and link back in gratitude.
- Look for an interview opportunity, especially if there is a chance to make a follow-up post.
Having built a certain amount of links, don’t forget to keep track of them and check if they are not broken every once in a while. You can easily automate this process with backlink checkers.
Social media traffic
This is another important traffic source. By increasing blog traffic coming from social networks, you are going to get a constant flow of visitors to your site, as today people tend to communicate, read news and even do business on social media.
To stay on top, make sure you are personally engaged with everything that’s happening on your social media channels. Get things under control by following these simple steps to boost traffic:
- Use visual content, it always attracts attention. Some networks are dedicated to visual content, and you can easily increase blog traffic with Pinterest or Instagram. Why don’t you take advantage of this niche opportunity and make an account there?
- Use keywords in the content as well as image captions.
- Be consistent in your postings.
- Analyze your competitors’ most successful tactics to implement them and increase blog traffic this way.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic comes in different ways: when you type in the domain address right in the address bar, when you open a link contained in an email, Whatsapp message or other apps, when you bookmark a website and more.
Direct traffic is considered valuable, as it comes from people who are already interested in you, and its percentage in the total amount of traffic is important for your website ranking.
One of the best ways to increase traffic on the blog is to provide it with a catchy name. Most visitors will type it right in the address bar without even googling.
Paid Traffic
As the name suggests, paid traffic comes at a price. There are various sources of paid traffic, such as:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. You’ll be charged for each click on your ad. Find more about the best pay per click networks in this article.
- Pay Per Display (PPD) advertising. You pay for how many times the ad is shown to the visitors.
- Fixed payment advertising. Thus, you can buy some space for a certain time on a particular site.
When preparing an advertisement campaign, take into account your target audience: location, gender, interests and other demographic data. All of this helps you appeal to relevant needs and get more responses. However, paid traffic is tricky. It does not guarantee a good conversion rate.
Remember, if you fail to entice someone to stay on your site, your bounce rate will increase and it will result in poor ranking. Don’t also forget to buy mobile traffic as it’s crucial in our era of smartphones.
Newsletters
Even though email marketing is considered an old-fashioned technique, it is still able to boost your traffic. First of all, you need to build an email list and then send out newsletters. Try to make them as catchy as possible so people want to click on the links you’ve inserted inside.
This is a good way to establish loyal relationships with people who are wittingly interested in your content and build them up with those who may have accidentally lost you.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Never forget to watch your back. By analyzing your competitors’ successes and failures, you’ll come to many significant conclusions about your prospects, risks, strategies to increase traffic on the blog, potential blunders and many more.
Choose the most successful representatives from your niche and do your own research.
Closing Thoughts
There are many different sources of website traffic, and you should address as many aspects as possible to grow your business. Even though some people negatively view paid traffic, it is widely used for blog promotion. As busy as you are with your own blog, remember to keep an eye on competitors, as getting insights to the root of their success can do a good job.
Implementing different techniques at the same time may bring you lots of traffic, and a good income as a result.