The flow of blog traffic
It’s an inevitable truth. It happens to every blogger’s life. A time comes when each and every blogger faces the same issue. You have bought a domain, you set it up. You crafted your message. And finally, you started asking yourself how to get blog traffic. To get the answer to this question you must answer a few.
Why have you started blogging? Have you started blogging to serve your purpose only?
Have you started blogging only to talk about yourself? The readers want you not to talk about yourself. They want you to talk about them. Now be clear with yourself about your motive.
Before we dive into the deep of this aspect let us see why we want to start blogging. Is it for social service? Or is it to earn money? Or is it to become famous? If you want to start blogging for the third reason, you must leave it now because one cannot be famous simply by blogging.
On the contrary, a famous person can always do blogging because people will hear him. Now let us consider the other two aspects i.e. social service and earning money.
Actually, there should be no pretension about it. Honestly speaking a person does blogging for both these two reasons.
He does social service and in doing so he earns a few penny directly or indirectly. In course of blogging, he interacts with a lot of other people.
Those people come to him to get certain resources. That person helps those people to get what they want.
In course of these interactions, the visitors click certain links displayed on the blog and sometimes make some purchases also through the links. The blogger gets a commission. And the visitor sometimes purchases a few things directly from the blogger.
In that way also the blogger earns a few pennies. So there is no harm. He is not cheating. A patient visits a doctor when he gets ill.
The doctor checks him and prescribes medicine. The patient pays fees. It’s nothing wrong.
1. Follow your niche
Before you intend to start writing content, you must know your area of interest and on which topic you are an expert. If your niche is cooking you must not confuse people by writing the food habits of Mexicans. Know your niche first and then target the audience. You should know what this segment of the audience wants to read and what message you want to convey to them.
2. Write a catchy headline
In some way or another, a headline is as important as the post itself or more. David Ogilvy, a well-known advertising executive and founder of the agency of Ogilvy & Mather, said “On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.”
A headline can either make or break the success of a post. It helps potential readers to decide whether to click and read further or to press the back button and move away.
While writing a headline you must take care of the following two important factors:-
- A headline is a promise and your post should deliver on that promise
- A headline should leave an unanswered question
You must understand the pain of your audience. A title should reflect this fact. Reading the title, the audience must feel an urge in their mind to click and read the article. A firm belief should grow in their mind that they are going to get their much-awaited solution to their problems or relief from their pain. A title should promise these to the readers at the outset.
3. Use keywords
Keyword is the real key to unlocking the front door of your blog. A carefully selected keyword/keyword phrase helps the reader in tracing out your blog from millions of others. It’s like a SIM Card in a mobile handset. The selection of keywords is the most important aspect of driving traffic to your blog. Proper research is to be done in order to select the most possible keyword. There are a number of tools in the market that may help in performing this work.
Search result volume and difficulty level and percentage of change in the last three months or one year are important factors in finalizing a keyword. A keyword with a high search volume and low difficulty level will mostly ensure your blog ranks higher in SERP. Long tail keywords(3+) are cheaper in terms of PPC and face less competition.
Using long tail keywords may prove worthier in getting a higher rank. The keyword or the keyword phrase should be incorporated in strategic locations in the blog or page or post.
In the title of the page, in the headline, and at the top, middle, or bottom of the content are the strategic places. A keyword also lets Google know what your blog is all about.
With this knowledge and other information, Google Search Engine will place you at the proper rank in SERP.
4. Write greener contents
In order to generate traffic for your blog, besides others, the most important aspect is the content, really good content, and green content because the content is king.
Content will be great if it takes note of the pains of the readers and solves their problems. Writing long essays on starvation is not sufficient. You will have to tell me where to get the food from.
Only then the readers will read your post and incline towards your blog.
5. Incorporate image
An image in a blog post makes the post far more appealing. SEO can also be boosted by including keywords on the photo as an alt-image tag.
Extreme precaution is to be taken while selecting an image for your post because there will be chances of violating copyright laws.
However, you can select images from a few sites like clipart.com where you can easily get royalty-free images.
6. Give outbound links
Sometimes you may need to mention the name of products or services of other companies. In case you need to do this, try to give the link to the company in your post.
7. Give social sharing buttons
The news of the posting of your new content should spread all around as much as possible. This will ultimately boost your traffic. For this, you must add social sharing buttons at the start and at the end of any post.
8. Invite guest contributors
You can ask others to write for your blog. If they agree, your blog will get more content in a given time. The new posts will certainly boost traffic for your blog.
They may also ask you to write for their blog. This will create a new readership avenue for you. This mutual exchange of interest will boost traffic on both sides.
9. Inncorporate videos
A video alongside written content is very powerful in winning over the mind of the readers. Hence it has the ability to boost the traffic to your blog.
10. Invest in promotion
Judge your audience. If you find this group of audience is spending time on Facebook then you can also spend some amount on Facebook-sponsored posts. Without spending too much you can boost your post significantly.
11. Write a guest post
Try to find out a few blogs which reach your target audience. Request them to publish your post. Though it will not be that easy initially and will take time. but after some time if they find your content really useful to them, they will start publishing your post.
This will give you much-needed backlinks which will help establish the domain authority of your blog.
12. Share through an electronic newsletter
It does not become convenient for the readers to read your post on a regular basis. You can do one thing. You can share with them the first paragraph of your post through your electronics newsletter leaving a link for them to read the rest on your blog. These will help you to get your subscribers to remain engaged in your blog.
13. Make your post pleasure reading
Remaining engaged in reading a 1500 to 2000 worded post is not easy. Note this point and take care to make your post a pleasure to read. Sometimes you may feel drudgery. Unfortunately in your content, this will be reflected. So be careful. Be funny (but not light) and humorous while writing your post. Besides using images and videos, you can also use subheads, bullets, and number lists to make your post more read-worthy. You can prop up your ideas by citing a few examples. But in doing this, avoid being off-the-point.
14. Use RSS feed
Get subscriptions of the visitors through the RSS feed. This will give you an idea about the response you are getting.
15. Read readers’ comment
Encourage readers to make comments after reading your post and you make it convenient for yourself to reply to those comments. This will give you the opportunity to remain attached to the thoughts of the readers.
16. Conduct giveaway event
Make things memorable. Arrange for some giveaway events on a day once in six months. These events offer prizes to the readers for comments or for sharing your link via social networking sites. You can invite sponsors for these prizes or you can offer these prizes yourself.
17. Optimize page loading time
It is one of the important factors. A page should not take longer than 3 seconds to load. A visitor will not wait long for your page to load. If it takes a long time, he will press the back button and switch over to the next site in the SERP. If you want to know your site speed visit Google Pagespeed Insights Tool. It will give you the speed score and also recommendations to improve the page speed.
18. Optimize the page on mobile
Mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017. So working on your blog on a mobile handset is very important. Nowadays modern users spend three hours on mobile or tablet on average. Considering this, it is imperative that your page be mobile-friendly. You can take the help of the WPtouch Mobile Plugin to optimize your blog for mobile devices.
19. Socialise
In order to get traffic for your blog you will have to make some public relations and you will have to team up with other blogs of your niche. You may exchange ideas and backlinks.
20. Comment on other sites
Devote a small part of your time to reading the post published in other blogs of your niche on a regular basis. Comment on those posts. In this way, you will start building a community for yourself. Remain active in these communities and make efforts to grow those. You will have ideas about what the readers are looking for. This information will be helpful to you next time you start writing a new post.
21. Write in a conversational tone
Do write in a conversational tone in the second person as if you are talking to your friend who is sitting next to you. Avoid using an authoritative tone. Nowadays even a street beggar hates to be dictated.
22. Use a tell-a-story approach
Neither you are the School principal nor the judge of a court. Tell the entire thing in a storytelling tone. The readers will remember it. Otherwise even after reading several times they may find it difficult to grasp.
23. Mention influencers in your post
You are a newbie in blogging but there will be few who have established bloggers in your niche. In your next post, you can link posts written by established bloggers.
This will provide additional insight and complement your post. Inform that influencer about this. But take care you do these only if it appears natural and relevant.
24. Interview an influencer
You can invite the so-called influencers in an interview (online or offline) as a part of the relationship-building process. you can introduce this influencer to your followers. The influencer will share his experience with his followers. This will certainly increase your recognition among new people. As a result, you will start getting traffic for your blog.