Start a Blog Series: 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
/So your blog is finally live (yay!) and after the initial boost of traffic from friends and family, you may be wondering how to get more eyes on that lovely blog of yours. No worries, we’ve got ten awesome tips for you to start gaining traffic to your blog in no time!
Post regularly and frequently
Growing a readership on your blog is super hard to do if you are not following a schedule, or using an editorial calendar to guide you. When your blog goes live, people are going to have expectations. They will want to know how often they can expect to hear from you. Naturally, you want as many visitors of your blog as possible to return. A way to get people to return, and thus increase traffic to your blog is to update your blog frequently with high quality content. Some people say you should be posting 5 times per week, but honestly, it’s extremely difficult to put out high quality blog posts that are actionable and helpful to your audience every business day of the week. Kleneice and I are currently experimenting with publishing blog posts three times per week and honestly, even that gets tough sometimes. Kleneice and I personally think either two or three times per week is suitable for a new blog. No matter what frequency you choose, the main thing you want is to be consistent.
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Write a series
See what we did there? :) Writing a series (like this one!) is a great way to spark interest on your blog and prompt people to return. Everyone loves a good series, and if you’ve got a collection of related posts that can easily tie into a series, go for it. It’s natural for us to want to know what’s next. Go ahead and start a series to build the anticipation on your blog!
Write longer blog posts
How does the length of your blog posts affect the traffic to your blog? Well, this is actually related to SEO (search engine optimization). It’s every blogger’s dream for a post to land in the top results of a google search. There is a lot more to SEO than the length of your post, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on the fact that the top results on Google are easily over 1000 words, with most totaling over 2000 words (source).
It sounds intimidating at first, but to give you a quick visual, most of the posts here on Humble & Whole are between 1000-1300 words. Honestly, it’s easy to hit a minimum of 1000 words if you are producing high quality posts that provide examples, tell stories, and answer the who, what, when, where, how, and why.
Participate in a relevant Facebook group
I’m pretty sure there is a Facebook group for bloggers in every niche. There are also tons of groups devoted to new bloggers that are not niche specific. The key to using Facebook groups is to know when/how to promote your blog posts. Check the rules of the Facebook group before you start promoting your posts. Sometimes it is acceptable to link to your post in a comment if it answers a question someone has. This is my favorite kind of promotion within a Facebook group because you’re pretty much guaranteed to gain some traffic if your post is a problem-solver.
Another way to gain traffic through Facebook groups is through your presence. If you show up pretty frequently, answer questions and provide words of encouragement, people will grow curious about the helpful woman in the group and will want to know where else they can connect with you.
Some people are pretty serious about relying on Facebook for traffic and devote 1-2 hours at the start of their day to interact in their groups.
Join Pinterest Group Boards
If you’ve identified Pinterest as one of your must have platforms, then you need to make sure you join group boards. Group boards are such an effective method for driving more traffic to your blog because they expose your pins to whoever is following the group board. In most cases, that means thousands of people. The more group boards you are apart of, the better. Utilizing group boards is an easy way to get your pins in front of an audience that is much more expansive than your own. Imagine the traffic and activity you could get from being active on more than 10 group boards, each with over 1000 followers. Joining and pinning our blog posts to group boards undeniably boosted the activity on our Pinterest account and our blog.
Share excerpts of blog posts on social media
A mistake that I’ve seen a lot of new bloggers make is merely posting “new post on the blog” or something short like that to announce a new blog post without any additional information. It’s all too easy for someone scrolling through social media to overlook a new blog post announcement. When you have a new blog post that you want to promote, why not share a little excerpt of it?
Personally, I’m more likely to check out a new blog post if someone has shared an excerpt because if it’s good, I’ll want to keep reading. Something I’ve learned is that it is helpful to capture your reader’s interest by being intentional with your words. Try to build anticipation and curiosity. In your excerpt, see what happens if you don’t finish your sentence. Then try ending with a question the next time. Experiment with different kinds of teasers and see what gets the best response from your audience.
Guest post on other blogs
Some people think this tip is outdated, but Kleneice and I would kindly disagree. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a new blogger who I loved that I discovered via guest post. Guest posting is effective because it helps you get your content in front of a new audience. But the goal of guest posting isn’t just to get new eyes on your content. The goal is to get some of the host’s readers to actually check out your blog. For this reason, you should be selective about where you choose to guest post. Ideally, you would submit your content to a blog that has a similar target audience to your own so that the chances of them connecting with you and visiting your blog would be higher. Another way to get the most out of your guest post would be to provide a piece of bonus content like a checklist, resource guide, tutorial, etc. that is linked to your website to drive traffic back to your own blog.
Free bonus content
Free, bonus content has many different names in online business. You may hear it referred to as opt-ins, freebies, or content upgrades. Free, bonus content is what is added to your blog post to make it even more helpful. For example, this blog post includes a tip sheet of the ten tips for boosting blog traffic that readers can get in exchange for their email address. I made a tip sheet for quick reference so that you don’t have to read the entire blog post again to learn how to boost your traffic.
Your content upgrades can help you build a resource library on your website (like we’re doing now) and are key to building your email list for your business. If you ask for a visitor’s email address in exchange for the freebie you created, you are essentially building a mailing list of people who have shown interest in your content. But we’ll get into the specifics of the importance of a mailing list in another post. Basically, content upgrades can help boost your blog traffic because visitors are expecting to find valuable, helpful information on your blog. The more value that you provide, the more likely they are to return. People share information like freebies/bonus content/content upgrades with their friends on their social media, so always put your best foot forward (make sure your free content represents your blog’s visual branding and your brand identity).
Contribute to an online magazine
Online magazines are very popular these days, and you can find one in just about any niche! The beauty of online magazines is that they also have a lot of content to produce and will usually ask for contributions. Similar to the concept of guest posting, you want to be sure that the audience of the online magazine you contribute to is very close to your own. The underlying principle here is the same as when guest posting. You want to create an awesome, valuable, and helpful post as a contributor to spark curiosity about who you are that prompts readers to want to connect with you.
Comment on blogs larger and smaller than yours
Commenting on other blogs is a tactic that takes time and intention, but it is absolutely worth it. We all love discovering that someone has taken time out of their day to leave a comment on our blogs. Why not make someone else’s day and leave a genuine comment (something more than “nice post”) on a blog that you enjoy reading? Commenting on blogs not only helps you spread the love, but it also gives you a chance to direct traffic to your own blog.
If you decide to leave a comment on a larger blog, also look for unanswered questions posed by other readers that you could answer yourself. And the benefit of posting on smaller blogs is that the owner of the blog is more likely to check out who you are.
No matter the size of the blog, be sincere with your comments. Whenever your thoughts are helpful, further the conversation, or offer meaningful encouragement, there is a greater chance people will want to know more about you and check out your own blog.
Building an audience on your blog is something that takes time. Be patient and give yourself grace. What is your favorite way to build traffic on your blog? Let us know in the comments below :) And stay tuned for the next post in the start a blog series! We'll be talking about the commitment to blogging and what it entails.
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