22 Important Tips to Increase the Traffic of Blog

Getting traffic on any blog is not as easy as it used to be earlier, and the reason behind this is the advanced algorithms of Google and other search engines. With every single update brought up, there is a need to move along with it and prepare the traffic-acquiring strategy without breaking any rules. For every blog, the audience is different, but the source of the traffic is mostly the same, i.e. Search Engines, Forums, etc.

To make that easy, we have listed some awesome tips that will help you to get lots of visitors in a very short span of time.

1. Creating Original Content

Content is the most important factor in the long-term success of any blog. High quality content is always preferred by visitors and it is the point that will determine whether that visitor would like to visit your blog again or not. Writing original and valuable content will always get you lots of shares, and hence the number of visitors will automatically increase without much marketing. On the other hand, poor quality or irrelevant content will tend to make visitors close the blog quickly, which will result in an increase in bounce rate.

The best way to create original content is by researching what people in your niche are looking for and how you can solve their problems through your blog posts. If you can solve a visitor’s problem, they will see you as an authority and will keep coming back for more info in that niche.

2. Creating an Action Plan

This is a complementary tip to the first one. This is intended to make your content more engaging, which will get you lots of shares and praise all over the internet. The most important thing that you should have in your mind is that no visitor should leave your blog without getting the information about what he has come. This can be done by:

• Making a full series of points that one can follow to get the results.

• A complementary Youtube video with a complete visual tutorial to help out visitors who either fail to understand something or who need a quick and clean step-by-step guide.

• A limited time task that’s going to provide results. For example, as stated in the title of this blog, you would be able to see an increase in your traffic in a month if you follow each one of the tips properly.

• Asking them to comment on the related problems they are facing, so that they can be covered in the next post in detail.

3. Write for your visitors, not the Search Engines.

With the update to Google’s algorithm, the relevancy factor of a post has become an important factor in the SERP’s ranking. The primary target of your posts should be the visitor, because it is ultimately their response that reveals the relevancy of your post. The social shares of the post are also considered as a factor in calculating relevancy. And it is only possible when visitors get what they want and are happy with it. Hence, just by stuffing keywords, you can influence your rankings, but that’s not going to work in the long-term if you are unable to produce the exact information that the visitors are trying to find. Your ultimate goal is to get visitors and be an authority in that niche. Hence, to achieve it, you need to satisfy your visitors with the quality of content they wish to read.

A full-detailed, descriptive blog post does score the best when it comes to search engine result rank. The best types of posts are ‘How to’ type tutorials that are generally long, fully explained, and step-by-step written informative posts. It is proven by various case studies that longer posts hold a clear-cut advantage in the rankings. It is observed that posts with 1000-2000 words generally do well in the rankings. Also, such posts have a better tendency to get shared on Facebook and Twitter, which also helps in evaluating the value of the blog post and hence the rank in search engine results.

It can also be noted that long but high quality content will keep visitors on that page for a longer time, and hence will increase the average time visitors spend on your site and may also decrease the bounce rate, which also plays a vital role in search result rankings.

5. Consistency – A Traffic Gainer

Regular posts on your blog are loved not only by visitors but also by search engines. The blog needs to be updated regularly in order to retain its popularity. The consistently updated blog hints at the visitors and the search engines when to come back for the newly added content. As a result, every faithful visitor of yours will keep coming back for the fresh content. No matter if the blogs are updated every week or twice a month, a schedule should be maintained according to your time and efficiency. The regularly updated blog gets indexed by the search engines much faster as it keeps your general schedule in account. However, it should be kept in mind that no matter what the number of articles you post in a week or a month, the quality should not be compromised as it is the prime factor that will decide whether your blog is useful or a piece of junk.

Some free plugins, like ‘The WordPress Editorial Calendar’, help you to schedule your posts in an effective manner. Most professional bloggers use it to maintain their posting frequency.

Images are also indexed by Google and hence can never be ignored. Appropriate and attractive images can also help you gain traffic. Along with the Web, Google also has its own image search feature, which can also be used as a traffic source.

For that, the first thing is to take care of the titles and alt tags of the photos you are going to include in your article. For example, a photo related to a SEO post should not be ‘photo15.jpg’, rather it should be something relevant like‘seo-tips-for-blogs.jpg’. The alt tag is the most important and, hence, effective words should be used. Whenever visitors check out images and see your image, there is a chance that they will click to ‘View full site’ and will land on your blog.

Also, appropriate videos come up in Google results. The link to your home page in the description will get the attention of people. As a result, you will get hits. As you keep adding posts with images and videos, they may become a good source of traffic.

Contacts with popular bloggers may help you to reach a lot of people, once they like your content. It’s very useful to be in contact with the popular and effective bloggers in your niche. You will not receive vital information from their side, but they will provide you with the exposure you need for your posts. One share of your post by an effective blogger in your niche may bring a flood of visitors as they would have relevant followers in their social contact list.

How to do it? Here is the action plan you can follow:

• Google “your keyword + blog” and list down the few top sites. They must be of great reputation and alexa rank to get an idea of their traffic. You can use plugins like ’SEO Quake’ to analyze straight from the results.

• Check out the ’About Author’ section of the highly ranked posts and the ‘Contact Us’ page of those blogs and follow their social network accounts. Try to share your best content which can be useful to them. If they like it, they may add you to their social accounts as well.

• Also, try to get an opportunity to guest-post on their blog. This is possible if you can interact with them and make them read your high-quality content. Then only they would be convinced to allow you. If you write impressive content, most bloggers will not hesitate to allow you. And you will get a nice backlink on their blogs, which will lead to amazing traffic.

8. Take advantage of popular bloggers

To build authority in your niche, you need to be acknowledged by already-reputed bloggers. Influencing strategies can help you do it. If you can create content including a blogger’s name or blog link, it’s always recommended to share the URL of your post with that blogger. This will get the attention of that blogger as anyone would like to read an article in which he is mentioned. If your work is appreciated by those bloggers, they will share your posts with many other people in that field. The shares will boost your blog post and will rank higher than they would have otherwise. Also, a link shared by a reputed blogger is liable to get further shares and a lot of traffic.

To start with this strategy, you have to research a lot about the popular posts, their authors, and the content you can write in which you can include their names and work. List down the popular bloggers in your niche and read their best posts. You can write a strategy or case study regarding their posts.

What will happen if you talk about chicken recipes with friends who are vegetarian? You will get non-sense replies, right? What I want to say is that it’s best to know about your audience and then create relevant content keeping their interests in mind. If a post solves the problem of a particular product or service, it will easily go viral among the people using those products or services. Now the point is how to identify who your audience is.

There are several services on the net to find out about the audience. One of them is Quantcast.

Quantcast is a free demographic-based tool that shows the demographic locations, age, and occupation of the users of any site. The only con to this service is that it is compulsory to put a script on your blog to check out the audience’s details.

However, Alexa.com can also provide you with the data of sites. You can upgrade your Alexa account to have better insights. You may be interested in knowing the alexa rank through this free tool.

The best approach is to list down a few blogs in your niche, i.e. competitors. Being a blog in the same niche, the audience would be pretty similar. Enter the URL of the competitors’ blog and check the visitors of their site.

Quora and Yahoo have become an awesome source of traffic for many marketers who know how to get the most out of it. These allow users to post their questions and give answers to others. By helping out people with relevant information, people get you up voted and hence increase your credibility. If you can solve a problem for a group related to your niche, you can get a lot of leads by posting your link as a reference to your answer.

It should be noted that Yahoo only allows Level-2 users to embed links along with the answer. So for the first few days, you have to help people for free. But both Yahoo answers and Quora can get you links as well as a lot of leads. Share knowledge, help people and win traffic as a reward.

11. Internal & External Linking

Interlinking your posts not only decreases the bounce rate of the blog, but also makes a way for a lot of traffic. A visitor, while reading a post, may like the content and share it with his social account friends/followers. By internal link, he gets on to another post and will share that post as well if he finds it good. Hence, more shares mean more reach, which means great traffic.

If you are using the WordPress platform, you can use plugins like ‘SEO Smart links’ to help you interlink relevant articles and provide good traffic flow over the path.

External linking also helps in most cases. Almost every blogger checks out the links pointing to his domain (It is necessary to prevent spam links pointing to it, since they are the cause of certain Google penalties). If the post pointing to it is valuable, it will be shared by the one who saw it and, thus, more traffic will flow towards you.

12. Post in Relevant Forums & Blogs

Forums have been a great source of traffic for a very long time. By participating in a forum where all the people relating to that niche interact, you can get immense, high-quality traffic as all of them have the same interest that your blog develops. Forums are successful since they solve the problems of any community or group pretty quickly and everyone can keep their point of view and get a response easily. The threads are niche-specific; hence you get super-targeted traffic. Generally, high-ranked forums allow posting URLs in messages and as signatures only after you gain some reputation over there. You will get it after you spend some time on the forum, taking part in discussions and helping others.

Start to post in forums at least 2-3 times a day and make friends as their upvotes will help you to reach the next level where you will get the feature to post URLs as comments and signatures. Come up with your own topics as they bring the maximum amount of traffic through your signatures. Forums on almost any niche would be present over the web. Search for “your keyword + forum” and you will find it. Some of the most popular tech forums are warriorforum.com and forums.digitalpoint.com.

Also, commenting on the most popular blogs will get you a good amount of traffic. Do make sure that your comment along with the link provides value to the post; otherwise it might be regarded as spam and be deleted.

13. The Broken Link Strategy

One of the best tricks for getting backlinks as well as traffic from reputed websites is the broken-link technique. What you need to do is find an established website/blog with broken links in a post of theirs which still receives a good number of views. After a blog gets established with hundreds of posts written, there can not be a regular check of the external links and, in time, some links might have expired. You can use this to your advantage. You can create fresh content regarding the keywords of that link and contact the blog owner, informing him of his broken link and asking him to replace it with your newly made content. If the quality of the post is good, he will surely do it because no one wants a broken link on their site.

14. Snatch Your Competitors’ Links

Somewhat similar to the previous point, we try to get our competitor’s link replaced with ours. You need to check your competitor’s blog and check its backlinks. You can find that through Ahref or Alexa pro. Head over to all the backlinks of your competitors. Now you have to check if any post on a competitor’s blog that has been linked by a popular blog is outdated or not. If you can find an outdated post that has been provided a backlink from a famous blog or website, there is a very good chance of stealing that backlink since every good blog will try to have fresh information in their articles. So all you need to do is contact the blog owner and ask him to replace the competitor’s link with yours, since your article is a new one and is much more informative and valuable.

For example, if your competitor’s post describes ‘10 websites to download royalty-free images’ and was posted about 3-4 years ago. Since it was linked to many other websites, it would still get traffic through those. In those 3-4 years, more websites would have come up with royalty-free images. So you can make a fresh content like ’20 best websites to download awesome royalty-free images’ with a lot more description than your competitor’s post. This way, popular blogs will not hesitate to give you that link.

15. Create YouTube Tutorials – Make fans

A video tutorial is always better than a written text or audio, since it provides everything and eliminates any chance of error. And there is no better place than Youtube for adding videos. If you can solve the problems of people related to your niche through a Youtube video, it can help you a lot. In the description of your video, just give a link back to your article. It will get you a good number of visitors.

The main problem is to find the problems the people in your niche are facing so that you can make tutorials about the solution. For example, if you are running a blog in the Android niche, you can make tutorials on ‘How to root any Android phone without a PC’, etc. You can find such problems in the comment section of various related blogs, several forums, Google analytics, and Quora.

You can use Screencast-O-Matic, Camstudio and other software to create your tutorials. However, these applications are not fully free. The free and awesome alternative to creating videos is Google Hangout, which can record both you and your screen.

16. The Facebook Ads

With millions of active users, Facebook possesses great potential for increasing brand popularity and its consumers. With Facebook ads, your blog can reach out to many potential visitors, which in turn increases traffic. With a single like and share, your content gets an opportunity to go viral, provided the content is of high quality.

The target of your Facebook ads must be targeted to succeed. For this, Facebook allows us to choose our audience. It is always necessary to filter out the audience and reach out to people who are most likely to join your community and provide you with good value. We can choose people of a certain country, age, gender, and those who have an interest in our niche. With the ads, both the traffic and likes on our fan-page will increase at the expense of a little money.

17. The Twitter Technique

Twitter has proven to be a solid platform to boost your blog posts and reach a lot of visitors in a short period of time. The main strategy of using Twitter as a social media marketing channel must be getting retweets from professionals in your niche who have a large number of followers so that they and their followers start following you and visiting your blog.

To achieve that, first try to get relevant followers. Search on Google for ‘twitter + your keyword/niche’ and start following famous people in your niche. Also, try out following the people following those famous people and check for a few days what response comes. Do this on a regular basis and you will see an increase in your followers and, subsequently, more retweets.

18. Solo Ads & Sponsored Tweets

Most of the time, sending your content straight to your potential customers can be very fruitful. This technique involves sending content straight to the relevant audience through someone else’s email list. You just need to buy solo ads from someone who has built an email list over the years and is related to your niche. It is better to contact the owners of big bloggers and ask them if they can sell the solo ads. It should be ensured that the audience is relevant. For example, if you’ve created a country-specific post, then the email list must contain only the people inhabiting that particular country. Make an attractive message to send to your audience, or you can ask the blogger to write an effective description for you, as he would be aware of what type of content gets more clicked by his subscribers. You can also buy solo ads from reputed freelancers, those working for big freelance websites.

You can also target the Twitter followers of specific bloggers and experts in your niche by buying sponsored tweets. This can be very easy to get traffic as many bloggers have thousands of followers and, hence, there will be many retweets which will, in turn, create a buzz about your content.

19. Utilize Opt-in Forms

Collecting emails has been a proven technique for building a blog empire. The email subscribers are the true followers of your blog and the success of your blog depends mostly on them. They are the visitors who would be giving page views for every single post of yours and are likely to buy any product you sell, be it your own creation or an affiliate one. In every popular blog, you will find email opt-in forms. Some would have them in the sidebars, while in some cases they will appear as pop-ups while you view a page. You can try out which type of opt-in works best for you. Try to read case studies about them and you can get the best out of them on your blog. A quick broadcast mail to your subscribers will give you enormous potential to get a post viral.

Email service providers like Aweber can help you with maintaining and utilizing your email list in an effective manner in exchange for fees.

20. Giveaways and Contests

Giveaways boost your traffic like nothing else. Free giveaways can help you get more and more shares on social media and, by seeing the participation rules, you get a lot of traffic. You can ask your visitors to share your content and comment to participate. This will boost your post and more shares will result in more traffic. The giveaway can be anything; an ebook, a premium account on a website, a product, anything as long as it interests people.

Posting contests on various websites regarding your blog can help you get a lot of visitors in no time. You can publish contests for creating logos, writing content, writing slogans and taglines, etc. on popular sites and put your blog’s link in the description. To make content, the participants will surely visit the blog for reference. Some of the websites you can utilize for such an advantage are:

• com – for logos

• com – for slogans

• com – for slogans

21. Adding Blog Link in Email Signature

How many times do you send an email in a month? Many, I suppose. No matter what type of email it is or what purpose it serves, there is no problem with including your website as an email signature. In fact, you may earn a lot of visitors if your email persuades people to forward it. And even if few people share any of your posts on social networks, getting visitors will never be a difficult task. It takes just a few minutes to create an email signature and it surely has the potential to benefit your blog with quality traffic.

22. Advertise on PPC sites like Google Adwords

PPC sites can also provide you with a good amount of traffic and leads that can help you gain a good amount of traffic. PPC advertising sites like Google Adwords, Infolinks, Chitika, and others may generate a lot of visitors for your blog. Although there are a lot of other cheaper ways to get traffic, if you have some extra bucks in your pocket, then try out this option as well and see how it works for you.

Now it’s all up to you to get up and apply the tactics mentioned here and build up your blog audience. In the end, it’s all your effort that counts towards your success.