6 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog

September 4, 2015 by Khalid Ibrahim

Blogging is an easy fun thing to do. There are thousands of blogs all over the internet. Anyone

can set up a blog free of charge and start writing away. However, there is one thing that truly separates one blog from the other – traffic.

Considering that you’ve built up a beautiful website, relatively active on social media and you’ve been creating content for a month but for some reason you just aren’t getting just aren’t

getting enough traffic means you are not doing a couple of things right.

Creating a blog with high traffic is quite the task to achieve. These tips should help you on your way to build a successful blog with healthy traffic.

Target your Audience

When you start blogging, it is always important that you specialize at least in one specific area. It could be in SEO, social media, cooking, cars etc. This enables you to create the best possible

content for your readers. The kind of content that will get your readers engaging and sharing your posts to other people.

This very nifty diagram above shows exactly where you want to be, which is within the blue and orange circle. The blue and orange circles are your targeted audience while the green circle represents your potential audience.

That really should be your main focus, targeting readers who are more likely to share your content. Participate in communities where your audience already gathers in. Big companies like Nike spend billions of dollars on advertising to find the right group of people who would

buy their products.

You can imagine Nike advertising their latest Hypervenom Phatal II Dynamic Fit FG football boots to a group of 80 year old men. That probably wouldn’t result in a lot of sales.

Even if you don’t have a billion dollars to spend, you can still find your target audience with a

quick, easy absolutely free of charge google search to help you find people interested in the content you write.

These expert guides will tell you more about targeting your audience:

5 Critical Tips For Identifying Your Target Audience

How to Reach Your Target Audience

How to define your target audience the right way

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Finding Your Audience in Social Media

Six steps to defining your target market

Optimize your content for SEO

One of the best ways for people to find your blog is through search engines. Your blog will be

easier to find if you can rank in the first page of results. The statistics on google searches is staggering with search queries expected to surpass 6 billion mark on a daily basis.

It becomes increasingly apparent that for your blog to be successful you really have to optimize your content for search engines. Setting up SEO in your blog and content is relatively simple

to do if you are using platforms like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

These guides should be particularly useful to you

Blogger’s Guide to SEO

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO

WordPress Blog SEO Tutorial

SEO for Travel Bloggers?

SEO Basics: Complete Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Share your content

After writing up an amazing blog post, the next thing you have to do is share it across social media to reach even more people. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin are social media

titans with over a billion active users. If there ever was a place to share your content it is probably on one of these sites.

To share your content effectively on social media requires patience and observation. Create

both personal and brand accounts on google, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Take the time to fully fill those profiles extensively. That also includes your bio data as well.

Profiles with more information have a high correlation with successful accounts. This is

because it differentiates you from a spam account that has little or no information at all.

If you already share professional relationships with industry though leaders and experts then connect with or follow them. If that may prove a challenge for you, services like FollowerWonk and CircleCount can help you with this.

With your social networks established, start sharing all content. Content that you’ve created,

content of experts and colleagues, and any other thing that you have come across as useful. Interact with your community members using hash tags so you can easily locate and join the relevant discussions to boost your blog.

Consistently participating in active discussions and sharing quality content will resonate

positively with your followers. This means that they will always look forward to the things you post and share it with their friends which in the long run will drive traffic to your blog.

There are also social networks that specialize in sharing content like Reddit, StumbleUpon,

Instagram, tumblr etc. Each of these sites all have specific rules for participating and sharing.

They allow you to join communities with interests similar to yours that you can also contribute to.

To drive more traffic to your blog, you should always seek to add value to the community you

participate in. Doing anything haphazardly like link spamming could lead to a community backlash so always try and avoid that.

These expert guides will tell you more about sharing your content on social media:

9 Ways to Improve Social Media Shares of your Content

How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media How Social Media Content Tools Can

Work for Your Sharing Strategy

Create graphics and illustrations

If you are quite the artist and are capable of producing appealing graphics, designs and

infographics, you can use that to your advantage. Upload your inspiring creations on sites like Flicker or Niice. By so doing, you create an additional traffic source for your website and blog.

Be a little liberal and less draconian with your image licensing policies. Allow other people to

use your image in a way that also benefits you as the creator. Things like asking the people who use your images to link back to your website work just fine in this regard.

For those people who think they can use your images without linking back and get away with is are out of luck. Google has a nifty image search feature that will find similar images on the

web. Then you can reach out to those people and request that they give you a link.

Key Word Research

Keywords and SEO go hand in hand. You have to make the effort to target keywords that your

audience is most likely typing in search engines. Conducting thorough research will give you insight into what those specific keywords just might be.

Google to the rescue again. Another free tool from the search engine giant called Adwords Key Planner can help you with just that. All you have to do is type some words in the search bar

and add words will display phrases that match the words you have used.

You can look for an exact match of keywords or a broad match of keywords to get a clearer picture of what your audience is searching for. Another useful keyword tool is Keywordtool.io. This application is particularly useful when creating titles and headlines for your blog post as

it pulls data from Google’s suggest function.

These expert guides will tell you more about keyword optimization:

Keyword Optimization: Why Optimizing for the Right Keywords is ‘Do or Die’

On-Page SEO? How to Optimize Any Page for Your Target Keywords

How to successfully optimize a page for over 10,000 keywordsA Visual Guide to Keyword

Targeting and On-Page SEO12 Steps To Optimize A Webpage For Organic Keywords

Analyze your traffic pay attention to results

Analyzing your results is important because it lets you know what you’re doing wrong and whether or not you’ve been making progress. Luckily for you, Google analytics is a powerful

free tool that will show you everything you need to know about your website performance.

All kinds of information will be revealed including where your website traffic originates from.

These expert guides will help you get the most out of Google analytics:

How To use Google Analytics: Beginners guide How To Use Google Analytics

How To Get started with Google Analytics 50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics How To Analyze Your Audience In Google Analytics

Conclusion

Even when things look grim and nothing seems to work, do not give up. As long as you analyze your results and find out the things that work for you then you should be able to identify the

problems and address them accordingly.

Patience is important in this regard because results take time to produce. Stick to your plans and schedules and keep producing quality content and refine your skills. When you do create that content distribute it as far and wide as you can to the most relevant audiences and surely

you will drive visitors back to your website.

Do you have any other strategies and techniques that you can use to drive traffic to your blog? Please share them in the comments below