Taking your blog from zero to high traffic in no time at all
You want a high
traffic blog, and you understand it takes a bit of effort. Excellent,
you are in the right place then. Getting a high traffic blog is easier
than you think if you plan, prepare and execute.
You’ll need patience and you’ll need to know when to quit testing a
technique and when a particular strategy is successful. First off, let’s
get a few things straight. I don’t know you or your blog, your ability
as a writer or how you will promote your site. Some of my advice will be
generic. IF you wish to book a
traffic strategy session, then we can formulate a traffic strategy that will work much better for you.
From zero to high traffic blog posts
Publish often
Publishing once a month may not be enough in your niche. Publishing
once a week may be too much for you. Look at the other blogs in your
industry, see how frequently they are posting and work out your posting
schedule.
The reason bloggers publish often is the more content you have, the more visitors you’ll get.
Personally, I have more than one ideal customer, I have several, so I
post 4 times a week. Each post addresses a different ideal customer.
This traffic strategy works for a number of reasons; It gives visitors a
good reason to come back – if they like what they’ve read so far, they
will come back. They connect with new readers and I look fresh and up to
date. Never underestimate looking fresh!
Different types of post attract different links and increase your
page rank in the search engines. This generally pulls in more traffic.
It tends to happen quick, I moved from one site to here and went from 0
to PR2 within about 6 weeks. Page Rank hasn’t been updated for a while,
but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to attract links – they help
with
your domain authority.
If you are using tools such as Twitter and Facebook, you’ll need
content to update your stream and your pages. Blog content is perfect
for this. There’s a reason I say all social media should be blog-centric
The more content you have, the more people will have a chance of
finding something they like, and wish to link to and to share. Incoming
links = more traffic.
When Forbes linked to us (3 times
Birds on the Blog has topped their top websites for women list) they sent us over 200,000 visitors. Good content = Links = traffic.
You can email other bloggers and ask for the links, wait for
discovery or contact them via Twitter. The choice is yours. Some people
like to link the living daylights out of other bloggers to get their
attention. I’ve never been one for that kind of strategy, but I
understand it does work and you may get a reciprocal link back to your
site.
Grab your reader by the throat and throttle them!
Actually, no don’t do that. But you do need a headline that attracts
attention. There are a few secrets to attention-grabbing headlines.
They include:
- Stating a benefit
- Use numbers and statistics
- Make it newsworthy using words like “new,” “introducing,” or “announcing”
- Make a big promise (and deliver in the post)
- Use a “reasons why” headline – For example, “10 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn’t Making Money.”
- Pique curiosity
Headlines that are a combination of these are also quite powerful.
Make your blog easy to follow.
If you have followed me over from my old site to here, you’ll have
noticed for the first few weeks I didn’t make it easy for anyone to
subscribe.
That’s not good thing to do. In my case, I wanted a particular action
to take place – newsletter subscribers rather than blog subscribers,
and secondly I just was not ready for active subscribers at that time.
Make it easy for your readers to subscribe. Invite them to subscribe, and then make them feel welcome.
Use plug-ins to add multiple subscription options if you are unable
to add the HTML from your subscription service. Make sure the RSS
buttons are prominently displayed in at least one area of your
blog. Over on
Africa on the Blog we’re experimenting with the
OptinSkin
plugin that is placed in the sidebar and chases (well it feels like it
chases) the reader down the page. I’ll let you know how that works.
Work it baby! Market your blog, and market it some more.
Use short term tactics like Twitter and Facebook marketing blended with long term marketing like guest posting. See more on
Social Media Marketing here and
how to use LinkedIn to find your ideal customers here.
On Facebook your blog can have it’s own fan page for you to update.
Your blog can have its own Twitter account. Over at Birds on the Blog
each post is tweeted out and so is every comment, all drive traffic back
to the site. Did I mention I get over 3 million+ page views a year over
there? No? Damn, that modesty is kicking in again
Article marketing has taken a hit after the last few Google updates,
but I still have sites that get a steady stream of traffic from the
articles and I still make sales from that traffic. Craft a really good
resource box and you’ll get click-throughs and subscribers from article
marketing. Don’t rule it out entirely.
You’ll like this post from Danny Iny, it’s a guest post on Kikolani.com about his experiences when
guest blogging and marketing his posts.
If you’ve reached this far and you know that your content is not strong enough, then I recommend that you check out Danny’s
Write Like Freddie blogging course (aff link).
Networking, I’ll just mention it briefly
Tell people about what you do and invite them to subscribe. I met one
of my subscribers a few weeks ago at an event, she came up and hugged
me. As a former publican I’m used to getting hugged by strange people,
but this hug was for the advice in my newsletters landing her a big
client and pushing her onto the front page of Google. She tells everyone
who brilliant my tips and strategies are. I bought her a coffee and
found out more about her, and she’s pretty brilliant too. Networking. It
helps.
Email
Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic back to your blog and
engage with your audience. I have more engagement via email than I do
on my blog
Gone are the days where you can just ask for an email address and be given it.
Offer an ethical bribe (known as a lead magnet in some circles) to
your readers in exchange for their email address. Promise you’ll never
spam them or sell their data. People like to keep their privacy and you
need to build trust before they will give you an email address. Send a
weekly update of your blog posts blended with exclusive content.
You may want to write exclusive subscriber only content like I do,
you may want to send them to a really cool post or report by someone
else. Bundle that up with your updates to make it a valuable read. In my
blog post updates I invite comments on a post, the next update that
goes our mentions three of the commenters sending them traffic. I like
to reward and incentivise the readers of this blog on a regular basis
(just check out the
likeables section).
Read more about email marketing and
the importance of headlines in your email marketing, in this post by Christine Brady and check out my free webinar
here about how I use email marketing to make sales.
Commenting
No blog is an island. Get out there and comment on other blogs in
your niche, on your friends blogs, on random Twitter follower’s posts. A
well thought out comment can bring you a tonne of traffic. I commented
on one site, that had just started up and last month they sent me 2,000
visitors. The blog doesn’t have to be huge to send you a whole heap of
traffic, it just needs an engaged audience. Don’t get hung up on only
commenting on popular blogs. If you comment on 10 sites a day that send
you 2k of visitors a month, that’s more traffic than a guest post will
generally bring.
Just think up a decent comment, and try not to sound like a spammer
with “great post”, but show you’ve read the post and expand on a section
of it or share your experience. You don’t have to leave a link to your
blog in the comment, you will have your name hyper-linked to your blog
when you complete the comment form.
Find blogs using Comment Luv and use Comment Luv Premium yourself.
Not only do you get to leave a comment with a link to your latest blog
post, you also get a do-follow link after a certain amount of comments
back to your site. An attention getting headline really comes into its
own when combined with Comment Luv.
To find
Comment Luv enabled blogs, check out this list by Ana Hoffman.
Forum commenting.
Again forum commenting is a powerful way to drive traffic back to
your site. Find two or three forums in your niche and be active on them.
Be helpful and people will recommend you, and your signature will send
visitors back to your site. To find forums in your industry just type
your industry and the word forum into Google and explore the results.
Again, in my early blogging career (2007) much of my traffic came from
forums. Just because forums no longer hold the sway over Google that
they once did, it doesn’t mean people won’t click through and read what
you have to say. I’m not going to expand much on forum commenting and
marketing in this post, but if done well then your blog will benefit
from doing this, especially as a lot of bloggers are too busy to do
this.
Someone else linking to your content on a forum is also great for
traffic, but they tend not to return or become subscribers. The majority
of the conversation will take place on that forum. You should always
reach out to the person who posted and thank them for adding your link.
Organic search engine traffic.
Using search engine techniques you can increase the traffic to your
blog. Good SEO is reader friendly, good SEO puts your reader first.
Complete meta descriptions for your posts and deep link through out your
posts to useful articles to your reader. Link out to other great
articles on the topic that you are writing about – make your post hyper
useful to your reader, and the SEO aspect will follow. Sure mention your
keywords, but don’t stuff your post like the Christmas / Thanksgiving
turkey with keywords. That benefits no one.
Additional reading –
two types of SEO a blogger should know.
You might like to check out the tools that I use here –
Scribe and
WP Swipe and Deploy, you use
Scribe
to assess the impact of your words and WP Swipe and Deploy to see that
your headline attracts people. This is then backed up with
WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Stumbleupon and social bookmarking communities.
StumbleUpon has always been one of my favourite traffic sources. When
I started out transport blogging, my first real traffic came from the
Stumble Upon community – thanks guys :). There are a number of ways you
can use the site to get traffic.
- Paid traffic
- Organic stumbles
- Su.PR URL shortner
There are lots of other social bookmarking communities out there
like Digg, Delicio.us and Reddit. Once upon a time getting on the front
page of Digg was a big deal, now… not so much. Wherever you find you
social bookmarking, you’ll find a community and if you join in and
become known then you’ll benefit from the traffic. Each community serves
it’s own niche and had groups. Go and do that networking thing
Blogmarking
There are new style communities that have sprang up in the last 2
or 3 years specifically for bloggers to connect and comment in, this in
turn sends you traffic and helps with the links. The main ones are
Okay, I’m not finished yet but I’ve just noticed the word count to
this post is over 2100 words and I don’t like to write epic posts too
often, they tend to pull down my site
So check out these posts on Search engine marketing and
affiliate marketing basics, because if these tools are utilised correctly they’ll send you back a tonne of traffic too.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog and build a large
following and I’ve touched on just a few here. But the key principle is
to have strong, good quality content worth sharing. If you write light
and fluffy, generic posts then you will struggle to get the traffic you
want.
Start with your content and the traffic will follow.
Yasser
