One of the primary concerns of business owners is how to increase blog traffic. When traffic numbers tick up, it means that your blog is attracting attention and helping flow customers through the sales traffic.
But the reality is that a lot of business owners struggle with getting traffic to their company blog. And when so much time and energy is invested in crafting the perfect blog post, it’s a real buzz kill when you only receive a handful of hits.
Before we jump into how to increase blog traffic, we need to discuss the difference between traffic and targeted traffic.
All Blog Traffic is Not Created Equal
While it’s exciting to see hundreds (if not thousands) of potential customers visit your business blog, you don’t want to get too caught up in the numbers at first glance. Big traffic numbers don’t mean anything if the visitors to your website aren’t relevant. It’s the same idea as inviting people into your flower shop who are looking to buy tires for their cars.
You’re not going to sell a whole lot of flowers to people looking to buy tires, are you?
So, your first lesson on how to increase blog traffic is to funnel targeted traffic into your website. This means that you’re bringing people to your website who will potentially buy your services—and that is exactly the type of traffic that you want.
How to Target Your Traffic
Finding the right kind of traffic to funnel to your website can be a challenge, but it’s not impossible. It involves doing some customer research as well as tracking your website’s current traffic patterns, but it’s worth the effort in the end.
- Step 1: Know Your Audience
Even the best blog writers on Earth won’t get any traffic if they don’t know their audience. As you craft your blog post, you need to keep your readers in mind. If you aren’t sure about your audience, picture your ideal customers. What are there interests, concerns, and most common questions? - Step 2: Analyze Potential Topics
When it comes to generating blog topic ideas, you don’t want to blindly throw a dart at the map. Bad topics can completely throw off funneling traffic into your website, so you’ll want to research the best potential subjects for your business blog. You can conduct your blog topic research at community Q&A websites such as Quora, as well as social media outlets. Don’t forget to use Twitter’s custom search feature to dig into what customers are asking or talking about in terms of your industry. - Step 3: Dive Into Your Website’s Analytics
If you’ve been blogging for a while, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed for traffic monitoring purposes. If so, you can use elements such as search queries that are made directly on your website. You can also dive into some of your website’s organic keywords and base those on new blog topics as well. This article gives an extensive list on ways to find blog topics from Google Analytics. - Step 4: Strategically Market Your Blog Posts
This step is possibly the most difficult when you’re trying to increase your company blog’s traffic. Many business owners are under the impression that a blog is simply set-it-and-forget-it. This is quite the opposite idea of what you’re supposed to do with your company blog after you publish a post, and it won’t do anything for you in terms of getting traffic. Perfecting a marketing strategy for your company blog won’t happen over night. But if you’re willing to put in the time and don’t mind a little bit of trial and error, you can end up with big spikes in traffic as time goes on.
OK—So How do You Turbocharge Your Blog Traffic?
There really isn’t one exact method to increase your blog’s traffic. In fact, there’s not really even an exact formula. However, there are different strategies that you can blend together to help increase your company blog’s traffic over time.
Here are several of the most effective strategies to boost your business blog’s traffic.
1. Hone Your Headline Skills
One of the best ways to driving traffic to your company blog is by writing outstanding headlines. The headline is arguably the most important characteristic of your blog—it gives a snapshot as to what your blog is all about, and draws the reader in the find out more.
Not to mention, it’s the very first thing that your reader will see before they read your blog. It’s important that your headline makes an impact, or you could potentially miss the boat of serious blog traffic.
But if your headline skills are lackluster, your business blogging strategy can quickly fall apart at the seams. You literally have a matter of seconds to impress your potential customer with your headline—and the clock is ticking.
In fact, 80 percent of people will read your headline, but only 20 percent will click the link to your blog post.
There are dozens of articles on the Internet that dissect the anatomy of a powerful blog headline. Be sure that your chosen headline is clear and does not aim to trick the user into clicking your link, only to find out that your article isn’t related to your title at all. This is known as click bait, and won’t win you raving reviews from customers anytime soon.
2. Share Your Blog Posts on Social More Than Once
If you’re already publishing your posts on social media, you’re heading in the right direction. However, one critical blog traffic mistake that business owners make is only posting the link to a blog post one time—this will greatly diminish the amount of potential traffic that your blog can receive.
As long as your blog content is relevant, useful, or helpful, you can absolutely share your post more than one time. There are multiple case studies on this subject and why it’s beneficial. It’s the perfect way to maximize the amount of traffic that you get to your blog, and it doesn’t cost you a dime.
3. Repurpose Content For More Offsite Traffic
Another trick on how to increase your blog traffic is repurposing your blog’s content. If you have a blog post that is particularly popular, you should consider repurposing the post to receive both more mileage for your content and additional traffic.
For example, you can take a popular blog post and repurpose into video format for YouTube. You can include a link back to your blog in both the video and its description, resulting in a bump in traffic from YouTube to your website.
Another option to repurpose blog posts into slideshows and upload to Slideshare. Slideshare receives an impressive 60 million visits per month and it’s an essentially untapped resource to seriously boost your blog’s traffic.
4. Publish High-Quality, Original Blog Content
This may sound like advice that’s been stated over and over again, but it’s the truth. One of the only real methods of increasing blog traffic is to offer very high quality blog content to your audience.
High quality blog content gets more social shares than stale, boring posts. More shares means more potential traffic, which is right within your reach if you can tap into the type of blog content that your audience is looking for.
So, when you’re thinking of publishing a blog post that’s considered high quality, aim for the following:
- Blog posts that are well-researched with supportive data
- Blog posts that contain unique and original images
- Long-form content that is in-depth, descriptive, and gives your audience an abundance of information on a particular topic
- How-to topics that help your audiences solve problems
- Extensive guides that teach your audience something of value
- Give actionable solutions to problems that people can get started with right away. Customers don’t want to have to wait to get results or get the ball rolling—so when you offer your best advice, try to be sure that your audience can get started with your recommendations as soon as possible
5. Find a Unique Angle
Rehashing overdone topics can be a challenge, but it’s absolutely possible to breath new live into old subject matters. When an old topic is presented in a new light, it becomes a refreshing point of interest and gives customers a reason to visitor your blog and check out what you have to say.
Here are a few suggestions for bringing a unique angle to an otherwise boring subject:
- Compare two completely unrelated subjects (but be sure to make it relevant). Example: What $5 Blog Posts And Fast Food Have in Common
- Conduct your own research to add new data for your market or industry
- Write attention-grabbing, irresistible headlines
- Try storytelling through your blog post—this can be one of the most creative methods of putting your own spin on a topic
- Add interactive media such as slideshows or videos
6. Use a Blogging Keyword Strategy
Another source of traffic for your company blog comes from the search engines. This traffic-boosting method can take a while to accomplish, but the effort can help funnel a considerable amount of traffic through to your company blog.
In order to be successful with ranking your blog in the search engines, you’ll need to strategically incorporate your keywords within your blog’s content. The idea is to interlace your keywords into your blog posts, and write them into
Don’t try to force keywords into your blog post if it’s awkward for your customers to read—Google knows the difference between blog posts with good keyword usage vs. forced keywords. Overstuffing keywords or negatively affecting your customer’s experience on your blog with bad phrasing will only hurt your efforts.
7. Take Advantage of Your E-mail Subscription List
If you’ve used your company blog to collect e-mail addresses over time, you have the perfect leverage to send additional traffic straight to your posts. Each time that you post a new blog, be sure to mail it out to customers (potential, new, and old) from your e-mail base.
This won’t only send extra blog traffic your way, but it will also keep your brand’s name on the front of your customer’s minds.
The Ticket to Increasing Blog Traffic: Quality Content, Consistency, & Originality
It can take a bit of time to consistently receive a lot of traffic to your blog. While it’s entirely possible for your blog to essentially blow up over night and receive thousands of hits, this situation isn’t always reality for many business owners.
However, if you continue to publish quality blog content on a regular basis, rest assured that people will eventually notice—and your blog traffic will continue to climb.
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