Starting a blog is fairly easy nowadays. With platforms like WordPress and Weebly, all you have to worry about is creating content and increase your website traffic.
If you’re new to blogging, the second part is a bit complicated. Thankfully, you don’t need a professional marketer to help you generate more traffic to your blog.
The creativity is inside you. All you need is the necessary guidance, and you’ll be on your way towards writing content that generates serious amounts of traffic.
In this article, we’ll be highlighting twenty-seven ways through which you can increase your blog’s traffic.
Table of Contents
- 1 #1. Create User Personas to Gain Insight on Your Readers
- 2 #2. Performing Keyword Research
- 3 #3. Create a Content Calendar
- 4 #4. Create Content That Solves a Problem
- 5 #5. Focus on the Readability of Your Content
- 6 #6. Learn the basics of SEO
- 7 #7. Powerful Headlines Go a Long Way
- 8 #8.Link Internally with Every Post
- 9 #9. Backlink as Much as You Can
- 10 #10. Visual Content Matters
- 11 #11. The Impact of Video Content
- 12 #12. User Submitted Content
- 13 #13. Reduce Clutter in Your Websites’ Design
- 14 #14. Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster
- 15 #15. The Importance of an Emailing List
- 16 #16. Automate the Blog Sharing Process
- 17 #17. Sharing Old Articles on Social Media
- 18 #18. Don’t Just Focus on Generic Social Networks
- 19 #19. Forums and Communities
- 20 #20. Create Your Own Community or Group
- 21 #21. Engage Audiences on Q & A websites
- 22 #22. Focus on Influencer Marketing
- 23 #23. Utilize Social Proof to the Maximum
- 24 #24. Keep a Check on Social Media Performance
- 25 #25. Track Your Website’s Keyword Rankings
- 26 #26. Web Traffic and User Engagement
- 27 #27. Never Stop Writing
- 28 Final Words
#1. Create User Personas to Gain Insight on Your Readers
A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
As a UX designer, you’ll start the design process by conducting user research—building empathy with your target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product you’re designing.
A persona is generally based on this user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns of your target audience. Check out the example below:
Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting by various demographic and psychographic data to improve your product marketing.
User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a business: they help uncover the different ways people search for, buy, and use products, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases.
- Try to get a handle on who your audience is, what problems they face, what are they looking for on your blog, and what you’re doing to solve their problems.
- Demographics such as age, occupation, education, country or region, and gender are all important tools in helping you create tailored content for your readers.
#2. Performing Keyword Research
- You can use generic keywords for your article’s SEO, but it’s essentially a “hit or miss” strategy that’s ill-suited towards your end-goal; which is to generate traffic.
- Look for long-tail keywords that the audience are searching for and centre your content around it. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs can come in really handy if you want to take things professionally.
- Understanding what a user might search is more important than centring your searches around generic keywords.
#3. Create a Content Calendar
- When you’ve selected your desired keywords, you’ll obviously have tons of blog post ideas just from seeing the content. For some, too many keywords might become a bit overwhelming.
- To avoid overwhelming yourself, you should create a content calendar spreadsheet for those keywords and write blog ideas next to them.
- Using tools like Trello will help you manage your blog more effectively.
#4. Create Content That Solves a Problem
- When writing content, always think of the user and what they can gain from your content.
- Creating long-form, highly organized articles relative to a subject matter works really well with regards to tutorial articles. For example, if you were to write an article comparing, Woocommerce and Shopify, then you would ideally want to segment the comparison into multiple categories to make it as readable as organized as possible. If possible, you can also create a Table of Contents section that allows users to jump back and forth between sections.
- High-quality and informative content should be the part and parcel of your content writing strategy.
#5. Focus on the Readability of Your Content
- Informative articles are indeed beneficial, but you also need to ensure people can read the content.
- Tightly knit, and long paragraphs reduce readability and increase the bounce rates of your blog.
- Write shorter paragraphs to ensure maximum readability for your users.
- You can use tools like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to calculate the readability metrics for your articles.
#6. Learn the basics of SEO
- You don’t need SEO experts to make your site stand out on search engines. Self-learning SEO basics can help you gain a tactical advantage over your competitors.
- There are tons of resources, blogs, video tutorials, and courses that will help you through your self-learning journey. Hint: Just searching for “SEO tutorial” on YouTube or Google will take you on a long journey down the SEO path.
#7. Powerful Headlines Go a Long Way
- The headline is your first opportunity to grab the audience’s attention. A good headline title makes it more likely that users will click through it or scroll for more information.
- The mechanics of headlines revolve around generating an emotional response from the audience. If the article is good, then it initiates a feeling of reward. If that same content is centred around related keywords, then it gives your website a massive SEO boost.
- There are plenty of free tools for headline analysis, like CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, ShareThrough, and EMV. When you’re writing, be sure to check them out.
#8.Link Internally with Every Post
- A huge part of SEO is ensuring that all your content is interlinked with each other. Internal linking is important for navigating your users to your other articles as well as for SEO.
- From helping Google gain an understanding regarding your website, and building its context to gaining more viewers to older posts, internal linking is an easy alternative to asking other websites to link to your articles.
- If you’re using WordPress, it’s important to tell you that Yoast SEO, an SEO plugin for the platform, provides you best practice SEO suggestions which include internal linking.
#9. Backlink as Much as You Can
- Backlinks are links coming from other websites to your own websites. Backlinks give websites the necessary “link-juice” required to make it go up the rankings.
- Getting backlinks can be tough, but with the right strategy and reaching out to the right websites, you can gain powerful backlinks in no time.
- Guest posting, influencer interviews, and linking your social media profiles are surefire ways of getting backlinks to your site.
#10. Visual Content Matters
- Images, charts, infographics – all are powerful sources through which you can make your content stand out in the digital sphere.
- Visual content adds context, value, and aesthetic appeal to your website. It’s also engaging to users who not only are interacting with your content but are also entertained by powerful images that make them delve further into your content.
- Free tools like Canva and paid tools like Adobe Photoshop can help you create wonderful infographics and images that make your content shine.
#11. The Impact of Video Content
- Video content is an essential part of gaining website traffic.
- Better than an infographic, a video (or more aptly, an explainer video) provides more information to you in organized format than any other form of content.
- YouTube channels like Vox and Oversimplified are popular for a reason. Their video content boils down complex content into easily digestible infographic videos.
- Combining your website content with a video can help you gain some serious benefits for your website in gaining traction and traffic.
#12. User Submitted Content
- Once your website is up and running, you need to have comments enabled or a contact form at your disposal.
- Comments and emails are a great way to gain insights, reply to readers, and new content ideas.
- The majority of some websites’ content is entirely made up of user-generated content. With it, you can never run out of content to write.
#13. Reduce Clutter in Your Websites’ Design
- With increasing content and modifications, your website will gain some clutter here and there.
- We’ve seen website design go haywire because webmasters keep adding more and more features to their website usually in an attempt to sell more products. With such modifications, oftentimes, the content gets ignored, and you’re left with a website that looks poorly designed and trying just to sell a product or service instead of informing the audience.
- Ensure your website’s UI is clean, crisp, and designed for spreading information.
#14. Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster
- If your website isn’t loading in between three or four seconds, then you’re going to lose a fair share of your customers.
- Google and other search engines give precedence to websites that load quicker than others.
- There are plenty of speed optimization tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights that you can use to gain more information relative to your website’s load times and speed.
#15. The Importance of an Emailing List
- You can utilize your existing users as opposed to scouring the internet for new viewers.
- Users that have given you their email addresses are an asset and its important that you nurture them with new information through email to make them come back for more.
- A healthy balance between targeting new users and retargeting existing users through Email Newsletters is the best method to apply for a webmaster.
#16. Automate the Blog Sharing Process
- To save your time sharing your website content to your social media pages, you can automate the sharing process by using tools like IFTTT.
- Doing post sharing manually can be a tedious task. These tools work similarly to Buffer since it automates the posting schedule to ensure your content is written and shared almost immediately.
- If you’re only sharing your new articles on social media and that’s it, then you need to actively engage your audience for the duration of their day as well.
- Sharing older website posts comes in really handy in this context since it allows you to generate constant traffic from your Facebook pages as opposed to the moment you post a new article.
- You can enable the sharing process by using tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to enable the automation of sharing older posts on your social media accounts.
- You might think that only Twitter and Facebook are the only social media sites through which you can get actual traffic. Well, you’d be wrong.
- There are plenty of social media websites besides these two that can help you gain traffic. Moreover, if you choose a niche-specific social media account, then you are going to have even more segmented traffic coming to your site as opposed to other social media networks where you run the risk of having anybody click through your site.
#19. Forums and Communities
- Quora communities and Redditt’s niche-specific Subreddits are a good way to get involved in healthy conversations with people who are interested in and engaged with a particular subject matter.
- Other than these, you can also try forums related to your industry, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups that offer you the opportunity to gain backlinks and engage in healthy debates and conversations.
#20. Create Your Own Community or Group
- If you really do become a thought-leader or opinion-maker in your niche, then the next best step for you would be to create your own community and engage people there.
- Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups and Quora Spaces are wonderful ways in which you can create and engage with your audience as well as new, interested readers, on a community platform.
#21. Engage Audiences on Q & A websites
- Q & A websites like Quora have already been detailed. There are other sites like Stack Exchange and Trip Advisor, among others, who can help you, get not only backlinks but also serious traffic if done right.
- The advantage of participating in such communities is that your answer or post stays live. If you’ve included a backlink, then it can be a regular source of the traffic to your site.
#22. Focus on Influencer Marketing
- Influencer marketing, with a link back to your site can improve traffic by a ten-fold, if done right.
- Asking influencers for a shout out, guest blogging on their platform, promoting their products, or just an interview can go a long way in increasing legitimacy and traffic for your website.
- Testimonials, customer reviews, and brand sponsorships are an essential aspect of maintaining a website’s legitimacy. It shows the reader that your website offerings have indeed guaranteed satisfied customers.
- The best part about social proof is that it can be included in your website, your social media profiles, and your newsletter to ensure maximum visibility.
- Always make sure to include a customer feedback and review system on your site.
- Posting on social media is one thing, making it work is different. Keep alert with regards to social media analytics and insights to understand which post performs and which doesn’t and rectify the ones that don’t work.
- This falls under the greater category of A/B testing. Once your site operations are going smoothly, it’s important to see which post on your site is gaining traffic and which is not. Google Analytics is one of the best free tools for that purpose.
#25. Track Your Website’s Keyword Rankings
- Tracking which keywords are performing better than others is important for ensuring the future performance of your website.
- Using tools like Search Console can help you double-up on your content strategy, focusing only on keywords that are relevant to the customers.
#26. Web Traffic and User Engagement
- Elaborating from Step no. 24, tracking your site’s performance through Google Analytics and then A/B testing different content strategies until one works.
- It’s a powerful tool that helps you view traffic reports, the number of people who have interacted with your content, the amount of time they were present on the site, and more. For budding webmasters interested in data, it’s the best tool to use.
#27. Never Stop Writing
All of the strategies we’ve mentioned above absolutely cannot work if you don’t have a healthy body of content to back it up.
Most bloggers, when they’ve amassed a substantial audience or when they’ve monetized their blog, get lazy with the blogging process. This is something you want to avoid at all costs.
Google ranks a website based on its activity. You may be ranking #1 for all the keywords related to your industry, but if you stop writing content, it’s going to hamper your rankings without a doubt.
Moreover, a competitor might swoop in and take you by surprise by creating better, more regular content.
Final Words
We’ve spoken all that we could have with regards to increasing traffic. We’re going to end this article with a quote that was spoken in the year 1996 but still holds tremendous value today.
“Content is King”. – Bill Gates
Author bio:
Nabeel Al Ahmed – Being a Passionate tech Savvy and WordPress community expert at Codup.co actually helping people to take guides from my case studies, savvy I always love to share my knowledge. Tech experience for eCommerce development agencies playing with the analytical data and digging into useful insights is his most favourite thing to do. Besides work, passionate about contributing to the communities and helping others.