Blogging is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. By adding great content to your blog on a regular basis, you are giving value and information to your site’s visitors and while creating more pages for search engines to index and rank.
If your content is has a high degree of quality, this will encourage other sites to link to your blog, which strengthens your branding and encourages loyalty from your existing readers and potential new ones.
You Have To Look Professional
A professional looking blog with reinforce your branding, establish your credibility and help generate leads and sales.
Too many advertisements and too much clutter will drive people away. Avoid non-essential images. Try to find the right balance between an attractive website and one that is practical.
Today, blog designs must be responsive so that they look good on mobile devices as well as on desktop and laptop computers. Fonts should be clean and easy to read.
Take advantage of your sidebar space to display a search bar, category links, and archive links. These types of links encourage people to stay on your website longer. You can also show recent blog comments, featured articles, and post archives.
Be SEO Friendly
Not only does your website need to look good for your readers, it needs to be easily analyzed by search engines so that they can index and rank your content proficiently.
Utilize the built in SEO features of your website. If the site you’re using doesn’t come with any SEO functionality, look for a highly rated third party plugin to get going. It is important that your website is structured correctly to help your content rank well. SEO plugins can also be used to create a sitemap for your website.
Be Prudent With Your Chosen Topics
The topics you write about in your blog will affect who comes to read your articles. If you publish a lot of basic information pieces, you will attract ‘beginners’ to your site. Whereas if you write about advanced topics, you will likely bring people who have more experience with the subject.
You should research what topics you want to cover on your blog and create a long-term strategy to match. This will produce targeted traffic from readers that are more likely to follow to your blog and purchase your offerings.
Write Quality Articles
Quality articles are more likely to be viewed and shared by others. This will increase incoming links and search engine traffic.
By focusing on quality content, your site’s visitors will be more targeted and more likely they are to purchase your products and services. Focus on quality and don’t worry about cheap traffic that merely bloats traffic statistics.
The best advice I know for increasing blog traffic is to solve problems. If you can help your visitors in some way, they believe in what you are doing and will be more likely to subscribe to your blog, share your content, and become a loyal customer.
Here are some more ideas for creating quality articles:
- Use images in your articles to increase social media shares and break up long pieces of text
- The title of your article will be displayed in search engine results and in social media shares, so make it eye catching and impactful
- Make use of lists. List grab attention and allow readers to process information quickly
- Proof read you posts for grammar and spelling. Nothing kills credibility than poor form.
- Perform interviews. If you can interview important people within your industry, you can improve your brand through association
- Share important news give your opinion on the news story instead of simply publishing the links to the story
- Publish honest reviews about related products and services
- Help readers with guides and tutorials which will help resolve readers problems and issues
Blog Consistently
There are differing thoughts regarding how frequently articles should published on a blog. Obviously high traffic news blogs publish numerous times per day whereas most business blogs publish anywhere from a few times per week to a few times per month.
In the most general terms, publishing more frequently equates to more traffic. But even more important than frequency is consistency. People love consistency, so posting six articles one week and then posting nothing the following month could do your blog more harm than good.
Start slow, make a schedule and stick to it. Plan ahead and write some posting in advance to help cover you in case you run into any unforeseen circumstances.
Interact With Your Readers
One of the best way to interact with your readers is through the comments area of your blog posts. When you answer questions and respond to commenters, you can demonstrate your knowledge of a subject and build a relationship with potential customers.
You can also interact with readers through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Surveys are also a cool way of getting to know your readers better and sharing the ideas of readers through your articles.
Do not take your readers for granted. The more you put into connecting with your readers, the more likely customers will become paying customers.
Make It Easy For Visitors to Share Your Content
Social media networks are an incredible source of traffic as your posts and articles can be easily shared on services like Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you integrate social media sharing buttons wherever you post your content.
Grow Your Online Presence
Every time you have a visitor to your blog, you have an opportunity to add a new subscriber to your list. Encourage readers to follow your social media feeds and subscribe to your email list to help them stay notified of new updates on your blog.
A very effective way of increasing your online presence is by utilizing an email marketing list. This allows you to send visitors messages directly to their inbox. You can use this to promote products and services and advise subscribers of your latest blog posts or sales offers.
Promote Your Blog
Promoting your blog could be the di
fference between a lifeless blog and a popular blog. If you have a budget to work with, you could develop your blog quicker advertising on other websites.
If you don’t have an advertising budget, you can use a number of other free promotional methods that won’t cost anything.
One of the most widespread free blog promotion methods is guest blogging. Writing articles for high traffic and well respected websites can raise your brand’s awareness. The links included in your author bio will also increase traffic your blog and increase your ranking in search engines.
Similarly, you can invite high profile bloggers to guest blog on your site. They will surely share the link with their readers and in turn, send traffic your way.
Commenting on popular blogs is also a practice that many bloggers use to promote their sites. Becoming known as a regular commenter can raise awareness of your blog and create new readers for your site.
Be Patient
If you don’t have a large budget for an advertising campaign for your blog, it may take some time before your blog establishes a strong following.
Do not be worried by this. Be patient and focus your energy on delivering quality content and your blog will be successful.