So—you’ve set up your blog, and a raft of sterling blog posts have since been planned, penned and published. Now however, as your wonderful prose sits there on your website, staring forlornly back at you, all you can think is… when are the readers going to arrive? The question of how to get more blog traffic perplexes many millions of individuals and businesses alike, all over the globe. So: how?
Publishing a blog without knowing how to increase blog traffic is the digital equivalent of jotting down your most profound thoughts in a lovely, leather-bound notebook, then immediately punting it into the Atlantic Ocean and waiting for somebody to find it. In a word: silly.
No more yelling into the void. No more giddy new blogs published to the resounding indifference of the internet. If you want to see your blog traffic increase, here’s what you’ve gotta do.
How to increase blog traffic fast
1. Share your posts on social platforms
Okay, so first you’ll need to set up a social presence of some kind—by which we mean creating social media profiles for your business, rather than becoming popular down the pub. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok (if you can stomach the cringe) are some of the most popular at the moment, though it tends to change every couple of years.
Let’s use Instagram as an example. First, set up a page for your business. Add a link to your website in your bio, and create a few posts showcasing fun, interesting aspects of what you do. Then, follow accounts from businesses that inspire you, or people who might be interested in your work. Engage with them; ‘like’ and comment on their posts, and congratulate others on their achievements. Pretty soon, you’ll start to see your efforts in kindness being reciprocated. This is a great way to build an interested, engaged network of people who follow your business.
Sharing your blog posts on social media is a great way to increase blog traffic. You can do this once you’ve established a following, but you can also make great progress in sharing your blog posts even if you have only a handful of followers. There are two ways of doing this: you can A) use hashtags (#) in your posts to make sure they appear in front of the right audience, or B) put out sponsored posts, which allows you to manually choose the kind of person you want to view your work.
Also Read: Here’s how content marketing can transform your business.
Note: if this sounds a little too complex for you, don’t worry. We’re more than happy to explain it to you in as much detail as you like over the phone!
2. Optimise your website for search engines
Ever wondered how Google decides on the order it displays results in when you search for something? Why, for example, do websites like Next and H&M appear in the results when you type in something like ‘knitted jumpers’, rather than obscure personal blogs called things like ‘Ethel’s Wonderful World of Weaving’? The answer: the brainboxes at Google have developed a very clever and complex algorithm that sorts websites and decides which deserves the top spot in their results, every time you type something in.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the practice of ensuring that everything in your blog/website is fine-tuned to please Google’s algorithm—thereby increasing the likelihood your site will appear on the first page of Google’s results, whenever people search for terms related to your business.
If Ethel wants her Wonderful World of Weaving blog to gain more readers, she would need to do a little research into which keywords and phrases people typically search for that relate to her site. This is done primarily with a handy tool called Keyword Planner. Once Ethel has determined the most common knitting-related phrases people type into Google, she can decide on new, relevant topics for her future blog posts.
Once Ethel has written up her first blog post—the title of which might be, say, ‘How to crochet an umbrella’—it’s then time for her to optimise said blog post for Google. This means ensuring the keyword the article is based around is present several times throughout the article, as well as many other SEO checks. We go into these in more detail here.
Now, this sounds like a lot. But trust us—it becomes second nature very quickly. Once Ethel has published a range of swanky, search engine-optimised blog articles, it won’t be long until she begins to see her website popping up in search engine results. And that means more readers!
3. Write guest posts
Another big way in which Google decides which websites are high-quality and which are not is by looking at the amount of other websites which link to them. For example, if Ethel manages to get her website mentioned in a BBC article, the link from the BBC website (considered very established and trustworthy) to Ethel’s site will be taken as a sign of good faith by Google.
Also Read: How can you find quality backlinks?
In short, if you can get respected websites to link to your own, you’ll gain more readers filtering through from said larger website, plus your own site will look more established to Google’s algorithm, and you’ll appear in better and better positions in search results. How do you achieve this? You pinball your way upwards! When you start out as a wee little Billy-no-mates website, you won’t yet have the clout to approach The Guardian and request to write something for them.
However, you can approach others in your industry with a great article idea and see if they’d be interested in you writing it for their blog. If they say yes, great! You write it, they publish it, and in return, they link to your website.
Kaboom – more clout, more readers.
Still unsure how to get more blog traffic? Let us do it for you.
As you may have surmised by now, the question of how to get blog traffic doesn’t have a super-fast answer; it requires planning, cleverness, and effort.
If you just don’t have the time, don’t fret: at Suki Marketing, we do it all for you. Give us a call today, and let’s have a chat about how we can help take your blog to the next level.