Anyone can start a blog but not everyone can get readership. Getting traffic is the biggest challenge that new bloggers face. It’s hard to get noticed when you haven’t established yourself in the blog space. Fortunately, there are many ways to bring in traffic to your blog and increase it organically. Here are 10 things that you can do even if you just started blogging yesterday.
1. Target and Optimize Your Pages for Low Competition Keywords
SEO is a strategy that requires you to be in it for the long haul, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of it now. Instead of targeting competitive keywords, look for keywords that are getting a low search volume and create content built around these keywords. Ranking on the top listings for ten keywords adding up to 900 to 3000 searches a month is a realistic way for beginners to start getting some traffic from the search engines.
2. Use Social Media to Share Content and Connect with Influencers
Social media is essential to the success of your new blog. Most people use it to keep their readers informed whenever a new post is made. What you want to do is to use social media as a channel for getting your content out there. Connect with influencers (publishers with a large social or blog following) and try to get your content in front of them. If you’ve impressed them with your content, they may decide to repost it to their followers.
3. Leverage Your Audience with Social Sharing Buttons
The easiest way to increase your traffic and build your readership is to simply add social sharing buttons on your blog posts. This allows you to leverage your audience and get them to get your content out there. There are a wide variety of tools that allow you to set this up. One of the newer ones that you should pay attention to are the tools that allow you to share to Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook when you hover over images.
4. Take Part in Guest Posting
Guest posting is still a great way to get the word out there about your blog. It can be challenging to land a guest posting spot on a popular blog as there is so much competition. The key here is to study the blog and their audience and come up with content that is specifically designed to cater to them. The beauty of guest posting is that once you get accepted for a post, the site owners will often come back to you to contribute additional content.
5. Get Involved with Online Forums
Online forums are still very popular. It’s by far the easiest way to get visibility for your blog. Online forums typically allow you to include a small add on the footer of your posts. The strategy to use here is to share great content on these forums and engage in popular posts to get the visibility you need. Make sure you follow the rules of these forums and avoid creating posts that are specifically designed to market your site.
6. Create Content that People Actually Want to Read
Are you creating great content and doing everything you can to get it out there only to see poor results? If so, you may want to go back and pay attention to the content you’re creating. It may not necessarily be about topics that your audience is interested in. If you want to do well with content marketing, you have to make sure that you do your research and create content based on the likes, wants and problems of your audience. One shortcut to creating the right content is to study what other similar blogs are doing and create content based on the topics they’re having success with.
7. Use the Power of the Press
Many bloggers have built a large audience by getting in the press. Don’t underestimate the power of press releases and press opportunities. One mention from a popular platform can eat up your site’s bandwidth. There are many online video channels, news programs, radio shows, magazines and podcasts that are looking for unique content. Get your story out there if you want to get more readers for your blog. There are many digital press platforms that you can use if you don’t want to travel for press tours or opportunities.
8. Set Up Cross Promotions
You can leverage the audience of existing blogs to grow your audience through cross promotions. All you have to do is to look for blogs that are related to your topic but not in direct competition with your blog. For example, if you have a fitness blog, you can go seek out healthy food blogs as partners. Cross promoting each other’s blogs is a win-win scenario for both parties. However, many partners will require that you have similar audience numbers to make it fair and worthwhile to them. For this reason, this is a strategy that you should utilize after you’ve build a sizable following.
9. Repurpose Your Content to Increase Your Reach
To get the most value out of your content, you want to repurpose it into different formats. For example, you can take your blog post and turn it into a PDF white paper and video. This allows you to post your content on sites like Scribd and YouTube which will increase exposure to your blog. There are many applications to this strategy from audio recordings, infographics, slideshows, email courses to short multimedia digital courses.
10. Invest in Advertising
There are many channels that you can use to increase your subscriber base. The most well-known channel is Facebook. Facebook has an advertising program that allows you to boost your posts and reach thousands of users instantly. If the goal is to build an audience, you want to use it as an opportunity for Facebook users to subscribe to your channel. Share content that’s valuable and interesting to these users and focus on getting them to follow your Facebook page and blog. There are other search and social media advertising channels you can use to get exposure but this is one of the cheaper options.
Using these strategies, you can start a blog and build a respectable number of followers within a few weeks. Most of these strategies don’t cost a single cent, so it’s all about the work you put in. There are many more ways to generate and increase traffic to your blog, so continue brainstorming for new traffic ideas.