D o you want to get more traffic to your blog? You're in good company!
Over the decade (a bit longer than a decade actually) that I’ve been blogging, I’ve tried taking advantage of every source of traffic in the book. During this process, I’ve curated a list of blog traffic tips I’m very excited to share with you today.
So, in this post, I’m going to be sharing the strategies and actionable tips you can use to grow your website traffic via:
- SEO,
- Email marketing,
- Building a community,
- Social media platforms like Facebook,
- And more đ
So, letâs get started!
Quick List of Blog Traffic Tips
In This Guide:
- Identify the Right Blog Post Topics Use tools and brainstorm to find and optimize keywords that attract your target audience.
- Create In-Depth Pillar Articles Write in-depth, high-quality content on general evergreen topics to attract ongoing traffic.
- Apply Basic SEO Use plugins like All in One SEO for SEO best practices and make your site more search-engine-friendly.
- Create a Viral Giveaway Run contests to rapidly increase traffic and email list subscribers.
- Build an Email List Capture visitor emails with a tool like OptinMonster to drive repeat visits and build a loyal audience.
- Start Guest Blogging Write articles for other blogs to expand reach and drive traffic back to your site.
- Use Email Outreach to Build Link Use outreach strategies to gain backlinks and increase traffic.
- Add Browser Push Notifications Add browser push notifications to alert readers about new content.
- Regularly Update Your Articles Regularly update your articles to maintain freshness and ranking.
- Run a Facebook Ad Campaign Invest in Facebook ads to boost traffic and overcome organic reach limitations.
1. Use Keyword Research to Identify the Right Topics For Blog Posts
If you’re blogging just for fun, it’s fine to write about whatever you want.
But if you’re serious about getting organic traffic to your blog, the first and foremost thing you need to focus on is keyword research.
What is keyword research?
Simply put, it means finding the words that people are using to search Google and other search engines. If you identify those search terms (likely using a blog topic research tool), also called keywords, then you’ll know exactly the topics that you should be writing about on your blog. Then when you use those keywords in your content, your blog posts will be more likely to show up in the search results.
Keyword research lays the foundation for your blog so you can attract the right audience who are interested in what youâre offering on your blog.
Without keyword research, you’ll fail to convert your traffic into email subscribers and customers. That’s because you won’t be writing about the topics your target audience is searching for, and even if you do, they won’t be able to find it on Google.
With keyword research, you can target the right keywords and optimize your content accordingly. This helps Google algorithms understand what it’s all about. Which will boost your chances of your articles popping up in response to a search.
How do you do keyword research? One way is to start with a blog post idea and then brainstorm different ways people might search for that topic in Google.
Then, start searching for that topic yourself. Make a note of the titles that appear in search results, and the suggested searches at the bottom of the page.
This will give you a good idea of what other people are searching for and how they’re phrasing it.
For detailed step-by-step instructions, check out this guide on how to do keyword research for beginners.
2. Create High-Quality Pillar Pages
Once you have a good idea of the topics people are searching for, the next thing you need to do is to create a series of pillar articles.
Pillar articles are longer blog posts on more general topics related to your blog niche. Pillar articles can be thousands of words long. They tend to be “evergreen”, meaning they’re not quickly outdated, and they bring in a lot of traffic even after months – if not years – of creating them.
Pillar articles help youâŚ
- Bring in a rush of new readers, social shares, and links back to your blog.
- Bring in more readers over time, even if your content is buried in your archives.
- Bring in search traffic because so many other sites eventually link to them.
So how do you create pillar articles the right way so they continue to drive traffic to your site for years to come?
Here are a few steps to get you started:
- Content ideas: Create a list of pillar article ideas you want to publish on your blog. These should be more high-level topics that you can write an in-depth post about.
- Research: Read what others are writing on the topic and consider how you can create content that’s even more high-quality and helpful for readers.
- Editorial calendar: Build an editorial calendar and add these ideas to the calendar. Make sure to give yourself enough time to write longer articles.
- Stick to the plan: Choose a publishing schedule and stick to it, no matter what. Check out our tips to write faster to help you stay on track!
This strategy can take time, but it’s a great way to build your audience and reputation. Plus, you’ll see your traffic continue to grow over time.
3. Apply Basic On Page SEO Best Practices
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of best practices that help make your site more search engine-friendly. The better your site is optimized for SEO, the more traffic to your website you will get as it helps search engines understand your site content.
And while SEO and even SEO tools, can seem complicated, they don’t have to be.
You can easily optimize your blog posts and apply SEO best practices to all of your web pages using a plugin like All in One SEO. And in turn, increase blog traffic.
When you create a new blog page or post in WordPress, All in One SEO will give you a TruSEO score that tells you how well your content is optimized. It also gives you an actionable checklist you can use to improve and unlock maximum traffic.
Plus, there are other powerful features like automatic meta description, meta tags, smart XML sitemaps, WooCommerce SEO, and much more.
There’s also a free version that includes all of the basic SEO features you need for your website (check out AIOSEO vs Yoast).
To learn more about both the free and paid versions, check out our detailed review of All in One SEO.
4. Create a Viral Giveaway
Want a tip that will work to get massive traffic NOW?
Running a giveaway is a great strategy to skyrocket your traffic and email list. A viral giveaway works like wildfire because it piggybacks on word-of-mouth advertising to help you increase traffic and signups to your newsletter.
Joshua Earl, a freelance writer, has managed to grow his email list by 3,418% in just 11 days by running a viral giveaway.
So, how does a viral giveaway work?
- Set up a contest/giveaway on your blog with a plugin such as RafflePress, which is the best giveaway plugin available.
- Announce a price for your audience to encourage participation.
- Encourage readers to share the giveaway to earn entries.
- Promote your blog giveaway everywhere on the web.
Create Your Viral Giveaway Today
RafflePress is the best WordPress contest plugin in the market. It helps you unlock viral growth by turning your website visitors into brand ambassadors. Best of all, you can use it for free!
Get RafflePress for FreeFor more details, see this step-by-step guide on how to run a viral giveaway.
5. Build an Email List For Email Marketing
Did you know that, on average, 70% of your website visitors will only stop by your blog once and never return?
That’s why building an email list is so important. An engaged email list can help you drive repeat visits to your site.
When you build an email list, you can build a connection with your visitors by sending them valuable content over time.
Repeat visitors are more likely to convert into customers than first-time visitors. In fact, studies show that it takes 3-4 visits to your website for potential customers to actually think of doing business with you.
That means driving repeat visits will also help you gain your subscribersâ loyalty, which will turn them into customers.
Using opt-in forms from OptinMonster, like this fullscreen popup that appears once exit intent has been triggered, is the best way to get blog visitors onto your email list:
Blogger Jennifer Roberge also used this technique to increase her email signups by 159%!
See our guide on how to get more email subscribers for more tips and tricks.
6. Start Guest Blogging To Get More Traffic
Guest blogging (also called guest posting) is when you write an article to publish on someone else’s blog.
It’s been a popular way to:
- Build brand exposure,
- Expand your reach,
- Build authority in your niche via links,
- And, of course, it is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.
Though it’s been around for a while, guest blogging isnât dead!
It’s still a great strategy for demonstrating your expertise and potentially driving massive referral traffic to your blog.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, youâll probably know some of the top blogs in your niche that accept guest posts. But don’t limit yourself by only writing guest articles for a few blogs you already know.
Instead, Google should be used effectively to find potential blogs that accept guest articles.
Below are a few sure-fire methods I follow to find them:
- Search your topic + âwrite for usâ, “contribute”, or “submit a guest post” to find on-topic blogs that accept guest posts.
- Install Mozbar on your browser. It’s a free tool to weed out irrelevant blogs from the results.
- Visit each blog that you think is worth posting an article for, and then send them a guest posting proposal.
For example, hereâs how Iâd use Google to find potential blogs for guest posts.
I’m using the inurl search operator to narrow down my results. (Check out this Google search operator guide for more advanced searching tips.)
Using the Mozbar extension, I avoid any blog that has a Moz DA (Domain Authority) of less than 40. This way I can ignore less authoritative blogs and save my time writing for more influential blogs with more traffic.
7. Use Email Outreach to Ask for Links
Email outreach is another great strategy to drive an insane amount of traffic to blogs and websites.
Basically, you write great link-worthy blog content, make it even better, and reach out to the right people for backlinks.
Brian Dean calls this strategy the skyscraper technique.
This strategy of getting backlinks from all around the web has helped him double his organic traffic in just 14 days.
Since weâve already covered how to write pillar articles in this post, letâs take a deeper look at reaching out to the right people.
This outreach strategy is helpful for any other purposes, including guest blogging, where youâre supposed to send emails to different editors. The better your outreach process is, the more time you can save, and of course, the better your results.
Blog Traffic Tip: How to Use an Email Productivity Tool for Outreach
An email marketing productivity tool like Streak, which I use and recommend, will let you track how often emails are opened and what links recipients click on your emails.
Streak is a free Gmail and Chrome add-on to track your email activities and improve productivity.
With its Snippets, you can use a library of frequently written emails, so you donât have to write them from scratch.
The most important feature of this app is its CRM. It lets you integrate a CRM into your Gmail inbox so you can see what happens to each email you send.
With Streak, you donât need to create a separate spreadsheet or a pipeline to track the progress of all your emails since they are integrated into your inbox.
For example, take a look at the email pipeline I created for my guest blogging campaigns.
By simply looking at the CRM, you can instantly figure out to whom you need to send a follow-up to get a response.
8. Add Browser Push Notifications
Since its inception, mobile apps have used push notifications to increase user engagement. Now, the same technology is available in browsers and publications.
With push notifications, you alert your regular readers about a recent blog post or any updates you want them to know. The key point is that you can notify your userâs browser even if theyâre not present on your website.
PushEngage is a great app that lets you send push notifications to your subscribers.
The best part is that PushEngage has a free plan that lets you send 120 notifications/month to up to 2500 subscribers.
To learn more about PushEngage, check out our list of the best push notification software.
9. Regularly Update Your Articles
Pillar articles are indeed evergreen content, but if you want to keep all of your articles fresh, youâll need to constantly update them.
The freshness of the content is also a ranking factor in Google, so you need to keep it updated. Otherwise, your competitorâs article would rank higher on Google, dropping your position on the search results and organic traffic.
I use and recommend SEMrush to keep an eye on the position of my preferred keywords on Google.
You can upload all the keywords you want to rank for using their Position Tracking report. This helps you figure out which article needs an update.
You can also tag the keywords based on priority so you can see the position of your keywords on the search results page. If you see a significant drop in certain keywords, you can improve your article.
After a few days of updating your article, you can view the stats and see if the recent update has affected your ranking.
10. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign To Boost Website Traffic
If you’re willing to spend some money to increase your blog traffic, Facebook ads are a great way to do it.
Trying to promote your blog post on social media like Facebook by sharing a link won’t do much.
If you share your blog posts on your Facebook page and have been for a while, you might have noticed that the number of Page followers doesnât always equate to the reach of your posts.
Awesome Motive founder Syed Balkhi has noted that the Facebook organic reach problem has a Domino effect.
If you have one bad post, then it will impact the reach of your next post.
Now since fewer people see your next post, there will be an even lower number of interactions which creates a negative chain reaction. Before you know it, your pageâs organic reach vanishes.
Similarly, if one of your posts does really well, your next post will have a better chance of succeeding due to increased visibility.
How would you tackle the Domino effect and continue driving huge traffic to your blog from Facebook? Advertising.
By advertising on Facebook, Syed Balkhi has found an improvement in the organic reach of the WPBeginner Page and an increase in traffic by 332%.
If you want to boost your own traffic with Facebook ads, follow these tips:
- Only share posts that you believe would interest your followers.
- Like any other social network, rich media, such as photos and videos, get more attention on Facebook than other content types.
- Constantly review the engagement using Page Insights to know what works best with your audience.
For more details, check out OptinMonster’s guide to Facebook ads.
Blog Traffic Tips In Closing
I hope these tactics will help you boost your blog traffic.
Do you have any traffic tips youâve applied to your blog and seen a big difference? Leave a comment and let me know. Iâd be interested to chat about this one.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to check out our guide on SEO for bloggers to drive more traffic to your blog.
Wonderful article. Thanks for writing!
Thanks for sharing this blog it would really helps me allot.
Good to hear, James!
Thanks for the article. Is it enough to update the article or do you need to edit the Published On date?
Hi Melvin, if you update your article the next time Google crawls your site it will notice a difference from the last time and re-index the page. Changing the ‘Published On’ date is just another indicator to the Google crawl. But for readers of your blog, this can help them see you’ve made some changes. So, ideally update both so it’s clear to Google and your readers that you’ve updates the content. The only caveat is that this should be for significant changes to the content. For example, if you only update a spelling mistake then there’s no need to change ‘Published On’ date.
Very clear, thanks. I’ve been wondering that for a while because that date is also an important factor of why someone clicks on your article in the SERPs. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t differentiate between the first time that an article is published and the last time it’s updated.
Your WordPress theme controls what date/time is visible. If you right-click then select “View Page Source” on your blog post, you can see there are three date/times: published_time, modified_time, updated_time.
I recently updated my theme to have the published date under the header. I think itâs a competitive advantage for both SEO bots and for real readers. I think people really like to see up to date content. Itâs reassuring.
Thanks for sharing such a useful information. I will definitely use the tricks and tips to get more traffic on my site. Traffic can be increased using SEO tricks. Thank you again for the post.
Thanks for the great write-up!
From choosing domain names to hosting site, to creating content, everything requires a lot of work. This is also true for getting site traffic. It needs a lot of work to get your site up and running and at the same time, build relationships with bloggers and site owners to solidify your online presence and reputation.
This article also offers great help for me as I am still getting my way into leveraging my own traffic and familiarizing the ins and outs of building site traffic.
This is awesome!
Cheers!
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Backlinks are very useful for getting rank and traffic also. So personally I use guest posting for my blog. But still, I am not getting High DA for that. So can you suggest me some tips for getting High Domain Authority for my blog?
Hey Ashish,
Backlinks are very useful at increasing your site’s domain authority. You can check out our article on How to Get Backlinks which has some tips for getting high authority backlinks to improve your DA.
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Thanks Serena, happy you found this article helpful. Good luck with your blog!
I like the way you told about how to get traffic on a website by using different strategies.
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Thanks Pertunia, we hope these tips help you improve your blog’s traffic!
As a beginner, I am struggling a little to get a decent amount of traffic in a month. This blog post was seriously helpful. PushEngage gives me hope to get a better amount of traffic this Month.
Happy you found it helpful Julie! Feel free to check out our PushEngage review to learn more about how it can help you grow your traffic and engagement. 🙂
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