A website's blog has the potential to convert a lot of readers into clients. It's not enough, however to simply build a blog and publish content to it once a week. It takes strategy to properly market a blog and get your content seen by the general public. The following six methods have been highly successful for me and my team, so I share them with you. May your blog traffic skyrocket!
Know Your Audience
Understanding the personas of the people you want to attract to your blog is crucial if you want to increase blog traffic. Furthermore, it's important to understand exactly who is already reading your blog. By developing a process for identifying these individuals, you can figure out how to continue crafting the right type of content to reach them. It's also a good idea to look at some blogs which are attracting the types of readers you want, and analyze what those blogs are doing differently from you. What about their content, design and marketing is working well? What can you learn from them? Track this process and apply it to your own blog.
Make Content SEO Friendly
What does it mean to make your content SEO friendly? It means following the rules of White Hat SEO and producing P.E.A.C. content- practical, entertaining, awe-inspiring and credible. It also means properly researching the keywords you want your content to rank for, and ensuring those keywords are low competition and have a high average search volume per month. It also means avoiding keyword stuffing, which can alert Google that you are using Black Hat SEO techniques to rank higher, resulting in penalization and no boost in blog traffic.
Do Outreach
How will anyone know about your blog and the content on that blog if you don't tell anyone? Not every company has a highly engaged following, so it's important to reach out to people who are most likely to share your content, and ask them to do so. Research influencers using a tool like Buzzsumo and ask them to share your work with their followers. You might be surprised by how many of them will be willing to share it for you. Just make sure to reach out to them in way they can't refuse.
Repurpose Your Content
What are some of the most popular blog posts on your site? Create a list of your top content and figure out how you can repurpose those articles into different forms. Produce an ebook that you can include in the article itself to gather leads. Make a podcast explaining the content directly to your audience. Use ready to use powerpoint templates to create an engaging SlideShare presentation. Access an online infographic maker and make an infographic highlighting the most important points from your blog post. The more variations in content you create, the more platforms you can share them on, and in doing so the more channels you can drive traffic from.
Promote on Social Media
Developing a strong social media plan can result in a massive boost in blog traffic. Foundr Magazine is an example of a company who managed to increase traffic and conversions by building up their Instagram following. Instead of worrying about tackling every social media platform however, try to focus on mastering one social network at a time. Once you learn one perfectly, move on to the next and repeat the process.
Engage Your Audience With Contests
How do you engage your audience so that they are actually active on social media, and on your blog? Create contests. I use an app called Gleam.io, since it's very simple to setup a challenge for your readers. Ask your audience to comment on blog posts, share posts on Twitter and Facebook, and even get them to invite their friends to participate. Award them points for every engagement and reward their participation with a prize. Often those initial participants who only entered the contest to win will remain engaged readers.
You can't simply write a blog post and hope that it will go viral. It takes strategic planning to craft your content, optimize it, promote it, repurpose it and get people to engage with it. Even the most successful publications had to work towards building up their audiences and keeping them engaged. Following the above six pointers and consistently applying them is key to increasing your blog traffic.