20 Ways To Get More Traffic to Your Blog

20 Ways To Get More Traffic to Your Blog

Note: Get a free course at the end of the article.

Increasing readership of your blog is both art and science. Take a look at these 20 quick ways you can drive traffic and attract the audience you want.

Every business owner who’s ever hosted a blog has experienced the frustration of trying to gain readership. Though we’d all like it if readers just magically came to us, the reality is, it takes some work to build an audience.

It’s easy to get frustrated and just give up on blogging, but once you experience the benefits, you’ll understand that your blog can have a tremendous impact on your business by attracting traffic to your site, helping you build a social media audience and making an impression on prospects and clients alike.

Following are 20 proven strategies that can help you boost readership and increase traffic to your blog.

1. Write more.

Studies show that the more often you update your blog, the more traffic it will receive. Google gives higher priority to websites with fresh content, so if you want to get more attention from the search engines, update your blog at least twice a week.

2. Promote with social media.

Share each new blog post across your social media networks, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. If you spend time cultivating your networks and share great content, social media sites can become some of your top traffic sources.

3. Write better titles.

The titles for your blog posts are almost more important than the content itself. That’s because titles help potential readers decide whether they should click and read more. Pay attention to the article titles you see on magazine covers. They entice readers with promises and solutions. When you do the same, your readership will increase.

4. Know your niche.

While you may be interested in sea life, exotic travel destinations, Little League baseball and weight loss, you’ll confuse your audience if your content doesn’t follow a clear theme. Decide who your target audience is, what they want to read and what specific messages you want to convey.

5. Include photos.

Studies have shown that photos in blog posts boost readership. Not only does a photo make the post more visually appealing, but you can also include keywords in the Alt Image tag on the photo, boosting search engine optimization (SEO) for your site. Keep in mind that you can’t just pull any photo from Google because you risk violating copyright laws. Instead, locate royalty-free images from a site like Unsplash.com.

6. Incorporate keywords.

Speaking of SEO, keywords are at the heart of SEO. One of the easiest ways to generate more traffic to your website is to ensure that every page on your site has a keyword strategy. So for each blog post you write, choose one key phrase that you believe readers would use to find that post. Next, incorporate that phrase into the title of the post, the headline on the page, within the content on the page at least two times, in a featured image on the page and also as part of the page link. Keyword concentration helps Google understand what that page is about, which can ultimately lead to more traffic from the search engines.

7. Incorporate links.

When you mention another company’s product or service in a blog post, include a link to that company’s page. Not only does Google like to see outbound links on your site, the company you mention may also notice your post and link back to you. Plus, readers appreciate it when you provide resources to make it easier for them to find the things they’re looking for.

8. Add social sharing buttons.

At the top and bottom of your blog posts, make sure you include social sharing buttons for Twitter, LinkedIn and the other major social networks. Make it easy for readers to spread the word.

9. Retweet past content.

We aren’t all looking at Twitter at the same time, so when you share a new blog post link, the majority of your fan base won’t see it the first time. Repeat your tweets, and don’t be afraid to share past content. Readers don’t care when it was written as long as it’s still relevant.

10. Invite guest contributors.

When others write for your blog, you add more content that you didn’t have to write yourself. As a bonus, those contributors will also share with their networks and may ask you to write for them, opening up new readership avenues for you.

11. Add video.

Google owns YouTube, which is one of the many reasons that videos can drive more traffic to your site. Supplement the written content on your blog with short videos that are informative and entertaining.

12. Invest in promotion.

If you believe your audience is spending time on Facebook, occasionally invest in sponsored posts. For as little as $10, you can “Boost” a post and increase its reach significantly.

13. Conduct give-away events.

Create fun theme days such as “Free Book Fridays” where your readers can win a prize by submitting a comment or sharing your link via social media. You can provide prizes yourself or invite companies to donate or sponsor these promotions.

14. Write guest posts.

Locate other blogs that reach your target audience, and offer to contribute guest blog posts. If the site has a substantial audience, you can bet that readers will in turn want to engage with more of your content.

15. Cross-promote to your mailing list.

Instead of writing all new content for your electronic newsletter, share the first paragraph from several recent blog posts and include a link to continue reading on the site. Not everyone is taking the time to read your blog each week, so this will help get your subscribers invested in your blog.

In addition to the tips above, the following smart strategies will also help increase readership:

16. Make your content easy to read by using plenty of subheads, bullets and numbered lists.

17. Promote your blog in your email signature and your bio in any online profiles.

18. Make it easy for blog visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

19. Invite readers to leave a comment, then respond and let them know you’re engaged.

20. Finally, have fun with your blog. If it feels like drudgery, your readers will notice. But if you enjoy producing the content, that will come across and have a tremendous impact on your success.

You can use this cheatsheet which I personally use Here!

How to Generate Revenue From Your Facebook Fan Page

How to Generate Revenue From Your Facebook Fan Page

Published by James Parsons

Most people these days simply refer to Facebook Fan Pages as simply Pages, and for a good reason; the era of their use primarily as pages for fan worship is long past. Today, Pages are used as marketing hubs and tools to build communities around certain brands, entities, events and media.

It’s entirely possible to make money from Facebook, though there are two different, non-exclusive ways to go about it. Which you choose depends on your goals, your resources and the nature of your business. You can even use them both, if you have several paths to monetization.

Step 1: Create a Page

Both the easiest and the hardest part of the whole process is properly creating your Page. Make sure you choose the proper classification; some types of pages are limited in what they can do and what they can display, while others have additional features specifically for that type of entity. Picking the wrong one will hamper you. Likewise, be careful in selecting the name you use. You can change your name and URL once, but it’s not easy; Facebook doesn’t want you to casually rebrand at the drop of a hat.

Take care when setting up your Page with all of the information you can fit in. This includes, primarily, you About section. The About section requires several sentences as a description of your business, a link to your main business page – essential if you ever hope to be verified, among other things – and your industry.

Your profile picture and cover photo are crucial as well. No one trusts a Page without a cover photo, for example. Your profile picture can be as simple as a recognizable shot of your logo, or you can jazz it up for a special event. It’s a good idea to change up these pictures every few months, as long as they stay recognizably branded.

Step 2: Build an Audience

When you’re first starting out, you can upload a mailing list if you have one, and Facebook will cross-check those emails with valid Facebook accounts. Any user who maintains a Facebook account with that email address will be given the option to like your page. You might want to hold off on doing this until you have some content on your page, though.

For content, you’re going to want to post and schedule several posts for the coming days. Ideally, you’ll post interesting industry content, content from your blog, content from other partner blogs and general interest content your users like. You might not know what works best yet, but time and study will reveal those secrets to you.

Once you have some content, you can upload your mailing list. You can also employ other techniques for growing your page, including running paid ads if you have the budget to do so.

Step 3: Funnel the Audience to a Monetized Page

This is the first of the two options you have to monetize your Facebook Page, and it’s not entirely just monetizing Facebook. See, the primary purpose of this method is to funnel people away from Facebook and on to pages where people can actually earn you money.

See, you can’t just run affiliate ads on Facebook. They don’t even really like affiliate links, though you can get away with those in organic posts. So, instead, you lead people off-site and on to your own website, blog, or storefront.

You can do this through ads and you can do this through posting content on your site and linking to it on Facebook. In fact, you should be doing both. Every person who visits your site from Facebook is a possible conversion.

You can’t really use optimized landing pages in organic posts. Facebook doesn’t like organic posts being dominated by such advertising. They’ll deliver a hit to your organic reach and make it harder for your other messages to make it through. Ads, however, can and should always link to an optimized landing page.

Once the users have left Facebook and landed on your website, you have all the flexibility and power of SEO and conversion rate optimization available to use.

Step 4: Create a Facebook App Store

The second option available is to run a store directly on Facebook. If you do this, you can potentially eliminate off-site marketing entirely. It’s not as effective as having your own store – people prefer to shop off Facebook, and you lose the presence of a good blog – but it’s perfectly acceptable.

There are a number of services you can use to set up a store in a tab app, including Shopify. The idea is that the service will create and host a storefront for you, and Facebook will become the portal to that store.

Note that such a store is in a tab app, which is somewhat limited in use on Facebook. You have one space in the top bar for your store to be labeled, but it’s not a fancy graphical label like tabs used to be. The graphical label is on the left sidebar some ways down the page. It’s not a lot, so you have to put a little extra effort into linking directly to your shop at every opportunity, so people know where to find it.

Step 5: Engage, Maintain, Grow

Once you have the path to monetization set up, everything else is about maintenance and growth. You have to grow your fan base, which you can do by posting compelling content and running advertisements that ask for page likes. You have to engage those users so they keep seeing your posts and thus are continually exposed to the idea of your business, leading them to like you more and potentially convert. And, of course, you have to maintain your store and your sales funnel so that you never miss sales due to a broken line of code or a missing product.

Your bread and butter with this process is going to be Insights. Study your Facebook insights and learn your audience. Cater your messages and your products to their needs and desires. Get them where they want it, and they’ll give you money to do so.

New Methods

As of 2018, there are a few new methods you can use to generate revenue: sponsored posts and shoutouts, selling products, and dropshipping. However, reach is also more delicate these days, so you don’t want to annoy your fanbase. Look into the 80/20 rule, which says 80% of your content should be useful or funny content that isn’t business-related, and 20% should be on any of the above; things that could potentially drive revenue to your page. Users don’t log into Facebook just to be sold things, they want to see what their favorite people and brands are up to. So, don’t sell too hard, and focus on creating great content.