Figuring out how to drive traffic to your blog is one of the most difficult part of blogging. If you can solve that problem then your life become easier as a blogger.
So, you start your blog. Then you spend hours and hours researching. After your research you write amazing contents. Now you are so happy! Your blog looks good and you are ready to make money from it.
But there is one problem, nobody is reading. No visitors. How do you make money from your hard-work if people are not visiting your blog? There is no way! You make money only when people visit!
If you find yourself in that situation, then this article will help you! In this article you will learn how to drive traffic to your blog. You deserve it for all the hard-work. You should not give up because of traffic. Let’s help you.
What is traffic?
To keep it very simple, traffic is the number of people visiting your blog and navigating through it. When a user visits a blog, data is sent and received by the user. That process of someone visiting your blog is called traffic. For instance, when visiting a blog, you type the address of the blog on a browser, that means you sent data. The blog then respond and loads, that means you received data.
There are two ways to look at this, unique visitors and page views. Unique visitors are the number of unique people that visits your blog for a particular time. Page views are the number of time that your website has been loaded for a particular time. That means one unique visitor can generate many page views.
For example, if a user visits your blog to read a particular post. After reading that post, the user navigates to read other posts. Every posts or page the user visits is counted as a page view. So if one user reads 5 posts at once. That means you will have 1 visitor and 5 visits. That is one unique user and 5 page views.
When the number of unique visitors is high, that means you have many people visiting your blog. When page views are very much higher than unique visitors, that is a wonderful thing. It means your visitors are finding your blog interesting.
Your page views should always be very much higher than your unique visitors.
Types of traffic
There are different kinds of traffic that you should know. Some traffic are better than some. Type of traffic is simply the medium from which people visit your blog. You need to understand the different types of traffic to know how to increase traffic to your blog.
1. Organic traffic
Organic traffic is the traffic that comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. It is widely regarded as the most important type of traffic. Organic traffic is regarded as very important because it is natural and shows intention.
For example, if someone was searching on Google for “Where to buy watches in New York” and clicks on your blog from the results. That means it is likely that the person is ready to buy a watch and you will probably make a sell because this person was intentionally looking for where watches are being sold in New York. That makes organic traffic valuable. It is precious to businesses.
2. Direct traffic
Direct traffic is the traffic that comes directly to your blog without passing through any medium. That is when a person enters the address of your blog on a browser and visits your blog directly.
Direct traffic is important. It shows that you are becoming a recognised brand. You have followers. People know you, trust what you do and are following up on you.
3. Referral traffic
Referral traffic are traffic that are referred to your blog from other websites. For example, another website links to your post and someone clicks on it to visit your blog. Or you were mentioned in the news and people click on news link to visit your blog. Any traffic coming from links on other blogs, websites, forums and so on are referred to as referral traffic.
This type of traffic is very important. It boosts your SEO when it comes from high authority websites. It tells people and search engines that your blog is truths worthy.
4. Email traffic
This is a traffic that comes from your email marketing. If you collect emails from your readers, and create a mailing list, then you send them emails either of recent posts or new products or anything at all. That is email traffic.
This traffic is very important for businesses, affiliate marketers and almost everyone.
5. Social media traffic
This is the traffic that comes from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others. When you or your readers share your post on social media and people click on it, that traffic is called social traffic.
This is a good traffic because people may be finding your content useful and therefore sharing it with friends.
6. Paid traffic
These are traffics that you paid for. The most common paid traffic is search engine paid traffic and social media paid traffic. You can pay Google or Facebook, Twitter and others to get traffic. You simply create ads.
This kind of traffic is a good way to grow your blog if you have the fund to.
Note that there are other ways of buying traffic that you should never try. Only used Search engine and social media ads.
7. Bot traffic
These are traffic from machines. They are not from humans. Most of these are from search engines such as Google and Bing who are crawling your site.
I just mentioned this so you know it exists. Nothing to worry about.
How to drive traffic to your blog.
Here are ways that you can drive traffic to your blog to your blog
1. Write quality and original content
This is the first step if you want to drive traffic to your blog. Do not joke with this if you want to become a successful blogger. Write quality contents that are original. Take time, research the topic you are writing on. Everyone loves quality content. When people visit your site, they should see quality content that is original, that will make them want to come back. It will encourage them to share your posts. And you should know that Google and other search engines loves quality and original content. It is a ranking factor. And if you write low quality content or copy and paste contents, you may just be wasting your time.
If you are busy or you are not good with writing. The best solution is to hire writers who can write contents for you. You can find quality writers on Fiverr. Just sign up, find writers and get quality original contents.
2. Research your content and keyword.
Do not just write, make sure you are writing what people are looking for. If you write the content people are not looking for, then you may not get traffic to your post. The best practice is to research for keywords and the contents people are looking for.
When you write contents that people are looking for then it becomes very easy to drive traffic. There are many ways you can find out what people are looking for. You can make use of Google trend. With Google trend, you can be able to track what is trending in your niche and write about it.
You can also use the free Google Keyword Planner tool to research the right keywords. Alternatively, you can sign up with SEMrush to do everything research on content and keyword. You can read top 10 keyword research tools for SEO, for more tools.
3. Optimize your post with Yoast
When writing a post. There are many ways you can optimise it to make them easier for search engines to rank and drive traffic. Sometimes, you may not remember all that you need to do. But with an SEO plugin like Yoast, you are able to optimise right there as you write. Just install yoast. Then when you write a post, look for the Yoast box. Input your keyword and you will get recommendations to improve your post.
4. Make sure you are using a fast web host
The web host that you use can make or ruin your blog. Speed is very important if you want to drive traffic to your blog. The faster, the better. If your blog is fast, search engines will probably rank it higher and you get more traffic. If your blog is fast, users will be happy. But when your blog is slow, people are very impatient, they will leave before it loads. Make use of a good web hosts I recommend Bluehost for new blogs and Cloudways for blogs with lots of readers.
5. Use a fast, responsive and clean theme
The theme you use for your blog can harm or improve your traffic. The theme has a lot of say on your blog’s speed, security, look, user friendliness and responsiveness. If you use a theme that is bad, your blog will not rank well on search engines no matter how good your contents are. The best practice is a responsive, lightweight, fast loading and user friendly theme that ticks all the major SEO boxes. If your theme is bad, you can get a theme like GeneratePress. Very fast, lightweight, SEO optimized and clean code.
6. Email marketing!
Email traffic is are good traffic. Make use of emails to drive traffic. Add a form on your blog and collect emails of your readers. You can send them update when you have a special post. Or send them summaries of your blog posts every month. These will drive traffic directly to your blog! You should collect emails. It is very important for blogging! There are many tools that you can use to collect emails on your blog. One of the bests is Constant Contact. There are other alternatives such as MailChimp and MailerLite.
7. Write good titles
The title of your post is the most important part of your content. That is what people see first. It is your title that will determine if people go ahead to read your post or not. Make sure that you write good titles that are enticing. Take a look at established blogs in your niche and observe how they write their title.
8. Share your posts on social media
Social traffic is very important in blogging. Make sure that you share your posts on social media. You should create a social media account in most of the major social media networks. Share your posts regularly.
9. Add share button to your posts
Make sure you add a share button to your posts. Either at the begging or end. You can add at both the beginning and the end. Share buttons make it easy for your readers to share your post to their friends. If readers find your content interesting, they will most likely share on social media with a friend or friends. And boom, you get visitors!
10. Write guest post for other blogs
This is a very good way to increase your traffic. Look for other good blogs in your niche, contact them and ask if you can write a guest post. Then send them a unique quality post. In that post include a link to a relevant content on your blog. This can help boost your traffic. The readers of that blog will probably click to your blog and you get referral traffic. Also, Google and other search engines love genuine backlinks.
11. Update old posts
Once in a while, check on your old posts and update them. If there is a fresh information, add to it. Add more and make it better. Search engines love this! It will be rewarding! Also, your readers will be happy to know that your post are updated.
12. Write evergreen contents
Evergreen contents are timeless contents. Evergreen contents will continue giving traffic without stop. Make sure you make the most of your blog by including timeless contents.
13. Add pictures to your post
Pictures make posts look beautiful and cool. It makes it easier to read. Apart from making the post good, search engine seems to love it. And you can also add keywords to pictures using the alt tag to boost your traffic.
14. Link to other blogs
When you write a post and you mention other blogs or companies, make sure you link to them. Google love to see this in posts. Apart from that, the blogs might see it and share your content since you mention them. They may even notice and mention you in a future post.
15. Use email signature
Leverage the use of email signature to drive traffic to your blog. In your personal email, just add an email signature so that whenever you send email your receivers will see the signature and likely click on it. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail all allows you create a signature.
16. Engage with your users via comment
When a user comments on your post, take time and reply to them. This will have many effects. It will make your users feel connected to your blog and they will come back. It will also add more content to that post, which is good for SEO. And also, users will be emailed for new comments, which means potential traffic for every reply added.
17. Write more content
Don’t leave your blog stagnant. Add new contents regularly. The pace at which you add content is up to you. It could be once a week or less or more. Decide and stick to it. When users come and see new content, they will probably come back again. But if they see same content every time without fresh addition, there is little incentive to come back. And also, Google love regularly updated blogs.
18. Request your friends and contacts to share your post
If you do not ask, you may not get. There is no arm in trying. Ask your friends and contacts to share your post to their friends. If few of them do, you may just get new life long readers.
19. Promote your posts on social media
If you have a little money, you can boost your post on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. This is a good way to generate lots of traffic to your blog if you have enough resources to.
20. Promote your blog with Google
Make use of Google Adword to promote your blog. You will have to spend money on this but it can be rewarding. If you have a good monetization strategy, you will probably make all the money back. Google Adwords offer many ways to promote your blog including on search pages.
21. Do a give away
Let’s be sincere, we all love freebies. Do a give away on your blog and attract readers. It could be through a contest. This can attract people to your blog and give it attention.
22. Create a tool
Create a tool for your blog. This is technical, but it can drive huge traffic to your blog. You can hire someone on Fiverr to create one for you. There are many tools that you can create such as PDF to Word converter, Citation tool, Paraphrasing tool, Currency converter and many more.
23. Keep learning and grow
Have fun blogging. You will learn as you grow.
Thank you very much for this post. If I create a tool, where is the best place to place it. Subdomain or subfolder?
That is a matter of choice. Both are okay. But I personally prefer subdirectory