Businesses having blogs get as much as 97% more links than businesses without blogs. But having a blog isn’t just enough. You have to make sure that it gets enough traffic. If you are struggling to get a decent number of visitors on your blog, following 5 strategies to boost blog traffic will give you a nice push.
- An adaptive blogging strategy
- Target long-tail keywords
- Guest blogging
- Publish superior content
- Don’t ignore SEO
1. An adaptive blogging strategy
Develop a content marketing strategy. Have a solid content publishing plan. Craft an adaptive blogging strategy.
An adaptive blogging strategy is one that adapts, evolves, and gets better over time. Your approach to blogging must be flexible. Analyze, learn, adapt, and transform your blogging strategy as and when required.
Most of the leading bloggers in all parts of the world develop a rigid strategy for content writing and publishing, and they never go back and make any changes to it for months. If things are moving in a certain direction, you should move in the same direction with your blog.
So there are two things you have to do.
First, create a plan and a solid yet adaptive strategy for the blog. This can be a formal written plan or it could be an informal strategy residing somewhere at the back of your mind.
I personally prefer having a formal plan with a content calendar for at least next 30 days. I know what I will publish, what keywords I will target, when the posts will go live, and everything is available on a sheet.
As of writing this post, I have numerous other posts in the pipeline that will be published over the course of next couple of months.
The idea is to never get out of ideas for new blog posts.
Second, be sure the content publishing strategy for the blog is flexible. You must be willing to amend the plans just at the last moment. Keep looking around with an intention to get better ideas.
As soon as something new and better emerges, study it, and amend the blogging strategy immediately. If you don’t, your competitors will do it and will develop a competitive advantage in the long-run.
An adaptive blogging plan ensures that your blog publishes new content regularly. More content eventually leads to more traffic.
2. Target long-tail keywords
Long tail keywords are your blog’s best friend. They are very helpful in bringing visitors to your blog.
Long tail keywords are long (normally more than three words) phrases that target a specific group of people. For example, ‘where to buy green apples with white dots’ is a long tail keyword that targets a small but a very specific target group.
Long tail keywords have the magical power of improving your blog’s ranking in search results as not everyone targets them. As soon as a user enters a matching query in the search engine, your blog post will pop up at the first few places.
Your job as a blogger is to find those low competition and profitable keywords in your niche.
3. Guest blogging
Guest blogging is the biggest source of traffic and it is the hottest strategies to boost blog traffic. The best part is that it is free and generates results instantly. You will see traffic instantly as soon as your guest post is published.
There are two things to look for when guest blogging:
- Guest post on authority blogs and websites that have the potential to send heaps of traffic to the blog.
- Send your best of the best blog post for publication on authority blogs.
Guest blogging should be used for getting traffic, not for generating backlinks. When you publish an awesome post on a leading authority site in your niche, you will attract the readers of that site. They will love the post and will follow you and will visit your blog.
This is how guest blogging works and this is how it should be used.
Attract visitors. Backlinks do not generate traffic, great guest posts do.
4. Publish superior content
There is a lot of content on the internet. There are billions of websites out there and the number of new blogs is increasing rapidly.
If you wish to attract visitors and you want them to visit your blog regularly, write something that they are unable to find elsewhere. Offer them with content they are unable to read anywhere else on the internet.
Go a step ahead. Do something better than your competitors. Do something better than what is already available on the internet.
Scrapping content, rewriting the same old articles, and not adding any significant value will not make your readers happy.
5. Don’t ignore SEO
Optimize your blog and every blog post for search engines.
Your blog has two types of readers.
- Your target audience – the people.
- Search engine crawlers.
Superior content attracts people. Adding more value to the content will make the people happy.
While, SEO will make search engines and their crawlers happy. If you are writing awesome content but you have not optimized the post for search engines, you will lose traffic. If search engines cannot read what you have published on the blog, they will not rank it in the search results.
Optimize every single blog post on the blog for search engines by adding SEO friendly titles, adding tags, optimizing images, and targeting a specific long tail keyword. This will educate search engines what your page is about.
In return, your blog will enjoy better search engine rankings, and will attract more organic traffic.
It is time to implement these 5 techniques to boost blog traffic exponentially.
Image from Flickr.
