In a perfect world, your blog posts would go viral within hours of publishing it, but in reality, this does not happen. In fact, if you do not properly market it, your blog post could go completely unread. There are millions of blogs out there vying for the attention of the same target markets, so you have to be diligent in your efforts to generate more traffic to your blog. Here are five free ways to make that happen.
Sharing your articles is one of the easiest ways to generate more traffic. This means sharing it more than just right after you publish it. For example, you share it on your social media pages immediately after publishing with a quirky headline to get people’s attention; however, how do you know everyone within your target audience saw that quick blurb? Social media is tricky when it comes to showing new posts. In a few days or a week, figure a different way to boost the traffic by posing a question with a link to the article or sharing a specific quote from the article that will grab the attention of more people without looking like duplicate content.
Writing a guest blog will not bring you income, as the blogger allowing you to post on their blog is doing you a favor, but it does provide you with links back to your own blog, which can increase traffic. The readership that the bigger blogger has already established will now be reading your article and if it is in interesting enough, they will want to read more from you, which leads them to click on the link to your blog, bringing you more traffic.
Sometimes your readers want new content, which you can bring in with guest bloggers on your site. Just as writing for someone else can bring you traffic to your blog, the same is true for guest bloggers on your site. Chances are that the people that write for your site want traffic too, so they are going to share the link to the blog they wrote on your platform with their audience, which increases the traffic to your blog at the same time that it brings attention to the writer’s article, serving as a win-win for everyone.
Time is of the essence with your blog topics. If you choose topics that are only relevant for a short period of time, they will lose steam, which translates into you losing traffic. Choose topics that will stand the test of time, or at least a longer period of time. For example, if you write a blog post about the World Series and the teams in it, people are only going to be interested in that during the time that the World Series is a hot topic. If, on the other hand, you wrote a piece on the world’s greatest baseball players and their records, more people would be likely to read it over time, giving you more traffic to your blog.
Your readers want content that loads fast, but if you load your blog down with pictures and other features that make loading take a while, you will turn people off. Potential readers are only going to wait a few short seconds for your content to come up and if it doesn’t, they move on. Don’t take a chance in losing your readership that way – keep the content enticing and the pictures to a minimum, to keep those readers coming back.
We all know one of the better ways to increase traffic if to write guest posts or contribute to a blog. For example, some writers may be able to write guest posts for SEO, PPC, Web Design, Content Marketing or anything related on our blog here. But we don’t accept just any writer or article. The article has to be well researched, well written, and have actionable information.
These six strategies will help to increase the readership of your blog. Despite the fact that they take extra time to make happen, they will not cost you any money, providing you with free marketing for your business that will hopefully translate into profits down the road.
