A blog can be an excellent way to promote your brand, whether it’s your personal brand or the brand of a company that you own. However, a blog is only able to offer value when there are plenty of people reading it. If you are new to the world of blogging, putting a lot of effort into well-written and informative posts only to have them receive no more than a handful of views can quickly become frustrating. The good news is that there are a number of proven ways to increase traffic to your blog that don’t require spending a fortune on PPC ads. If you would like to start generating substantial organic traffic to your blog, here are four simple yet effective strategies that you can employ.
Focus on SEO
While you certainly want to write content that will appeal to your readers, it is equally important to write content that appeals to search engines as well. This starts by performing keyword research in order to identify keywords that are likely to be searched by your blog’s intended audience. Once you have a list of such keywords in place, try to sprinkle them throughout the content that you publish on your blog to make your posts rank higher in the search results for relevant searches.
In addition to including carefully researched keywords in your content, there are a number of other ways to improve a blog’s SEO. You can use the best keyword research tool such as Semrush. Developing a backlinking strategy is one great option to consider. Or hire a specially trained SEO agency that can accomplish all the SEO purposes for your site. By publishing content on high-authority, third-party websites that link back to your own blog, you signal to Google’s search ranking algorithms that your website has been given a sort of “stamp of approval” from these high-authority sights, thus improving your ranking.
It’s also important to ensure that all of the technical aspects of your blog are properly structured in order to boost its SEO as much as possible. There’s a lot that goes into technical SEO, from making sure that your site architecture is structured correctly to ensuring that you index all of the pages on your blog. With a little research and time spent fine-tuning your blog’s technical aspects, though, you can go a long way toward improving its SEO and thus boosting its organic traffic.
Create Visually Appealing Content
If you really want to capture the interest of your audience and encourage more views on the posts that you publish, you need to make sure that your blog consists of more than black text on white pages. Visual content is a key component of effective content marketing. While the core of the information that you share may come in the form of written text, that text needs to be presented in a format that is as visually appealing as possible.
There are a number of different ways to go about making your blog posts more visually appealing. Creating an eye-catching design for the blog itself is an important place to start. From there, make sure that you are formatting your blog posts in an appealing and attractive manner that includes things such as multiple headings, plenty of white space, short paragraphs, and visual elements such as hyperlinks and bulleted lists. Next, be sure to include a few relevant images in the posts that you publish, even if it’s just free stock images. Embedding videos or podcasts in your blog posts is another simple yet effective way to make them more visually appealing.
Another excellent way to create visual content is to present your content in the form of an infographic. With the help of an online infographic maker, you can make infographics that are fully customized and professional in little time at all – and infographics are an excellent tool for presenting key information in a way that is both eye-catching and easy to skim.
Promote Your Blog on Social Media
Instagram alone boasts more than 500 million daily active users. If you would like to go where your audience is, you can rest assured that they are spending a great deal of their time online scrolling through social media. While growing a social media following can often be just as challenging in itself as growing a following for your blog, it is certainly worth the effort.
Start by creating profiles for your blog or the business behind it on all of the social media platforms you have time to manage, starting with the major players such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each time you publish a new post on your blog, take the time to share it with your social media audiences. It’s also a good idea to add social sharing buttons to the blog posts that you publish. In time, the growth of your social media following will compound the growth of your blog following and vise versa.
Pro tip: it is also an intelligent move to automate social media as much as possible so that social media doesn’t take away precious time from blogging and other more important traffic-growing activities. Using website visitor tracking tools will help you to understand which social media brings you the most traffic.
There are a plethora of excellent tools on the market that can help you schedule posts months in advance, and there’s even a tool (Missinglettr) that uses AI to write and create social promotions campaigns for you.
Optimize Your Blog
Issues such as pages that are slow to load or pages that aren’t formatted correctly when viewed from a mobile device can make it all the more challenging to grow a following for your blog. Before you start spending too much effort promoting your blog, it is essential to address technical aspects such as making sure that your blog is easy to navigate and making sure that its pages load quickly and correctly.
Utilizing Google’s Page Speed Insights tool is a great way to check how fast your pages are loading and compare your speeds against overall averages. Once you’ve measured your loading speeds, the Page Speed Insights tool will also provide you with tips on how your loading speeds can be improved.
In addition to making sure that your pages load as fast as possible, you will also want to make sure that they load correctly when viewed from a mobile device. According to a Hitwise report, 61% of all online searches are now conducted with mobile devices, making it vital to create a blog that looks great across all devices. If you publish your blog in WordPress, plug-ins such as the WPtouch Mobile Plugin and Jetpack by WordPress can make it easy to optimize your blog for mobile users.
By optimizing the technical aspects of your blog for faster loading speeds and quality across all devices, you can make sure that the visitors who do find your blog have every reason to stick around.
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