How to grow your blog traffic in six easy steps

In this post, I am going to share you with strategy that can help you grow your blog. Either you are starting from zero or you already have some traffic coming to your blog, the strategy discussed in this post will help you increase your blog traffic.

Step 1: Setup a measurement plan

The first step to increasing your blog traffic is to actually setup a measurement plan. What you cannot measure you cannot improve. You need to setup a measurement strategy that allows you to know when:

-your blog is attracting the right audience?
-your content is resonating with your audience?
-your audience will buy your products or services?

This is why measurement is one of the most important parts of growing.

Day over day, week over week, month versus month and year versus year, you want to know if you are doing the right thing.

So…how can I do that you may ask?

There are millions of tools out there but there is one that is "free" to use and install. This tool might be all you will ever need except you want additional feature. This tool is the Google Analytics tool.

Google Analytics offers so much information that you will be silly not to have it properly installed for your website. And the best part: it is technically free. Use this link to learn how to install Google Analytics for your website if you already have not.

Step 2: Be focused

Once you have setup a great measurement plan to measure your effort, the next step is how to distinguish your blog from others that exists in the field.

Do you know that there are over three million blog posts published every day? Do you know that the attention span of the average human being is eight seconds and we are gradually losing it to around three seconds?

Most blogs fails today to attract the right type of people because they lack two basic understanding of the fundamental shift that occurs as people become more empowered.

1. Niche sells

A niche is whatever area you have decided to operate. You cannot have a blog dedicated to no one and expect it to grow. You need to be conscious of who you are writing for.

Here are the simplest questions you want to answer

• Who are my audience?

• What problems are they trying to solve?

• What do I have that will make them come to me?

Pro tip = This is just a beginning. Your audience can be only one particular type of people or they might be up to 20. What is important is that you define exactly who you want to write for.

2. Quality trumps quantity

Remember I told you that the attention span is now around three to eight seconds. That is how long you need to hold someone's attention to read your blog and then possibly return.

You want to do that by making sure that your blog is:

• Well designed and with good presentation.

• Contains quality articles

• User friendly such that device experience is consistent.

Step 3: Write what your audience want to read about

You see, there are thousands of ways to get traffic to your website. Some free, some not but everyone's dream is to get as much free traffic to their website as possible.

That is why to grow your traffic, you need to write exactly what your audience are looking for. There are numerous ways to know content that your audience want to read but we will again turn to the simplest one.

1. Go to Google

2. Start typing a topic you want to write about (check out the image).

Do you notice that Google begins to suggest topics surrounding words you start typing. These words are actual phrases people are looking for. Write articles around such phrases or content.

Option 2

Instead of step 2, actually, write your own words and then press the enter button.
3: Stroll to the bottom of the page
4: You will see a list of suggested phrases you can also use.

5: Pick any one of this and then write a blog post about it.

You see, by following the above process, you are able to actually write content people are interested in. The mistake people make is writing content that no one cares about. As a result, they do not get any traffic from an organic source and they begin to wonder why.

If you are just starting your blog, use this technique. If you have an existing blog, go back to some of your articles and implement this technique or just start following the steps listed here.

Step 4: Beat the competitors at their own game

Your competitors (especially the good ones ) have done a lot of research. They have spent hours struggling and thinking of how to create good content. Why not leverage on this instead of reinventing the wheel.

Competitor analysis is one the things I love to do but not blindly. Here is one of the simple competitive analysis strategies I use.

I introduce to you the “Blue Ocean Strategy”. Actually, there is a book around this strategy but the principle is the same. Do something else that your competitors are not doing.

Sound simple! It is.

Here is how to approach it too get more traffic to your website.

1. Write down a list of all your top competitors - Do a simple Google search using your keyword (by now you are familiar with the concept of keyword)

2. Read their last 30 posts (50 if possible).
3. Note the type of post that gets lots of comments or shares

4. Now go produce something similar but make it better. Add more images, statistics or quotes

The above strategy is phase one of the blue ocean strategy. You can take it further by writing a list of all your top competitors:

1. Note the type of content they are producing2. Now produce another type of content e.g more infographics, video content or podcast

The idea is to think differently and better than your competitors..

You see, people are tired of reading the same thing over and over again but they won’t mind getting that content in another format.

Step 5: Get started with content promotion

Creating great content is just one-half of the equation. The other half of the equation is getting your content seen. With great content, you have the opportunity to drive traffic, sales and leads. And that is why your content must resonate with your audience.

You have seen how to create contents people are looking for by conducting a purpose driven keyword research. So how do you begin to promote your content to actually triple the trafic?

1: Find out where your audience hangs out

Many people make the mistake of posting the same content on all the social network. That is good but there is a better way.

The better option is to find out exactly where your audience like to hang out. For example, Facebook is best suited for B2C audience. So if you are an e-commerce website, then building a good community on Facebook is important.

But what if your target audience is business owners. Then LinkedIn is a better option.

2: Understand what makes your chosen platform rock.

Finding the right platform is good but for you to make it grow your traffic, you need to understand how it works.

Does your chosen platform rely heavily on graphic (Instagram)? Then you need to know that every post you share on this platform must be image driven and well designed?

Do people who visit the platform prefer to read list articles, workplace or career growth? Answer this question and you are on your way to growing your blog’s traffic.

Recently one of articles made front page on one of the platforms where my target audience hangs out. This has resulted in not only shares and views on the article but also syndication which means more links to the article.

Step 6: Accelerate your blog’s growth

Is it possible to grow a blog? Yes and I will show you how.

Like I said earlier in this post, today we have hundreds and thousands of blogs in each niche. This means you have to be quite outstanding in your approach to getting your share of the traffic.

You might be turning out quality content every day but without influencer marketing, you might not get good potential for your content.

What is Influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is when you have influencer people who have built a huge following to promote your content. I am not talking of paying them but getting them to do it for you FREE.

This is how to do it.

Step 1: Write down 20 blogs in your industry who are doing well.

Step 2: Write down the name of the owner, editor or anyone on the team .
Step 3: Grade them on a list of 1-10. One (1) been the easiest to get to and Ten (10) being the hardest. People in your group of 10 may be large publications. Ignore those in the grade 7-10 list
Step 4: Visit the blog every day. Share their content on social media platform where they are likely to notice you.
Step 5: Comment on their article for the day. Make sure you are making meaningful contribution.
Step 6: Engage with them both online and offline.

Step 7: Pitch them your own content or ask that you write for them

If you do this consistently for about 60 days, you will not only get a chance to write for them, they will ask you to contribute in a lot of ways to their blog or community. This means grow for your blog in terms of referral traffic.

Conclusion:

It may be difficult but by working a little extra hard with the right strategy, you can actually grow your blog’s traffic in a way that it helps your business to grow.