With over 300 million blogs online, you will have to be more than a pretty blog with mediocre content to get the attention you crave. Whether you have a business blog or a personal blog, the principle remains: You cannot create a blog, go to bed and expect it to be internet-popular the next morning.
As Smart Blogger puts it “Anyone can start a blog, but the real test is getting readers.” No wonder the internet is a smoldering pot of dashed hopes and abandoned blog projects. You do not want your blog to suffer a similar fate.
Of course, you should be blogging in a niche that is in need of fresh ideas. Many people should care about the information you are sharing. Shouting in a stadium full of people will not get them to pay attention to you, even if you are sharing a life-changing strategy. Now, let’s dive into tips you can start using today to boost your blog’s traffic.
Plant seed articles
Dave Chesson, the founder of Kindlepreneur, calls seed articles “low-hanging fruit.” Sometimes, you have fresh ideas or solutions people do not know they need.
The idea behind seed articles is to create articles that you are certain – with a little research of course – that people are looking for. Seed articles allow you to get new readers every day. Typically, you need to plant about 5-10 of these articles for the strategy to start to take off. It will take time before your efforts begin to bear fruit. After all, they’re seeds.
The process of writing seed articles involves using similarsites.com to find sites in your niche and getting each site’s ranking via Alexa. You then need to compare the site’s ranking with yours. It is much easier to compete for traffic with websites that are similar to yours.
The next step is to put these websites on SEMrush.com to identify keywords that get them organic traffic. Look for keywords that are related to your website. It helps to document all the keywords from all the sites you have identified via similarsites.com before developing any content. Along the way, you might see a pattern that will help you tailor your blog’s content direction.
Next to the keywords, you can actually see the highest-ranking content for that particular keyword to give you an idea of the content you need to create. Remember, the idea is not to copy the content, but to create something similar.
Guest blog on credible websites
Before reading the article on “seed” articles on goinswriter.com by Dave Chesson, I had never heard of him. After reading that article, however, I have visited Kindlepreneur – Chesson’s own platform – and become a regular reader.
And that’s the benefit of guest blogging: It introduces new audiences to you. Besides access to new communities, you also build backlinks, which are like gold for your search engine rankings.
Additionally, guest blogging is a fantastic way to build solid relationships with other bloggers, who can always help you promote your blog and its products. Here are a few great tips on how to guest blog well:
- Don’t be scared of rejection. “No” never killed anyone.
- Ask courteously; use “please” and “thank you.” Remember, you are not entitled to it.
- When given the opportunity, strive for a home run, not a single.
- Write content tailored to the site’s content and not what you feel like writing.
- Make your personal blog presentable. It says a lot about your standards. After all, they will be telling their readers to respect what you have to say.
On guest blogging, Jeff Goins, the author of The Art of Work, recounts:
“A good friend of mine once said that the road to building a popular blog is a three-step process:
• Design a beautiful website.
• Write great content.
• Consider skipping 1 & 2 and just start guest posting.”
Integrate with social media
According to Statista, there are over two billion social media users. Almost three out of four of your website users will own one or more social media accounts. Imagine being able to reach their networks (friends and followers) and their friends’ networks.
But simply asking politely for your visitors to share your content is not enough. You have to make it easy for them to do so. If you are using a platform like WordPress, adding social share buttons has never been easier. These buttons make it a breeze for your users to post content to their social media. You also want your visitors to follow you on your social media channels via these social share buttons.
If you follow these blog marketing strategies, you will remove most of the roadblocks in your path, and get a following – and make a killing – with your blog.