How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: You’ll probably have come across the saying that a blog can be critical in achieving successful online growth for any business.
This is probably part of the reason why you are insistent on getting your website up and running.
After setting up your website, now comes the tricky aspect of it – How do you get people to visit your new website?
Luckily, even if you’re a novice to blogging or you have an existing blog struggling to see results, there are several tactics you can apply to drive traffic to your content and website.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
In order to draw traffic to your blog, you’ll need to target the sources of traffic. Now, there are so many traffic sources you can get online. They include:
- Direct traffic: This is when a visitor comes directly to your website, usually after typing your URL in their browser.
- Paid traffic: When you put up an online ad, a user can click on it and be redirected to your website.
- Referral traffic: Here, a visitor can be taken to your website via a link on a different website.
- Social traffic: Visitors on your social feeds can click your website link and be taken directly to your landing page.
- Email traffic: You can get website visitors from users who click a link on the emails you send to them.
If you have a new blog, it is always a great idea to target organic traffic for it. By organic, we mean visitors who are actively in search of crucial information that your website content provides.
As a result of this, they are more inclined to engage your content and likely become paying customers or leads down the line.
To begin building organic traffic for your blog, there are some key steps you need to follow. We will discuss them below:
1. Know and understand your audience
To begin generating blog traffic, you’ll need to first understand the audience you’re trying to reach.
Thus, you should have a tight grasp of what their concerns are, what they need, their interests, issues, as well as pain points.
Having this knowledge will help guide the content you plan to create. A rather effective method of knowing your target audience is by going to where they frequent.
Basically, what we mean is that you should visit forums, social media groups, attend webinars, message boards, as well as online events.
Pick out the most active of these communities and take some time to monitor understand the issues and interests being discussed.
For instance, discover what their most commonly asked questions are, find out what topics seem to commonly come up in their conversations, and understand the challenges or issues they are facing.
As you become more assimilated into these communities, you can begin to contribute to the discussions and measure the responses and reactions you get.
The point of all this is to try to pitch to them or convince them of anything. Basically, you’re putting yourself in the process of getting to know your audience better.
While at it, record your findings. Note the questions, pain points, and discussion topics you unravel because you will need them in the next stage.
2. Do keyword research
When it comes to driving organic traffic, keywords are key (no pun intended). For those who may not be conversant with the term, keywords are words, queries, or phrases that internet users type into search engines and are usually the starting point of how visitors find websites.
Thus, the core element of attaining traffic to your blog rests largely on identifying the most suitable keywords related to what your business offers. Afterward, you’ll go ahead to build content that targets those keywords.
This makes keyword research very crucial. However, before you can conduct the process of researching keywords efficiently, you’ll need to have access to a reliable database of keywords.
A good example is Google Keyword Planner. It will help you to quickly find which keywords drive the highest monthly volume. You’ll also get to see how difficult those keywords are to rank for.
For instance, let’s say you run a small shop for kitchen appliances like microwave ovens. Based on your audience research, you may have discovered that the most popular discussion topics among your target audience are centered on cake recipes and how to bake cakes.
By utilizing the questions, pain points, and topics that you’ve previously recorded (as well as every other phrase or term that is relevant to your business, product, or industry), you can begin to compile a list in your keyword tool.
Furthermore, if your blog is brand new, it will likely come with little or no authority. One of the most vital metrics to note is Keyword Difficulty (KD).
When you build a blog from scratch, we recommend that you focus on keywords that hover between a low keyword difficulty and a high search volume.
This is often referred to as “keyword efficiency.”
Using the instance above, the keywords “how to bake” and “cake recipes” would likely get a huge number of monthly searches. Surprisingly, they also boast a low keyword difficulty rating which is perfect.
You can further narrow the keyword down to “how to bake red velvet cake.” This could be an awesome keyword target for a blog that is focused on an audience interested specifically in baking red velvet cakes.
It is a niche angle with a large search volume and an attractive low competition level which makes it all the easier to rank on search engine results pages (SERP).
With this, you can begin to gain traction in terms of organic traffic to your blog page.
3. Create a content plan
At this point, you should have gotten a copious amount of relevant and efficient keywords you can build your blog around.
Now, you have to figure out how to develop content that capitalizes on those keywords. One simple way of doing this is by entering the keyword into a search engine, such as Google, and then reviewing the top 10 results manually.
Your key focus here should be on the titles, angles, and structures of these results. This is because they’ll give you a clear idea of what type of content searchers are looking for.
You should also take into consideration the content length of your competitors. Blog posts having more informative and comprehensive content often rank better and higher, thus, increasing your traffic.
You can also employ the use of certain tools like Semrush that can give you insights, allowing you to spot gaps in your competitors’ content which you can capitalize on to provide better value to your readers.
4. Subtopics structuring
It is always a great idea to break long, detailed subjects into smaller subtopics, especially if you own a new blog.
Aside from allowing you to target keywords more efficiently, it also lets you develop a refreshing stream of topics to write about.
For example, if your subject is learning how to bake cakes, you could build an entire sequence of blog posts under that canopy, like:
Top cake recipes
Things you’ll need for baking cakes
How to choose the right flour for baking cakes
As you develop, you’ll probably want to focus on other subjects in your industry and then flesh out those subtopics too.
Another advantage of structuring your content this way is that it lets you repurpose it further down the line.
For instance, you can gather all of the subtopics blog posts and fuse them together into an eBook.
You could even mash up the key elements of each post to build a comprehensive “master” article focusing on the broader keyword.
When you do this, you’ll get to cover a lot more topics deeper. This helps establish your blog as an authority on the subject.
Additionally, it also makes your content more appealing to attract external backlinks. These things further contribute to boosting your SEO profile while also driving traffic to your website as you rank higher.
5. Write consistently
As soon as you’ve concluded on your keywords and topics, the next stage is to take a seat and put your knowledge of the subject in writing.
For many people, this is where they hit a roadblock. Honestly, the writing part of content creation can be quite challenging, overwhelming, and time-consuming, especially if the writer also owns the business they are writing on.
However, there are many ways in which this step can be overcome much less painfully. You can make use of certain tools to help make the process of writing easier.
But, if you simply cannot sacrifice the time or resources to develop your content, then it would be wise to outsource it to a reliable third party.
You can reach out to us if you want high-quality content delivered to you that will give your blog post the best possible chance to rank and drive traffic.
6. Publish, share, and promote your content
After getting your content published and live on your blog, naturally, you’d expect it to start getting traffic, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. The reason is that any type of blog content hardly ranks on search engines overnight.
It takes time for search engine algorithms to judge the relevance and quality of a piece of content.
Also, it will take a while for the content to start acquiring backlinks and meet other ranking factors.
No doubt, the steps above as well as other SEO tips and strategies can help you rank on SERPs and boost the chances of people coming to your blog, taking your content directly in front of the right audience, in the right way, and at the right time, takes more than simply tapping the ‘publish’ button.
If your blog is new, it may not yet be time to distribute your content to an audience through other traffic sources.
This is because you may not yet have a large email list or a massive social media following. You may also have to contend with budget constraints to leverage paid search.
However, it’s not the end of the road for your content creation journey. But you will still need to do a tad more leg work yourself to share and promote your content. You can begin by:
1. Engaging with communities directly
Hope you still remember the folks you engaged with in the first subtopic of this article. Yes. The forums, online communities, and social media – share your content with them.
For instance, you might come across a discussion about different types of cakes. If you happen to have a blog article reviewing several types of cakes, you can share it in the forum as a helpful resource to the community engaging in that discussion.
However, while in these communities, ensure to use the utmost discretion. Your content must only be shared because it has value to offer and not because you are trying to sell something to the community.
If you foster trust and respect with your audience, they will later come to value your perspectives and understand that you’re giving them information not to sell but rather because it will interest them or help them solve a pain point.
Be sure to always respect the rules of the online community too. Communities like Reddit frown against self-promotion.
If you avoid spamming and post links genuinely relevant to the current discussion, you’ll be developing an efficient tactic for both brand awareness and cheap traffic acquisition.
2. Develop relationships with respected players
Once your content is useful, reliable, and valuable to your audience, other respectable players in your industry, including bloggers, influencers, affiliates, and even public figures, might be more comfortable with sharing and promoting it.
Indeed, it can be quite time-consuming as you have to consistently churn out new content, however, it can be an intelligent, cost-effective tactic to clinch relationships with these influential people and collaborate with them.
This collaboration can come in the form of guest posts, mentions, webinars, newsletters, etc.
These connections can not only help you gain credibility and authority in your niche, but they can also make it more convenient to get relevant backlinks to your content.
Generally, this is essential for increasing your SEO profile, acquiring extra referral traffic, and reinforcing your organic presence.
3. Enhancing your authority
Although you might not yet have a strong online presence, however, it does not actually mean that you’re not an authority in your niche.
Despite your blog or even your business being new, you might still have several years of experience in your industry.
You can leverage that to your advantage. Do this by making yourself available as a guest speaker for digital conferences, webinars, podcasts, and other online events.
Doing this can give your blog broader exposure and draw relevant traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Driving high-quality organic traffic to a new blog isn’t a piece of cake but it is quite achievable if approached in a defined way.
As reiterated earlier, the writing part of acquiring high-value, relevant traffic to your blog is only part of the whole process.
You may realize that you’re highly skilled at the first and final or promotional stage of content creation but can’t quite wrap your head around the writing bit as it takes so much of your time.
That is quite okay and unsurprisingly common. Our team can help out with the writing aspect of your blog. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us today.
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