The universe of the Internet is overwhelmed with a plethora of impractical, unusable, and uninspiring content, and that is the kind of world we work in.
In this overcrowded space, if the question you have is ‘How to get traffic to my blog for free? You need to know that you not only have to compete with websites with great content but make your way through the not-so-great content as well.
So what is the secret behind cutting through the clutter driving traffic to your blog? How do you go from 0 to 1,000 visits per day to thousands and lakhs of visitors per month? How will your blog post reach the top results on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?
In this blog, I am answering them and sharing the tried and tested SEO strategies to get free blog traffic. So let us get started.
How to increase blog traffic?
Out of all the ways to increase blog traffic, some effective and others not so much, below are the tried and tested techniques for you to get free blog traffic.
- Optimize Your Blog For Seo
- Publish Quality Content
- Publish Content Frequently
- Promote Your Content In The Social Media
- Perform Keyword Research To Decide On The Content Topic
- Do Guest Posting For Other Blogs
- Create An Email List And Send Out A Newsletter
- Use Additional Publishing Platforms Such As Medium
- Promote Your Blogs On Quora, Reddit, And Other Forums
- Blog Commenting
- Keep Patience And Repeat The Process For Each Content
Optimize Your Blog For Seo
The secret to your blog’s success is tied with Search Engine Optimization, AKA SEO. What is the reason?
- To start with, SEO is one of the only ways that will attract organic traffic from your search engines like Google to your website.
- SEO will not only increase blog traffic but attract targeted audiences to your blog; hence they will engage more with your content and convert faster. The conversion could be in the form of email subscribers, or they might download a product demo.
- SEO will enable you to increase the number of backlinks to your blog because people want to connect to pages that rank on the first page of Google’s SERP.
For the same reason, SEO also helps you get more social shares, i.e., if your blog/website ranks on Google’s first page, your website is considered valuable. People are more than happy to promote it on their social media network.
SEO help a lot! You know that now. So how do you plan on optimizing your blog?
Ok, so there is no magic solution or strategy that you can implement; however, learning the fundamentals of SEO and following my SEO checklist will surely help you gain SEO benefits faster.
Publish Quality Content
Most of you will already know this, but anyone new in this field should know that just publishing blogs online is not the only thing and far from being enough.
What you really want is to create high-quality blogs adored by the search engines and add value to your readers’ lives.
It should be interesting enough to urge your followers to like, comment, share your blog, or, even better, if they make a purchase or sign up to your email list indicating that they would like to come back for more.
So what is considered high-quality content?
Once upon a time, every marketer had their own definition of high-quality content; however, today’s search engines take the guesswork out of the game.
These search engines are now smart and advanced enough to pick and filter high-quality content from the chaos of the bad and average quality content on the Internet.
In short, a piece of content is deemed to be of high quality if:
It is Fresh and Unique: This means the content on your blog is original and plagiarism free.
It is Informative: It offers an entirely descriptive view of a topic and includes almost all aspects of a situation, and is unbiased.
A human being writes it: Your blog should have an author name instead of published by admin or a number code. Nobody likes to take advice from an unknown entity.
It is Sharable: People today like to display their feelings about the content they are consuming by reading it, commenting on it, and most importantly, sharing it with their contacts. So high-quality content always entices the user into sharing the blog.
Without high-quality content, the chances of your blog succeeding are minimum.
It would be best if you found a way to either improve your blog’s quality by self-improvement or by outsourcing your blog creation process to someone who can bring your thoughts to reality.
Publish Content Frequently
After you find out how to build great content, the next challenge will be to regularly generate/ publish high-quality blogs.
Being consistent with your blogging efforts is the toughest yet the most important aspect of increasing blog traffic.
Are you wondering why consistency matters to drive traffic to my blog?
Regularity in publishing blogs offers an opportunity for the search engines to review and learn more about your website and users to return to the latest content.
This can only work if you are organized and maintain a blog publishing calendar, for example, publishing a new blog every Mon, Wed.
Remember that search engines want their customers impressed by generating their search results with the latest and reliable content.
So they can select your content even more efficiently as you update your website regularly.
Instead of a too ambitious and unrealistic timetable, build a reasonable publishing plan that you can follow in the long run.
Prepare blog posts for 2 weeks beforehand to improve the odds of following a blogging schedule and then start posting. This allows you enough time to create new blog posts.
Promote your Content on the Social Media
There is understanding in the world of marketing that if you want your blog to succeed, you need to give 20% effort toward creating a high-quality blog and 80% towards promoting it.
That means your job is not done after clicking the publish button; you need to promote the blog as well for it to get the exposure it deserves.
What does it mean to promote your content?
As a digital marketing manager or an independent blogger, one of your responsibilities is to get acquainted with other creators in your field, and the easiest way to do this is via different social media platforms.
You will likely have at least a few thousand followers on Twitter and Facebook, etc. if this job has been completed accurately.
These are the users who most definitely would like and engage with your content (as long as you’re connected to the ‘right crowd’).
And because the chances of them sitting and waiting for you to publish a new blog on your site is low, you have to update them about a new blog or content by posting about it on your social media.
What is the advantage of socially promoting your content?
It is as simple as this; the more people see your post, the higher the chances that they will visit your site, share your blog, and get you backlinks as well.
There are many direct and indirect advantages of sharing your content on social media and the perfect way to increase awareness about your fresh content quickly.
Perform Keyword Research to Decide on Content Topic
For a variety of factors, conducting keyword analysis before creating content is essential. To begin with, it will help you better understand your market by studying the most common keywords and phrases.
Secondly, a blog post that is an outcome of extensive keyword analysis has more potential to get even more organic and social traffic. As a result, you get a better value/ profit from your blogging efforts.
Keyword research doesn’t have to be a time-consuming or complex issue. Here are few ideas to make your life simpler if you are a beginner:
#1 – Begin with Google keyword tool: Using Google’s Keyword Planner, you can quickly get an overview of how many people are searching for a specific keyword related to your niche on Google every month.
#2- Use BuzzSumo– BuzzSumo is just like a search engine that brings you the top results based on how popular a piece of content is on social media. In other terms, as you check for a phrase on BuzzSumo, it will tell you which posts focusing on your selected phrase have performed higher on social media.
#3- Use Google Suggest: Start typing in Google search and carefully look at the recommendations given to you by Google. To get more ideas, change the letters as you write. After that, hit the search button and scroll down to the bottom of the page and check out the “related searches.” That’s a goldmine for finding related keywords.
Check out this blog to learn how to conduct thorough keyword research.
Do Guest Posting for Other Blogs
Many see guest posting as a “comfortable” way of acquiring backlinks, but the actual advantages of guest posting go far beyond obtaining a link referring to your website.
Guest blogging is one of the most fruitful ways not just to promote your brand (either personal or business) but is also a neat way to increase your blog traffic.
On the other hand, you need to get your posts published on high-quality websites with heavy traffic to reap the benefits of guest blogging, and this is not always straightforward.
First, you must find certain websites that are related to your brand and are likely to publish your content and then develop a strategy to post them.
The good old emailing the company and asking them to publish your content will not work anymore, so you have to be more creative in getting your blog published on brand sites.
When contacting large websites such as Forbes and Huffington Post that publish content from contributors, you have to show them examples of your past work.
So make sure that you have some excellent examples of published work in your portfolio before trying to contact them.
The Editor might also review your social media accounts along with your submission to evaluate your candidature. So, ensure that you have a genuinely good identity in at least one social media network.
Getting blog traffic through guest posting is a tough job, but it is certainly something that can set your blog apart and ahead of the curve. Additionally, guest blogging attracts SEO benefits as well.
Create An Email List And Send Out a Newsletter
Several people argue that social media brought an end to the era of email marketing, but this is far from the truth.
Even today, people use emails; in fact, they actually check their email almost as many times as they check their Instagram.
If you think about it, most people check their email as soon as they get a notification about a new email on their mobiles, smartwatches, or laptops.
A few people believe that email and newsletters are spam, but that’s not the whole picture either. If people subscribe to your newsletter by inserting their email address, they do so because they enjoy what you have to say, and they want more of it.
Gather up emails from your visitors and send them emails to remind them about new content, new deals, new items, and anything else that can interest them without spamming and going overboard.
The best way to ensure that you are not spamming your email is to think before clicking the send button. Consider if what you are sending really adds value in your user’s life and if it is something that you will enjoy in your inbox?
An email list registration can be viewed as a conversion measure for blogs and websites that do not offer any goods or services but are using AdSense or other methods to monetize their content.
Use Additional Publishing Platforms Such As Medium
Uploading your posts on other blogging sites such as LinkedIn Pulse and Medium is one smart way to get free blog web traffic.
These platforms allow you to republish your content, and they have a broad readership that can discover your posts based on their own tastes and knowledge of reading.
However, I do not suggest that you post your content on these sites. If you do so, you will miss potential readers’ ability to view your website and convert into leads or consumers.
Your “inbound” links would take users to other publishing platforms rather than back to you. In the end, you won’t see the outcomes you can get from your content marketing if your strategy is to post your content only on 3rd party sites like Medium.
Instead, first, publish the blog on your site and then repost it on the platforms of your choosing.
Just make sure that you have links to other articles back on your blog in this content, and you can even send traffic to the rest of your posts.
Use Quora, Reddit, And Other Forums To Promote
The most demanding task in driving traffic to your blog is finding out where our target demographic is.
Forum marketing is an incredibly successful solution that helps you to join in discussions and answer questions related to your niche while contributing to the content.
It will give you the opportunity to develop relationships with your target market and with other content creators in your domain.
To create a reputation, forge connections, and get more blog traffic, you can use Questions and answer sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora.
You really should treat forum marketing carefully; don’t just search the panels for some chance to get a backlink. Respond to most questions cautiously without linking them to your content; people are more open to them if you put links with relevant answers.
This will also safeguard you from getting banned on the sites for obnoxiously promoting your content, which by the way, happens on a lot of Q&A sites, including Quora.
Blog Commenting
Commenting on blogs is one of the best techniques to build a relationship between blogs, bloggers, and blog readers.
This is a perfect place to talk about different ideas and opinions about a specific subject or a blog. Comments on the blog help draw attention to your blog and make it a topic of conversation in social media circles.
What you need to do is, search for your keyword on Google and find the top results.
You should read relevant articles and comment on what you agree with, and probably dislike, etc. If you are serious about adding value to the related content, you will not be considered a spammer.
Keep Patience And Repeat The Process For Each Content
If you have been in this business for a long time, you will know that driving traffic to your blog is not a one-time task.
It is something that requires constant effort, hard work, and an immense amount of dedication.
However, that hard work does pay off if you are successful in getting a lot of traffic with a good enough number of blog subscribers.
You can not only make money directly from your blog but also generate quite a lot of business opportunities for yourself.
Conclusion
Unique blog content will help you develop your authority in your industry by cultivating your leadership, help nurture leads to make a quick buying decision, and provide your readers with useful information; all you need to do is get people to visit your site.
Check each one of these freeways to improve blog traffic and see what brings you the best results.
You can use Google Analytics to measure and track the incoming traffic.
You can see which sources are giving you the most traffic from their referral monitoring section.
By concentrating on referral sources that bring you the best results will enable you to provide more attention to them, which will result in you attracting more readers to your blog over time
What did you think about these free tips on how to get more traffic to your blog?
Which technique are you planning to use first?
If you are already using these techniques, what were your results? Let me know in the comments.