One day, you decide to start a blog . So you start writing a blog post every day. But now, even after writing 30-40 blog posts, your traffic is not increasing. Search engines are not sending you traffic, and your efforts are not rewarded.
Does this sound familiar?
If yes, then read this guide to learn how to drive massive traffic to your blog.
When bloggers start blogging, they see a lot of other successful bloggers doing certain things, talking about certain things, and perpetuating certain myths. They start talking about high DA and how you can achieve a lot of traffic by writing a lot of quality posts.
I highly recommend you read my other article for more actionable takeaways:
Read: How to Promote Your Blog (12 Actionable Blog Promotion Tips)
Well, to some extent, this is all true, but in order to drive a lot of traffic to your website, there are many other things you need to focus on.
1. Quality Posts and SEO
Impact: High
SEO is the only source that can do wonders for your blog traffic. ShoutMeLoud gets close to 1 million page views per month and over 84% of its traffic comes from search engines.
Personal bloggers can easily complete two aspects of SEO work:
- On-page SEO : Basically optimizing your content for your target keywords.
- On-site SEO: Optimize your entire blog for search engines. Yoast SEO is a simple WordPress plugin that takes care of it all.
With a little learning and practice, it can become your biggest traffic driver.
Learn: How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Blog
2. Convert visitors into subscribers:
Impact: High
This technique can greatly increase your blog traffic. Most newbies only focus on getting more traffic, but they don’t convert that traffic into subscribers.
Once you drive traffic to your site through SEO and other techniques, you should also convert them into subscribers. This helps you send them updates and keep them revisiting your site. This way, you will always have new traffic + revisit traffic, thus increasing your traffic graphs slowly and steadily.
Want to know how to do this?
Well, there are several methods you can use.
Email Marketing:
Impact: High
Email marketing is one of the best mediums for bloggers to consistently drive traffic to their site. It’s certainly not the easiest method, but it’s worth learning and implementing.
The majority of ShoutMeLoud’s return traffic comes from email marketing.
You can mix and match:
Start with email marketing.
While the Jetpack plugin sends an email newsletter every time you publish a new post, with Kit, you can send a few selected posts and promote offers in between to generate significant revenue.
Over the past few years, I’ve sent over 2.9 million emails with a 5.51% click-through rate.
Email marketing is one of the most underutilized traffic sources for all bloggers. The basics of email marketing are simple:
- You add an email subscription box on your blog[](http://127.0.0.1:86/email-subscription-box-placement-ideas.html)
- Once people subscribe, you set up a sequence for them and traffic starts driving.
There are many advanced strategies (e.g. segmentation, automation) that can be implemented to maximize the impact of email marketing.
Read: Email Marketing for Bloggers (Beginner’s Guide)
Email marketing combined with push notifications can do wonders for your blog traffic.
Push Notifications:
Impact: Low to Moderate
This isn’t some new technology but a lot of people don’t know about it. For me it’s more of a plug and play approach and it’s been driving traffic to my blog.
This technique displays a notification to your visitors asking them to subscribe to your blog updates. Once they subscribe, you can send them notifications when you publish new blog posts.
You can use a service like PushEngage to configure this. They have automation features that basically help you automate the traffic part.
Just like email marketing, you can make users a part of a sequence when they subscribe to your website using push notifications.
Let's understand this with an example:
If users subscribe to ShoutMeLoud push notifications by reading any SEO related post, they will automatically receive 14 articles in 30 days. This way, new users don't miss out on useful and important topics, and we get a steady flow of traffic.
I started using PushEngage about 4 years ago , looking at my dashboard stats:
If you use WordPress, it also offers plugins to automate almost everything.
Read how to configure push notifications for your blog here .
3. Drive traffic from SlideShare
Impact: Low to Moderate
If you're not worldly-wise, you probably know what SlideShare is. It's a website that allows you to upload and share PowerPoint presentations online. But did you know that SlideShare is also one of the best sources of driving a ton of traffic to your blog?
Before you start creating your first slide, there are a few prerequisites you need to know.
- In order to attract a lot of traffic to your slides, you obviously need to get more views on your presentation on SlideShare.
- According to Ana Hoffman, your slideshow needs to get about 900-1100 views to be featured in the featured box, and 1200-1500 views to be the presentation of the day.
- The best time to upload your presentation is between 11 pm and 2 am EST.
How to Drive Traffic from SlideShare
Step 1 - Create a SlideShare presentation
Create a SlideShare presentation based on your blog post. For example, if you are writing a blog post about “10 Tips for Weight Loss,” you can create a SlideShare on the same topic.
There are many ways to create a presentation. Let's look at a few of them.
- Make your own : It's easy to make a presentation. If you're on a PC, use PowerPoint; if you're on a Mac, use Keynote. Or, you can try free software like OpenOffice.org.
- Download PowerPoint Templates: Instead of creating a PowerPoint template from scratch, you can download a PowerPoint template online and start customizing it yourself. This way, you can ensure that your presentation looks great.
- Hire an expert – Hire a professional designer from Fiverr.com to create your presentation for you.
Step 2 - Choose the right image
Make sure you use great images in your presentation. If you're not sure how to find free images for your presentation, read my article on how to find and use Creative Commons licensed images using Google .
Step 3 - Embed the link/call to action and publish
The best thing about SlideShare presentations is that you can embed links and even call-to-action buttons in your presentation. Once everything is ready, you can go ahead and publish your first presentation. Once it’s live, you can start promoting your presentation on social media and other channels.
4. Social Bookmarking to Increase Traffic
Another great way to increase your blog traffic is to submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Pinterest.
If done right, social bookmarking sites can bring you a ton of traffic, which can help take your blog to another level of success.
It is also very important not to share only your own content on social bookmarking sites but make sure to share more of other people’s content before sharing your own content.
The hard part is making your posts popular on these sites. You need to understand how social bookmarking sites work and how to make the most of them.
People love quality posts. Also, list (top 10, top 25) posts are always popular.
Here are a few social bookmarking sites that I use regularly:
5. Quora
Quora is a popular question and answer website where you can answer users’ questions and cleverly add links to your blog/website to attract more traffic. However, it is not easy to be successful on Quora before you jump on the Quora bandwagon.
The fact is, Quora doesn’t like self-promotion, which is why you have to follow the tips that work on Quora.
Don’t worry, because this Quora traffic guide will help you drive traffic from one of the largest question and answer forums on the planet.
6. Blogger Contests (Bribe Them to Increase Traffic)
Another great way to build your blog is to organize a contest on your blog. If done well, contests can be a great way to drive traffic to your blog.
The idea here is to make your contest more challenging and get the emails of the participants. You definitely want to exclude non-target users to get the most out of this technique.
I have used Gleam on several occasions to drive traffic and capture emails. They do have a free plan but it has limited features.
You might ask,
Hey, how do I find sponsors?
Well, this one is relatively simple and you can read this guide on how to find sponsors for your blog contest .
You can get sponsors for your contest by manually contacting companies and big blogs in your field who will be willing to sponsor if you offer something substantial in return.
7. Twitter
Twitter is a great way to get your posts viral, but promoting yourself and your blog on Twitter isn't as easy as it sounds.
On the other hand, it's not as tough as it looks.
But to do this well, you need to understand the importance of the word “social.” You need to understand why people do what they do.
You also need to learn techniques for driving traffic from Twitter. To help you get started, here are a few things you should do right away:
- Complete your Twitter profile by updating your bio, profile picture, and header image.
- Tweet regularly (at least 6-7 times a day). I use Socialpilot to schedule my tweets in advance.
- Retweet interesting and relevant content from other bloggers. Use analytics tools to find trending topics.
- When sharing a blog post, make sure to include an image or better yet a gif/video.
- Please always use the hashtag (#) when tweeting.
Here are some guidelines to help you get the most out of Twitter:
8. Facebook
Facebook has become one of my favorite traffic generation tools. I have been using it successfully to drive quality traffic to my blog for many years.
Getting a Facebook fan page is the first step, and adding a Facebook pixel.
Your Facebook fan page allows your readers to connect with your brand on Facebook. You can also use it to interact with your readers.
But perhaps the most valuable aspect of Facebook is its ability to make your posts go viral. When you post on Facebook, your readers are notified and your traffic can potentially skyrocket.
But unfortunately, Facebook traffic is not as organic as it once was. The most important thing you need to focus on is engagement. If your audience isn’t engaging with your posts through likes, comments, or retweets, your organic post reach will drop.
Even if you have a lot of “fans,” Facebook won’t do you very well.
You can use a tool like PostPlanner which helps me keep posting interesting content on the ShoutMeLoud Facebook page.
Read: How to get traffic from Facebook fan page
Using the Retargeting Pixel to Get Traffic from Facebook
NOTE: This is not free, but works well and is scalable.
If you’ve been using your Facebook page to promote your blog posts for a while, you may have noticed a drop in reach from your Facebook posts. There could be many reasons for this drop. Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt that it’s harder to increase reach for free now that competition in the news feed is more intense than ever.
A surefire way to increase the overall reach of your Facebook page is to use ads. Again, it’s better to spend a few bucks to increase your reach than to have your Facebook traffic disappear by trying all sorts of useless tricks.
What kind of content works on Facebook?
When sharing posts on Facebook, the general rule of thumb is to make your post stand out in the news feed so that it can easily grab the user's attention. Like any other social network, rich media such as photos and videos attract more attention on Facebook than any other type of content.
However, if you’re looking to increase traffic to your blog posts, you’ll need to focus on sharing links and continually review your performance using Page Insights.
Expand your Facebook reach and drive traffic
Facebook offers different types of advertising options.
Since the goal is to drive more traffic to your blog and ultimately expand your reach, you can try boosting your posts, which is also the easiest way to advertise on Facebook.
All you have to do is click on the Boost Post option in the bottom right corner of your post. You will be asked to choose to run your ad to "People who like your Page and their friends" or "People selected through targeting."
You can choose the second option and set up a retargeting pixel on your blog, which allows you to target Facebook audiences who have previously visited your blog.
9. Purchase traffic
A few years ago, buying traffic for a blog was not that effective. However, nowadays blogging has become mainstream and most of us make money from blogging, more traffic means more money.
You should also consider buying traffic from sites like Facebook, Quora, Reddit, Google AdWords, and other native advertising programs that sell traffic. Personally, I really like traffic from Facebook, and it’s cheaper to buy it using retargeting techniques.
WordPress users can integrate the Facebook pixel into their blog using the Pixel caffeine plugin. This plugin also allows you to categorize your traffic, which is useful for retargeting.
10. Syndicate content on Medium
This is a little-known trick for driving traffic to your blog. Content syndication is the process of republishing your content on other platforms and driving traffic + gaining SEO benefits. Medium.com is a popular blogging platform that offers content syndication.
With just one click, you can import your blog posts to Medium (SEO-friendly way) and take advantage of the huge traffic of Medium.com.
Read: How to Republish Content on Medium.com to Drive More Traffic
11. Reuse and Redistribution of Content:
One of the hardest parts of creating content is coming up with an idea and writing that first piece of content. Once you have it, the next step becomes easier because you can repurpose and distribute the content in a variety of ways. For example:
| platform | Content Type |
|---|---|
| YouTube | Video content |
| podcast | Audio content |
| Twitter Topics | |
| Google Web Stories | Slideshow |
Similarly, you can optimize your content for different platforms and drive traffic to your blog. Read our previous blog post “ 23 Tested Platforms to Distribute Your Content and Get Crazy Traffic ” to master this technique.
Conclusion: How to Increase Blog Traffic
By combining simple wins with some long-term SEO strategies and techniques like email marketing, push notifications can help you drive sustainable traffic and achieve financial independence in the future.
Also, learn how to drive traffic from Quora .
Having a good SEO strategy and social media engagement will ultimately drive the most traffic to your website.
What do you think are the best ways to increase traffic? Can you add more points to this list? Let me know in the comments below.
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Here are some hand-picked guides you must read next:
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