Blogging has rapidly become one of the most
used tools to increase traffic to any website. Most companies and organizations
do it on a regular basis to get search engines, mainly Google, to rank their
sites higher and get more traffic.
Bloggers like you and me are also on our toes to get more traffic to our sites, and we want it fast! There are quick tips and strategies that’ll help you boost traffic if you’re consistent and have a daily routine but also some longer-term strategies I wanted to share.
These techniques require you to invest a
reasonable amount of time and effort on a regular basis, but they’ll yield
results if you’re disciplined and work through each strategy.
Posting about the fad of the day or around
seasonal ideas can be good for a quick bump in traffic but it’s the posts that
live forever that will really boost your blog.
Evergreen content is any topic or article that has long-term appeal to readers, regardless of the season or what people are talking about today. These types of posts can generate traffic for years and work great as long-form posts or list posts.
To ensure your evergreen content is actually
“evergreen”, follow these rules when creating it:
- Use Google Trends to see if the topic has a stable search volume throughout the year
- Search for the topic on relevant forums and discussion boards
- Are questions around the topic highlighted in Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ section?
If you´re having problems coming up with viral ideas to write about, try using these methods to come up with great ideas in as little as 5 minutes. Free tools like Google search, Google related search results, YouTube search, and online communities are fantastic sources of information and inspiration.
New information is coming up constantly and that great blog post you wrote a few months or even years ago might be outdated. Your readers will notice and outdated information might make you lose credibility and eventually traffic.
To avoid this drama, try regularly updating
good-performing old posts. For an extra boost of traffic, you can also change
the publication date to send Google those ‘freshness’ signals it loves so much.
Here are a couple of tips on how to update and refresh your blog posts:
●
Add More and New Information
Can you add another few items to a list post or more detail on each? Are there questions left unanswered from the original post. I like to use the ‘People Also Ask’ section in Google search results or just the comments from the post for new content ideas.
●
Add Better Imagery
Boost the popularity of your posts on Pinterest or Facebook by updating the images to something even more appealing. Consider turning some of the information into an infographic or other graphic type.
●
Improve Your SEO
Simple tasks like checking the use of your keywords, and checking your images alt tag text can boost your rank in Google.
●
Include Internal Links to Newer
Content
This small tweak
makes a mighty difference. Add new, relevant internal links to your older
content to keep your visitors moving around your site and to increase your
domain authority.
If you keep adding relevant information to old posts, they’ll increase in length and fall into the long-form format Google also loves. Remember to focus on quality over quantity to avoid adding content just for the sake of it and to keep content as strong and as in-depth as possible.
Related: Blog Post Template
Be active about encouraging your readers to share your content on social media. Explicit requests to promote sharing are fine and some of your readers will follow them.
Write in a conversational style, informally
like you’re talking directly to the reader. This way they’ll be more likely to
engage with your content by commenting and sharing it.
Not only should you see a rise in traffic, but you may also be sending subtle ‘signals’ to search engines on the popularity and quality of your posts. You’ll also be creating more keyword-rich content on your website, encouraging return visits to your blog, and increasing “dwell time” on your post. All good vibes Google loves getting.
Related: 6 Beginners SEO Tips
Bonus! Broken-link Building
Those are all easy changes to your blog to get
that quick boost of traffic but for real growth, it’s hard to beat
link-building. This is where you go off-blog, connecting with other websites,
to get links back to your blog. Links help increase your rank on Google and
since Google search is most bloggers’ biggest traffic source, it pays to spend
a little time here.
Broken-link building is a special strategy
that looks for those pesky 404 pages on the internet. You know the ones I’m
talking about. When you land on a page that was supposed to show you how to
make your own mocha-cocoa latte but instead you see a Page Not Found error
message.
Google hates these broken pages just as much as readers so any website linking to these dead-ends can get dinged in search. Using web scraping tools like ScreamingFrog, you can find 404 pages in your blog niche and the blogs linking to them. Then you just reach out to the linked blogs, explain that you found a broken link on their site and (oh, how convenient) you just happen to have a blog page that would be perfect as a replacement.
Part of the motivation to getting that big traffic spike to your blog is creating an income source that generates profit both actively and passively. So I don’t want you to think blog traffic will solve all your problems. Make sure you have a plan in place to monetize that traffic once it reaches your little spot on the world-wide web. Put the two together and you’ll have a successful blog that not only gets read but also makes you money!
Born and raised in Iowa, Joseph Hogue graduated from Iowa State University after serving in the Marine Corps. He worked in corporate finance and real estate before starting a career in investment analysis. He has appeared on Bloomberg and CNBC and led a team of equity analysts for a venture capital research firm. He holds a master’s degree in business and the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.
Joseph left the corporate world in 2014 to build his online businesses, first through creating websites and later through YouTube. Booking just $792.41 in 2015 income, he’s grown his online assets to an income of $122,400 for the twelve-months to July 2019. He’s published 10 books and has grown the YouTube channel, Let’s Talk Money, to over 75,000 subscribers in just 18 months.