News flash! Setting up a new blog isn’t the hard part.
With great hosting companies out there, it’s super easy to create your own WordPress blog.
The difficult part is getting traffic to your new blog.
Am I right?
Anyone out there can start a blog, but only a select few are able to build up enough of a readership to go full time as a professional blogger.
With this post, I’m gonna reveal a few key ways that you can get more traffic to your blog, so that you can grow your readership, boost your sales, and make a living doing what you love.
1. Automate Social Media
I’ve found the easiest way to begin to get some traffic to a new blog is with social media. Take a second to create a social media account for your blog on the major networks like:
One you set up an account on each service, sign up for Buffer. Buffer is a life changing tool that lets you pre-schedule social media messages to go out on your various profiles.
Rather than remembering to post updates every day, you can use Buffer to automate the entire process. A great alternative to Buffer is Edgar.
Once you sign up for a social media tool like the two above, you no longer have to worry about continually posting on social media. They’ll do it for you!
This frees up your time so that you can concentrate on doing what you’re best at…. blogging!
2. Create SEO Optimized Content
The vast majority of my traffic comes from search engines like Google. This is repeat traffic that I get day after day, month after month.
In my opinion, SEO traffic is the holy grail of blogging. It’s the reason that full time bloggers only have to work one or two hours per day to maintain their income streams.
The #1 question that you want to ask yourself with every piece of content that you create is:
“What would a reader type into Google to find this post?”
By asking yourself this question, you’ll be able to title your blog posts more effectively and stay on topic. It will also help you produce articles that are USEFUL for your readers.
Once you’ve identified that you’re answering a question with your blog post, you’re going to want to optimize your post for search engines.
There are a few easy ways to do this. I’ll also link to an SEO guide here. Consider:
- Including at least one image with keywords in the file name/name.
- Link to other blogs or articles that are related to your topic.
- Don’t keyword stuff your posts, but include the keyword regularly.
- Use headlines like H2 to help search engines understand your content.
- Write 2,000 word posts, as they are proven to rank better in search engines.
- Get linked to from other blogs and websites.
Google really likes niche websites that are authoritative about a particular topic. The key to boosting the traffic to your blog is to stay consistent. Produce content regularly around a specific topic.
Over time, you’ll become an authority on that topic in the eyes of google. The more that other websites link to you, the higher your domain authority will become.
3. Build Up An Email List
When you use a blogging platform like WordPress.com, your readers will get notified every time you come out with a new blog posts.
Professional bloggers will build up an email list that they can use to:
- Announce new articles
- Unveil new products
- Direct readers to a particular website
There are many different ways that you can grow this email list to thousands of subscribers. One of the best ways that I’ve seen is to begin to direct traffic to a specific landing page with some type of lead magnet.
That lead magnet could be a free ebook, checklist, guide, or other helpful resource. The landing page will track the number of people that come to that page, and the percentage that convert into email subscribers.
You can use a simply landing page builder like Leadpages to do this. The software is super easy to use. You’ll be able to set up a landing page in a few minutes and start collecting email addresses.
Leadpages gives you all of the tools that you need to set up a landing page fast. I use them myself for webinars, giveaways, and to convert website visitors into email subscribers.
Having an email list will help you increase your traffic to new blog articles. You’ll instantly get readers commenting on new articles and sharing them on social media networks.
This is the reason that for the first few hours, even when a big internet celebrities like Tim Ferriss publish a blog post, there won’t be any comments. He and others won’t start to get comments and social shares until he sends it out to his email newsletter.
4. Do Guest Posts on Other Blogs
Other blogs have already built up an audience of loyal readers. Rather than trying to build up your own from scratch, you can get some exposure in front of their audience and bring some back to your blog.
The most important aspect of guest posting is making sure that your content is absolutely stellar for the other blog. It should be freaking awesome. That’s the only way they’re going to want to publish it on their site.
In addition, you need to make sure that your article topic is a good match for their audience. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been pitched guest post articles that are clearly a bad match for my audience.
I can easily tell that the individual is just trying to get a link back to their own blog. They don’t care about the quality of the content.
A roundup post is simply an article that links to and quotes other bloggers. Let’s say that you’re writing a travel blog. You could do a roundup post like… “10 Travel Experts Say To Bring This On Your Next Trip.”
You’d then quote the individual travel experts and link to their website. Since they were featured in the post, they’re more likely to share the article on various social media networks and with their email list.
There’s something in it for them.
6. Keep Writing!!
The formula is pretty simple. The more quality content that you write, the more likely someone is to stumble upon your blog.
They could visit your blog from a social media link, another blog post, or discover it because you’ve linked back to your previous content.
The more that you write, the better the chance that someone’s going to find you online. Plain and simple.
I would recommend putting out 3 quality blog posts per week in the early days. You can scale that back and increase the length of your articles as time goes on.
When you’re first getting started, you need to build up a library of content that you can reference and promote. In addition, putting out more content on a regular basis is going to help you rank better in the eyes of Google.
Over time, you’ll be able to earn a full time income from blogging.
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