One of the best ways to attract people to a website is blog traffic. When you frequently add great content to your blog, you will give visitors valuable resources. You will also publish more pages to your blog for search engines to index.

Writing high-quality posts will strengthen your brand, produce more incoming links to your blog or website, and improve loyalty from existing clients, readers, and potential customers.

Experienced bloggers say they made many mistakes along the way to realize what increased blog traffic and what did not. In this article, I would like to share with you some proven methods to increase blog traffic. You can even use a blog to drive traffic to your website, so I hope you find this post helpful.

What are the Proven Ways to Increase Blog Traffic?

Choose Your Topics Wisely to Increase Blog Traffic

The topics you include on your blog will impact visitors who read your articles. For instance, if your published articles involve many essential tutorials on a subject, they will draw a lot of beginners. Similarly, if you post advanced tutorials, you will attract readers who have more experience on the subject.

Therefore, you must better research the topics to include on your blog and develop a long-term content plan. This process generates targeted traffic from readers who prefer subscribing to your blog and buying your services or products.

One technique of increasing blog traffic is covering currently popular topics. Services such as Google Trends have trending topics and enable you to know what is hot and what is not.

Additionally, make sure you review the keywords and key phrases related to your business. You can achieve this by evaluating your blog traffic and searching for keywords and key phrases that generate more traffic.

A few good examples of keyword research tools you can use include Keyword Tool, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and WordTracker.

One of the most successful keyword research methods is by studying how your competitors generate blog traffic. Several great tools are available online to show you exactly how your competitors acquire traffic. These tools include the keywords they rank for, the articles that receive the most traffic, and the websites that link to them.

Interact with Your Readers

A blog provides you with the opportunity to know your audience better and vice-versa. The best section to interact with your audience is through the comment area. By replying to questions and answering commenters’ opinions, you can prove your skill on a subject and develop a relationship with prospective customers.

I believe there are important reasons and benefits of responding to readers’ comments. However, if you lack enough time to reply to comments, consider disabling them. Failing to respond to questions or comments from your readers may show a wrong impression concerning your business.

The other ways you can interact with your readers include social media services such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. You can also use surveys and visitors’ interviews to know your readers well and share the readers’ opinions through your articles.

Additionally, never take your readers for granted if you want to increase blog traffic. If you connect with your readers well, you will convert them into loyal customers or service buyers.

Write High-Quality Articles

Writing high-quality articles will attract a big audience and encourage more sharing among people through social networks. Later, this technique boosts incoming links and search engine traffic to your blog.

Never take your blog merely when you want to increase the number of pages indexed by search engines on your website. Only focus on quality content. Keep in mind that the more you target your visitors, the more likely they will buy your products and services. Therefore, concentrate on quality content and exclude cheap traffic that inflates traffic statistics.

One crucial piece of advice I can give is that if you want to increase blog traffic, try to solve people’s problems. Also, if you can help your readers by some means, they will be grateful. Doing so will prompt them to share your content, subscribe to your blog, and become your faithful customer.

It does not mean you will have to handle or write all blog content yourself. However, the online arena has many experienced bloggers who can assist you in publishing excellent articles on your website.

Indeed, one way includes hiring bloggers using job boards or searching them from freelancing marketplaces such as Listiller.

Use a Professional Blog Design

An attractive blog design should offer your readers the professional appearance you intend to present. This process will increase credibility, strengthen your brand, and improve sales and leads.

A common mistake made by a blogger is placing too many advertisements and insignificant images when designing their blog. This mistake upsets many readers, and they end up clicking the back button even before reading your posts.

Check the following posts for other mistakes from bloggers to avoid.

5 bad blogging habits you need to stop for successful blogging

If you aim to increase traffic and improve conversions to your blog, make sure your website design is both attractive and realistic.

Create a blog design that is responsive so that it seems good on a personal computer, a laptop, and smaller devices such as smartphones or tablets. Ensure you also format your article with a font that is appealing and easy to read.

Using a sidebar with recent posts is a perfect way to help readers navigate easily on your blog. Take advantage of this section and display category links, a search bar, and archive links. To persuade visitors to stay longer on your website, you can display featured articles, recent blog posts, and related articles.

Promote Your Blog

The difference between an unsuccessful and a successful blog depends on your promotion methods. If you have enough money to invest in your blog, you can develop it quickly by advertising it on other websites and increasing your social media presence.

Luckily, if you don’t have a budget, several freely available promotional methods are available. One of the most popular free blog promotions is through guest blogging.

This process involves writing posts for high-traffic and well-esteemed websites to gain recognition for your blog and your brand. The inbound links you display in your author bio will also increase inbound links to your blog. This action, in turn, boosts your search engine rankings.

You can also read my post on how to market and promote your blog for further information.

• Techniques Involved

One of the best techniques for promoting your blog is to allow other people to do it for you. To achieve this, you need to publish excellent articles and develop helpful resources such as free online tools.

The other great technique for allowing readers to promote your blog is competition. Competition services such as Raffle copter enable people to join a contest by sharing your article on Facebook or Twitter. One can also enter a competition by signing up for your email newsletter or writing comments on your blog.

Many successful bloggers comment on their favorite blogs to promote their new blog. Even though this method can advertise your blog, it isn’t efficient enough for a blogger’s time. Therefore, I recommend using alternative methods to promote your blog since you will get a better return.

Blog Consistently to increase blog traffic

There are differing opinions about how regularly you should publish content on a blog. For instance, most high-traffic news websites publish several times every day since more news increases traffic. However, most businesses and bloggers post articles occasionally every week or month.

If you assume that each article on your blog has the same quality, then publishing more often will produce more traffic. However, this declaration does not necessarily imply that more is always better. Research indicates that it’s better to choose a schedule that you can maintain consistently.

Readers want consistency, and publishing three articles for one week and then failing to post for another month, is a bad blogging habit. My suggestion is to start at a slow publishing frequency, like once weekly. Later you can adjust by increasing your publishing frequency if you get extra resources.

Moreover, to organize your blog efficiently, you have to write and schedule one or more articles in advance. My recommendation is to activate the WordPress plugin such as the Editorial Calendar to assist you in scheduling tasks.

Failure to prepare content in advance will cause disruptions to your blog publishing frequency due to unexpected conditions. Such conditions include some of your authors becoming sick or failing to meet their deadlines.

Analyze Your Blog Traffic

Excellent services such as Google Analytics can let you know a lot regarding your blog. It can tell you what articles receive the most views, what key phrases and keywords bring in visitors, and the number of visitors your blog receives daily.

It can also inform you more about the people who visit your blog. For instance, it can tell you about the country they live in, the language they speak, and the device they use to visit your blog. This information lets you understand your readers better and whether the content marketing strategies you use are functioning well.

It is tempting to check your traffic statistics each day to confirm traffic growth. However, this habit can produce problems rather than help achieve a goal. My recommendation is to review your traffic stats every week, fortnight, or even every month. Always set targets and then evaluate whether you have achieved them.

Do not get discouraged if you fail to meet your expectations. Sometimes you won’t meet your targets, and you will even go beyond them at times. The primary approach includes using targets to push your blog forward with the right content and marketing strategy.

Ensure Your Website is SEO Friendly

Your site should not only look good to people, but it needs to be easy for search engines to interpret. Doing so will help search engines to crawl and index your content efficiently. Fortunately, the WordPress platform has an SEO-friendly solution with built-in SEO features such as custom page slugs to help you.

It is crucial to structure your website appropriately to help your content rank well in search engines. Your website theme should validate without CSS and HTML errors and use header tags correctly in templates. It should also take advantage of other navigation features such as breadcrumb navigation links.

To optimize page titles and Meta descriptions, use search engine-friendly plugins such as All in One SEO Pack, which can help to optimize your pages.

Also, you can utilize other SEO plugins to create sitemaps for your website. If the SEO plugin you choose lacks this functionality, then consider activating the free WordPress plugin known as Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin provides you with complete control over what search engines should index and the rate at which pages get crawled.

Definitely, many professional bloggers recognize it as the most flexible sitemap solution for WordPress users to boost blog traffic.

Make It Easy For Visitors to Share Your Content

Using Social media networks creates an excellent source of blog traffic. Unfortunately, providing high-quality articles is hardly an assurance that readers will share them on services such as Twitter.

Nevertheless, if you desire to improve how often your readers share your articles, several approaches are available. One helpful technique is to integrate social media sharing buttons into your posts. Fortunately, many free plugin tools are available on WordPress to help you integrate Social media icons into your post. These include Simple Social Share, Ultimate Social Media, etc.

For example, in my blog post, I have used Ultimate Social Media sharing buttons on the left-hand side of my posts. The plugin ensures that the sharing icons scroll down with the page to make it visible always. This technique helps to increase shares from my readers.

Expand Your Online Presence

Whenever readers visit your blog, you have the opportunity to convert them into long-term subscribers. Ensure you encourage your visitors to follow you on social media networks and subscribe to your blog RSS feed. Doing so will let them know any new updates you publish on your blog.

The most successful method of expanding your online presence is through a targeted email marketing list. This method is more valuable than RSS, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

Therefore, take every chance you can to persuade visitors to obtain updates by email. When you do so, visitors will receive messages directly to their inbox. Also, use this method to promote services and products and notify the subscribers regarding your latest posts.

When visitors subscribe to your blog, they are likely to return to your blog regularly. This process helps to increase blog traffic, which generates more sales. If you succeed in converting visitors into subscribers, your online presence will grow, and your blog will develop exponentially.

Be Patient if you want to increase blog traffic

For your blog to have an established readership, it can take several months unless you have a big budget for advertising campaigns to promote it. It can also take years before your blog gets better traffic.

However, you should not be scared of this issue. Be patient enough and focus your effort on providing high-quality articles, and your blog will soon be successful.

I hope you have appreciated the above ways to increase blog traffic. If so, I urge you to subscribe to my newsletter to receive updates on my latest posts.

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