Internet has become our backbone in many ways, especially when we are in need of certain information or facts. Simply Googling it, helps us to come across a billion of blog posts that seems quiet alluring to get the details we are looking for. This poses great difficulty for the blog owners to attract genuine and relevant traffic to their blogs. In short, there are billions of blogs and competitors available online. With so many competitors and rivals coming over the surface every year, how will you attract relevant visitors to your blog?
You must be toying with different ideas to drive traffic to your blog and must be checking your blog for its oversaturation, inaccurate data or lack of relevant backing of facts, but the prior reason behind insufficient quality traffic can be lack of proper promotion of your blog.
In order to experience great traffic to your blog, you have to take the charge on your shoulder and lead your blog through the highly-competitive path. When everything is in place, take a look at some proven promotional methods to ensure driving reliable and quality blog traffic.
1. Get Traffic to Your Blog through Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites which have around 2.32 billion monthly users. That’s a huge number to target. But, it’s a great prospect to enhance your blog’s traffic.
The most effective and impactful platform of the modern era, Facebook gives you a wonderful podium to reach out to the innumerable audiences out there, around the globe. You can do it through the following ways:
A. Complete your Facebook profile with relevant and accurate information. Add a website and complete your profile with precise and professional summary. Always remember, your profile is your key and your weapon in this field.
Before moving on to the next steps, don’t forget to read and understand Facebook’s Community Standards.
B. Build a strong network on Facebook. Find people who might be of your same feather, send them friend requests and also a message about yourself and the reason to why you want to add them. Avoid sending too many friend requests in a day, maintain a time gap. Respond to people who sends you friend requests and add them if you find they are of your same interests. Ask your friends, acquaintances, and partners to support you by sharing your blog posts from their Facebook account among their network.
C. Join relevant groups associated with your interest. The groups should have a good number of active members and should be free from excessive spam. Sharing your blogs on these groups at regular intervals, give you great prospect to attract quality visitors. Another key to grab the attention of relevant readers is to be social and reply to each and every comment that you receive on your posts.
D. To keep a strong and constant engagement for your blog posts, be active and post on your timeline or your page on a regular basis maintaining a time gap. You might have heard the proverb “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” and you definitely will not like to fall prey to the same.
E. While posting on Facebook you have to keep in mind that the posts contain relevant hashtags with catchy texts and images. Adding Emojis to your posts makes them even better.
F. Start your own Facebook group. Invite your friends to join your group, request the existing group members to add their friends to your group. Facebook group is a brilliant source of community and traffic which is ideal for promoting your posts and that too for free.
2. Increase Blog Traffic through Pinterest
Pinterest is one of the most popular social media networks of the world, with the number of people joining it growing every single day, currently standing at around 250 million monthly users. This means, it has a lot of opportunities for you to offer. You have a wide ocean of prospects to reach out to your target audiences through this social media platform. The best practices that would help you to increase your blog traffic by using Pinterest include the following:
A. Pinterest is all about pinning your blog. Create relevant boards and pin your blog posts. Avoid keeping your boards secret as this will devoid you of the prospect of reaching your target.
B. Follow Pinterest users who are of your same niche. There are huge chances of these users to follow you back and even repin your pins from their boards.
C. Group boards are the pages of this social media where several people pin content on different topics about a particular interest. Request the admin of such boards to add you to their group, and start pinning your blog posts there as soon as they add you. Make sure the boards should have good amount of followers, you might get some potential and loyal readers from here for free.
D. Create pin-worthy and high-quality images for your pins. Images are the key for your content on Pinterest. It brings maximum engagement and is preferred more by the users. While using the images, keep the branding and logo to minimal and make your image look relatable to your topic.
E. Plan your pinning strategy. There are millions of pins posted on the platform around the clock. When you want to be different, you have to create a pinning schedule, when you can reach out to the maximum number of your target audiences. Follow some research work and find out the right time that can boost your pin’s traffic.
3. Techniques to Drive Visitors through YouTube
There are several tried and tested method for increasing the number of visitors your blog receive, video integration is one such unique and proven technique. YouTube is an ever growing network with around 1.9 billion active users every month. It can help your blog to grow its popularity and increase its visibility in the market explicitly. Video content is always considered to be dynamic and engaging, embedding it in your blog posts, boosts the probability of reaching new heights. You can use the video in your content in the following ways:
A. Create relevant video for your blogpost. Maintain its relevancy.
B. Make the video look great and add an alluring professional touch to your video.
C. Insert the URL of your blogpost in the YouTube video description section. Adding your blog’s logo in the video and a good description with effective tags makes it look more professional.
D. Don’t forget to optimize the title and description of your videos with your target keywords that will be shown in the search engine results.
E. Add an attractive and relevant thumbnail for your video. The thumbnail is the first impression of your video to the visitors searching YouTube.
F. Share your videos on popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. The social signals help to enhance the overall reputation and ranking of your videos.
G. Spread your videos to different websites by creating blogposts and embedding your video to those posts.
4. Promote Your Blog through Quora and Yahoo Answers
Yahoo! Answers and Quora can drive an extensive range of traffic to your blog. This may sound a bit weird technique for blog promotion to many, but it is one of the most effective ones. Both these platforms are a well-developed social network, which allows the general people to ask questions of their choice or interest. These questions are answered by experts, experienced and many times the common people themselves. People can rate and vote for answers they like and some even share their favorite answers to their profile and then to their social media networks as well.
Yahoo! Answers has more than 200 million users and Quora has around 300 million users (the number is significantly on a rise). Yahoo! Answers and Quora, both are extremely powerful tools and source for referral traffic and the potential is beyond one’s imagination. Some tips to help you tap the potential of both these platforms are summed in the below points:
A. It’s always good to let people know you. Completing your profile with adequate and accurate information on both the platforms will give you an edge over others, make people wait for your answers. Completing your profile is a way of promoting yourself and giving an identity to your answer.
B. Search for the categories or the questions which seems to be relevant to your blog. You don’t need to be the first one to answer any question. It doesn’t really matter, what matters most is that you answer a relevant question with a good and subtle answer that can be captivating for the readers.
C. For both the platforms, it is very necessary for you to shortlist a number of questions, which seems to relevant to answer in accordance with your blog. However, there is yet another aspect that you need to keep in mind. For Quora, you need to keep a check on the number of views a question gets. Some people might also consider the number of followers for a question, but they need a reality check. There are many instances where the number of followers for a particular question is too less as compared to the number of views they receive.
D. Take a look at the quality and quantity of answers for the questions. Although, it has been mentioned earlier that you don’t need to be the first one to answer, being the last will not be in your favor each time. If a question has already received around 1200 answers and most of them are of great quality, then until your answer is outstanding there is a probable chance of it getting lost among the other thousands of answers.
E. While writing an answer, adopt a crisp, precise and engaging tone. This attracts readers. Being honest with readers is also necessary. Your readers are not fools, who will accept everything that you serve them; they will use their own intelligence and reasoning to judge the truthfulness of your answer.
F. While everything else will work out easily, don’t forget to add links to your blog posts in your answers. Phrase your answer in a way that it can have one link about your blog or its post. And yes, of course, you have to do this without using a sales pitch. People on such platforms look for genuine answers and feel highly dejected if they come across multiple links or promotional content.
5. Twitter Tricks to Drive Huge Blog Traffic
Twitter, the social media platform has around 326 million active monthly users. The influence and the impact this platform has over the market makes it a must-explore podium for the bloggers. Maintaining an active Twitter account with a good number of relevant followers always helps you to get more visitors to your blog. It attracts a tremendous level of engagement and excellent traffic for your blog.
The success that it delivers is rare to be found anywhere else and it is also a wonderful platform to easily tap the community that supports and shows interest in your work and thus driving traffic to your blog. Using this platform for your benefit requires you to use some specific techniques, which include:
A. Crisp language to get more attention. Twitter allows a maximum number of 280 characters for a tweet. You have to use this number of characters to grab the attention of your audiences, reach out to them, engage them and make them read your blogs. Some would say this is rather near to impossible, but this is where you can play with words and make your blog stand out amidst the competitors.
B. Don’t forget to use visuals. You cannot explain everything in words. Using and tapping the potential of visuals here is the key to grab quality visitors on Twitter. Accompanying your content, the image can do wonders to help you get the attention of valuable visitors.
C. Be Repetitive. There is nothing bad about posting the same content on social media channels over and over again keeping an interval between the posts. This might be considered to be a bad practice by some, but in reality, it isn’t. Rather, it provides additional value to your audience and sometimes it even gets you the attention of the audiences, who probably would have missed your content earlier.
D. Be specific and get in details with your bio. List your information including your occupation and add the link of your blog with a specific call to action to optimize the Twitter reach and to direct valuable traffic to your blog.
E. Develop a healthy competitive environment. You should consistently tweet the content of other influencers of your niche and this is how you would develop a strong reputation in the eyes of your followers. This would even help you to grow your network and increase recognition of your tweets within your community.
F. Don’t forget the hashtags. Tweeting without hashtags is not always a good idea. The tweets using hashtags receive more engagement than those that don’t. Use of hashtags even enhances your chance to get more visibility, more clicks, and relevant visitors.
6. Increase Quality Visitors To Your Blog Through LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a popular professional social networking website with around 500 million users around 200 countries across the globe. It is known for bringing traffic and conversions to a blog and increases its opportunity to reach out to potential audiences. Use the following techniques to help increase the traffic in the most effective ways:
A. Maintain a top-notch profile with in-depth information about your educational and professional background. You always get the advantage of putting the details of your experience, expertise and the services that you offer. People generally get connected to you after reviewing your profile and experiences.
B. Establish essential connections. Once you join the LinkedIn, you will be flooded with options to connect with people. Connect with your friends, acquaintances and peer group along with the people who share the same professional or educational background and interest as that of yours. This helps you to build a strong and ideal connection’s network on the platform. Build your degree to connect to at least 500 connections.
C. Share your blog posts at regular intervals on your timeline, once you post on your LinkedIn timeline it will also be visible on your connections feed. If the blog-posts title and image are catchy and are of interests to your connections, you can expect a good amount of click-throughs and views on your blog’s post.
D. Find the right kind of groups as per your interest in relation to your blog and join them. Join the groups that have a significant number of members. Join industry-specific groups to develop valuable network and connections. Don’t forget to follow the group rules as it will help you to establish a good reputation and enter in the good books of your audiences. Now, start posting relevant blog posts in those groups and see a gradual increase in blog post views.
E. Add relevant links to the Website URL section of Contact Info page. Each link should offer something new, fresh and attractive, which would make the readers feel that they are experiencing something exclusive and unique.
7. Tips to Boost Your Blog Traffic Heavily using Reddit
Reddit is one of the most popular online communities with the souvenir of 5th most visited website in the US that helps to drive huge potential web traffic for your blog. Apart from being the only online community with over 330 millions of average monthly active users, Reddit has more than 138 thousand of active communities and gets 14 billion monthly average views.
Users can submit content in the form of text posts, links, images, and videos. With a proper strategic approach, Reddit can help in gaining control over the type of target audience relevant for your niche specific blog contents.
Let’s check out how Reddit works for you and can bring huge quality traffic to your blog:
A. Firstly, sign up and make your profile on the Reddit website. With just an active email address, a username and password anyone can join with millions of redditors.
B. The next step is to do your homework right. Explore the site properly, various categories (Subreddit as they call it) and also the terms and regulations before you start your own campaigning. Also, check out most trending topics by reading other’s posts. Remember, it’s really important to know your redditors
C. Recognize your true subreddit. For a quick and genuine response, it is always recommended to choose a subreddit that has the maximum number of subscribers with most people active and online.
D. Reddit is strict with their rules, so be very careful with what you post. It has to be unique and relevant so it gets noticed, voted and shared by others. Never ever spam!
Other networks such as SnapChat, WhatsApp & Tumblr are also popular and effective medium to establish a stronghold over the market by attracting exclusive visitors to your blogs.
Using exclusive techniques and popular platforms for the promotion of your blog posts ensures an incredible reach among your target audience. It also helps your blog to attract large number of traffic, who over the time becomes your loyal audiences and contributes significantly in developing your name and fame in the industry.
Image Courtesy: mohamed_hassan/pixabay, aahanbhatt/medium and 292Jacob/wikimedia.
SEM Correspondent publishes latest news and updates from the world of Digital Marketing in behalf of Search Engine Mogul Team.
This a really helpful post to drive traffic for free.
Super advice here. I love the focus on building connections. Well done buddy.