How To Promote Your Blog For Traffic: Useful Tips To Increase Traffic

So you have just hit publish on a post for your blog.

What’s the next step here?

Should you start working on a new post?

The answer is no. Your new post requires attention and nurturing before you can start focusing on another one. You need to invest yourself in promotion!

While the content you post is the big hook, you still need to find ways to reel people in, and promotion is the bait.

Let’s move on and take a look at these helpful tips for promoting your blog.

Understand SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is an insanely important aspect of blogging so it’s practically required to familiarise yourself with the concept and figure out how it works.

Do the relevant research and understand how keywords work, how often you should use them and which ones would yield the most traffic.

Go the extra mile and use tools like Google Analytics to keep tabs on what terms are more popular than others. Use images and tag them appropriately so that your SEO ranking is as high as possible.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

The idea here is to write posts/articles that offer the audience a significant amount of depth.

By writing longer posts that provide valuable insights to readers, your content has an increased chance of ranking with long-tail keywords, the benefit being that this ranking provides reliable long-term traffic for your blog.

In addition to this, research also indicates that Google tends to give priority to longer and more detailed articles as opposed to ones that are more brief and simplistic.

Build an E-Mail List

According to most successful bloggers, email is an extremely useful medium for building up traffic.

At the end of the day, an email list is essentially a database and on top of that it’s something that’ll keep expanding in numbers.

Not to mention the convenience of being able to email those on your list at any time.

Another reason a mailing list can make a difference to your traffic, is that often people are too busy to check their favourite blogs.

However, getting an email that provides content updates is a great way to stay fresh in their minds.

Start Guest Blogging

For those unfamiliar, guest blogging is basically submitting an article or post to another blog (typically one that is much larger than your own) for the sake of ‘getting your name out there’ and promoting yourself.

This starts by identifying blogs that have greater reach than your own, and submitting your articles to them.

However remember to include a small bio and provide the relevant link(s), so that those reading the post can explore your blog and see your other content.

Be Active in Your Niche

Identifying the strongest players in your respective niche can be helpful on multiple levels.

As mentioned above, doing so can help you increase traffic through guest blogging. But another technique at your disposal is being an active commenter.

The advice here is to make your presence known in the community for your niche by contributing insightful, thought-provoking commentary on a given blog post.

When others will see how interesting your thoughts and opinions are, they’ll most definitely explore your blog for more.

Use Backlinks

Backlinks are part of the SEO strategy – they are a show of confidence that the relevant link provides meaningful content.

As such, the best way to use this for promotion is to put a spotlight on other bloggers and their posts.

Reference them in a relevant manner and then reach out to them about it.

By highlighting their content, they’re most likely going to check out your post and if they like what they see then in the future they’ll definitely give you the same treatment.

A healthy system of backlinks is great for exposure.

Social Sharing Buttons

Sometimes the best kind of promotion that your blog gets is through the efforts of the readers.

By having clearly labelled social sharing buttons on display you can reach a wider audience without even having to do much because your readers spread the word instead.

This also provides a great way of having some sort of presence on platforms you might not be very active on.

Make Use of Interviews

This approach is somewhat two-pronged, in the sense that you should both be hosting interviews and guesting on them.

Try to arrange interviews on your blog who are relevant to your niche and have inspiring, interesting or entertaining stories to share.

This is a great way to generate interest because people will want to know what this person has to say.

And as for the guesting aspect, it’d be beneficial to reach out to podcasts or other mediums to land an interview for yourself.

This way a whole new audience is made aware of your blog.

The only catch here is that you need to be able to prove to the hosts that you have interesting things to share.

Discuss Current Affairs

The thing about news is that it’s generally on your mind.

Whether positive or negative things are happening, people are thinking about what’s going on.

You can make use of this by sharing your thoughts on any current affairs or even simply by writing an informative post about them, just remember to twist the topic in such a way that it fits the topic of your blog.

Merely by association you could get an instant boost in traffic.

Don’t Shy Away From Controversy

Alongside current events, don’t feel obligated to play it safe when expressing your opinions.

As they say ‘no such thing as bad publicity’, because at the end of the day controversy helps direct eyes to you.

People will either read out of curiosity, or because they agree, or even if they disagree (hate-reading tends to be big among some people).

At the end of the day people will flock to your blog. In fact, this will also lead to greater engagement from readers who will express their approval or disapproval.

Either way this is the sort of tactic that leads to a great deal of activity. Just remember to not be controversial for its own sake, because quality is still important at the end of the day.