How can I increase my blog traffic for free? This is a common question asked by many beginning bloggers. As a blog owner, you know how hard it is to build traffic to your web site. There are so many blogs of different sizes and they are all competing for the same pool of web visitors. It can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Paid traffic generation methods like AdWords often aren’t worth the money for the number of real visitors they deliver. To help you get that traffic flowing, here are five free ways to get people to visit your blog and to keep them coming back.
1. Use Keyword Research to Find Traffic
To get organic traffic from search engines you have two problems to solve. First, you need to write about topics related to your niche that people are searching for. Secondly, you need to ensure that the search engines know what your content is about and can connect it with people who are searching for that content.
Search engines such as Google are mainly powered by keywords, so your content needs to contain variations of these keywords. These keyword phrases should be the ones that people benefiting from reading your blog posts will type into the search engine. Make use of the many keyword research tools available online to find popular topics that people are interested in and the search terms they use to find those topics. Then create your content around those topics and keywords.
2. Consistent Content Posting to Bring Traffic
People are more likely to follow a blog that has consistent content going up on it. They may stumble across your blog from a variety of directions but once they are there they will be on the lookout for fresh content on their topic of interest. This is particularly true if the topic of the blog includes time-sensitive information. The more posts you have the more discovery points you also have for search engines and human visitors to find your content, and the more context the search engines have for properly categorizing your blog. So ensure that you have a steady flow of posts for both search engines and people to consume.
3. Building an Email List to Keep Traffic
Building a following to your blog is a long and hard process, so once you have someone interested in your content you should try as hard as possible to retain them. Getting people to subscribe to an email list is a great way to provide them with a reminder to come back to your blog and it also provides you with opportunities to responsibly promote additional content. You can use services such as Aweber to manage the list and offer your site visitor something extra for free to get them to sign up. The advantage of a service like Aweber is that it is less likely to trigger ISP and browser spam filters as it is commonly used as a reputable tool for genuine content-focused mailing lists.
Another great benefit to using an email service provider like Aweber is the ability to target your lists by topic and schedule email campaign series. For instance, you might want to create two different email welcome campaigns based on the sign-up source. These campaigns would be automated and set up in advance. These features are also great for sales funnels. Welcome campaigns are great for increasing blog traffic and sales funnels can be very lucrative.
4. Guest Posting on Third-Party Blogs
Another way of creating discovery points to drive search engines and visitors to your blog is to post relevant content on other people’s blogs. Many blog owners are on the lookout for people creating content in the same niche as them to create some unique content for their blog. It’s free content for them and, if done right, it can help raise the profile of both blogs and drive more traffic to each blog in the longer term.
Do some searches for content within your niche and make a note of any interesting blogs you find as a result that you may benefit from posting to. Look for blogs with a similar-sized following to yours, as significantly larger blogs aren’t going to take you seriously. Then send a message to the blog owner to see if they are interested in publishing a guest post from you. Ensure that you provide them with some examples of your quality content in their niche and give them an outline of what you are considering writing about.
5. Social Media
The final tip to answer the “How can I increase my blog traffic for free?” question is by using social media. Social media sites are the place where most people on the web hang out, discuss topics, and look for solutions to their problems these days. They are also the place where search engines love to go looking for organic links to follow and categorize. If you are looking for ideas on topics to write about then browsing social media sites to find questions that people need having answered is a great way to find inspiration.
You can also use social media sites to promote your blog but you need to be very careful in how you do it. People love to find new content to read but hate to be advertised to, and there’s often a fine line between doing one or the other. Some sites provide more opportunities than others for direct promotion so size up each site before posting and work out a posting strategy that works for each site. For discussion focused sites such as Reddit, you will need to take a more conversational approach and work your content links in naturally after creating some trust. For sites such as Facebook, you have more varied options for posting content and links and you can be a bit more direct.
Increasing Blog Traffic – Summary
So if you often ask yourself the question “How can I increase my blog traffic for free?”, then using these methods should help you get the web traffic flowing and also help you keep it once it gets to your site. By writing good unique content on topics that people are searching for, you can create a successful blog that both search engines and human visitors love and keep coming back to. To ensure you retain that success though you need to keep up a steady flow of fresh content and make use of services like Aweber to let people know when you post something new.