How to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

On the internet “content is king”, but if what good is being a king if you don’t have anyone in your castle? This is how you need to look at your blog. The more traffic and engagement you have flowing through your blog, the more likely you are to find success and eventually become an authority within your niche.

There are plenty of ways to bring quality and targeted traffic to your site and I’ve listed a bunch of them for you below. Let’s jump right into this!

Organic Search Traffic

The best type of traffic that you can get to your site is the free traffic that search engines can send you. The problem with relying on free search traffic is that it’s very hard to compete against all of the sites on the internet, especially if you are going for some first page rankings. Google ranks web sites and blogs based on their site content and the quality of other sites that link to the site you are trying to rank for. This means you are going to need to focus a lot of effort on the quality of your content and getting link backs from other high level web sites. The more content you create, the more likely you are to rank for more long tail keywords with your site.

Paid Search Traffic

If you don’t have the patience for ranking in the search engines organically or have some money to spend on getting traffic to your site, then paid advertising might be a great option for you. Instead of trying to rank for specific keywords in the search results, you can actually buy places at the top of the search results and pay on a per click basis. This can be done through Google Adwords, Yahoo, Bing Ads and other smaller search engines.

Blog Commenting

There are millions of blogs in the internet and hundreds or even thousands of them are on the same topic of industry of your blog. This means that one of the best ways for you to engage with these existing sources of traffic is through blog commenting on other sites. If you are going to focus on blog commenting, make sure that you provide real and quality content based comments. If you go about this the wrong way it can end up hurting your online reputation and make you look like a comment spammer.

Guest Blog Posting

Even better than blog commenting is guest blog writing. Guest blogging has gotten a bad rep lately with all of the spammers that have been trying to sell links through their articles, but if you build up your name and only generate great content for other sites, there is still a lot of value in guest blogging. When you write guest posts for other sites you will usually get a bio / author section at the bottom of the post that will include your picture, a short bio and a link back to your own blog.

Link Bait

Creating articles that gain the interest of other top bloggers or are based on world news or events that are gaining interest is a great way to get free viral traffic back to your site. A few good examples of this is are interviewing other top bloggers or experts within your industry, scouring trending news topics on Google Trends, writing controversial blog points or pointing out major flaws or breaking news with any service or business. At the end of the day it’s all about using your content to gain the attention of other big sources, media outlets, bloggers and even your audience to get them to share your content and do the promotion for you.

Top Lists

Another great way to create content that can relate with your audience and get a lot of people sharing your content is to create top lists. Sites like BuzzFeed.com do extremely well with this. Not only does a great majority of their site visitors relate with the content on the site, but they also have a very high rate of viral and sharing success. Creating top lists that relate with your audience and provide value is something people will not always go out of their way to read, but they will also share it with their friends, which keeps getting shared over and over again.

Social Networks

There are currently over 1.3 billion users on Facebook, another 300 million on LinkedIn and 600 million on Twitter. That’s over 2 billion users just waiting to view and share great content form your site. I didn’t even mention Pinterest and Instagram, which are also two huge sources of traffic for many web sites and blogs out there. Bottom line – you need to be using social networks to your advantage. The audience and platform is already out there, you just need to create the quality content that people are waiting to share.

Facebook Ads

I mentioned that social networks are a great way to target the perfect audience for your blog. Viral traffic and social sharing is awesome, but it isn’t something that you will come by often. The next best option for you might be to create a Facebook Ads campaign to send more traffic to your blog or build out your own Facebook Fan Page. This can all be done through the Facebook Ads system which allows you to target users by their age, location, gender, interests and much more.

Use These Methods to Generate Massive Traffic for Your Blog

All of the eight methods I mentioned above are great ways for anyone to start generating new and quality traffic to their blog. I personally use all of these methods for ZacJohnson.com and many of the other blogs I run. You don’t need to try them all, but I would definitely recommend focusing on creating quality content that people want to share and figuring out how to best utilize social network traffic to your advantage.

If you haven’t already, get setup with your blog and a free domain name, then shoot me an email with any questions you have about getting setup. I can even set you up with a free premium theme to get you on the right path.

In the last section of  my “Seven Days of Blogging: My Personal Guide to Blogging” I will be covering the many different ways that you can turn your blog into a full or part time source of income. The good news is that there are plenty of methods you can use to generate review, all you need to do is decide which is best for your blog audience and platform.