You hear so many bloggers telling you that Pinterest is how they exploded their blog. Or, it’s Facebook or Instagram that grew their blog traffic.
As a new blogger, this seems like a huge new feat to master. Maybe you’ve never used Pinterest to market your blog or you have no idea how to use Instagram for your business.
So, how can you grow an audience, connect with readers and increase your blog traffic without social media?
Is it even possible?
Yes! And you know what?
It’s highly effective too!
My Elna Cain blog has almost 80k pagviews and only gets 9% of social traffic! This blog does not rely on Pinterest to drive sales, email subscribers and traffic.
If you haven’t yet started a blog, make sure to check out my free blog course!
Here are seven tactics that you can use for your new blog if social media isn’t your thing!
Here’s my video if you enjoy watching more than reading a blog post! Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel!
6 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic Without Using Social Media
Gaining blog traffic for your new blog doesn’t have to be hard. It might seem like that right now, but that my be because you aren’t using the right tactics or strategy for gaining blog traffic!
I found that if social media isn’t helping you with gaining more traffic, there are six pillar tactics that you must do to ensure that your blog WILL start to increase traffic.
1. Start Blog Commenting
Okay – some bloggers may say that blog commenting doesn’t yield a high ROI and it’s a waste of time.
This can be a waste of time if you don’t optimize your comments for blog traffic and if you spend too much time doing this. Reading blog posts takes time and you don’t want to spend hours a week doing this!
No!
Instead, pick five-ten minutes a day or even a week to visit three blog posts. Start there. Read the blog post and create a comment that readers will actually read!
You wan’t to start a conversation with your blog comment and to do that easily you can add to the blog post. For example, if the post is about breastfeeding tips, you can offer your spin on a new tip.
Other visitors will probably read your comment and want to get to know more about you!
Finally, make sure you put your blog name next to your name when filling out the comment!
By placing your blog name along with your name will create curiosity in other visitors. I know when I visit other people’s blog posts and see the comments with their blog name, I’m much more likely going to visit those blogs than not!
2. Share Other People’s Blog Posts
Blogging is a community and if you scratch a blogger’s back, they will scratch yours hypothetically!
That’s why it’s always good blogging practice to share other people’s blog post on social media or in your email newsletter or with a blogger friend!
One tactic you can do to ensure that your posts gets shared is to ask them in your blog post! For some blog posts I add, “Please remember to pin me!”
This is enough to get people to pin my blog content!
3. Write Valuable and Quality Blog Posts
Okay! This tip is a big tip but let’s break it down –
People only visit blogs if there’s something for them. This is called the WIIM factor (what’s in it for me).
If your blog post doesn’t help them with some problem or immediate problem, they won’t go to your blog post if they see it on Twitter or land on your blog. So your aim for your blog is to create a blog post that answers a problem for your audience.
For example, if your blog niche is about parenting teens, think of your audience of moms with teens. What are their biggest challenges with parenting teens?
- Bullying
- Arguing
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Getting ready to be an adult
- Bonding with you
- Telling the truth
- Following the rules
- Learning to drive
- Dating
There are a lot of great topics you can fill your blog to help your audience of moms with teens. So take one of those topics and break it down into an outline with valuable tips that you can share.
Make this post a long-form post as longer blog posts get shared more and yield traffic for your blog.
If you need help creating that content that drives traffic, make sure to check out my masterclass!
4. Start Guest Posting and Podcasting
Guest posting is the idea of having your blog post on someone else’s blog. Ideally, you want to guest post in the same niche as your blog and on a blog that is much more popular than yours (i.e. more traffic).
This ensures that you will grow your brand to a new large audience.
To find places to guest post, you can do a quick Google search. I typed in Parenting blogs + write for us.
Find the blogs you want to guest post on and pitch your ideas. To ensure that you’ll get accepted, do some research on the guest posting blog to find out their popular posts.
For example, if you wanted to guest post on Imperfectly Perfect Mama you can go to Buzzsumo, type in the URL and see their top performing posts based on social media shares.
Right now, their top performing post are kid activities for the summer. Why not pitch an idea for indoor kid activities? This is an easy way to get your guest pitch accepted.
5. Start An Email List
One of the easiest ways to build traffic is if you have a group of loyal followers. These are the ones that will visit your blog, share your posts and tell others about you and your blog!
You can start this loyal tribe by starting an email list!
This is the place where you can be more personal, share stories and connect with your visitors on a whole new level! And down the road? You can start monetizing your email list!
Win-win!
6. Begin SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and this is Google traffic! This type of traffic is the BEST type of traffic as it’s long-living and consistent. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, my blog, Elna Cain, gets mostly traffic from Google and barely any from social (even though I have a Facebook page and a Pinterest profile for this blog).
Organic – or SEO – traffic is 72% of my overall traffic while social only makes up 10%.
I was able to optimize my content with keywords and build strong relationships with influencers in my niche to share my posts and link to my content. For example, I was interviewed on Freelance Writing.
This is the go-to site for freelance writing!
By having these connections over time, it has helped me with collaboration projects, which in tern, helped grow my blog’s traffic!
So, when focussing on SEO, first focus on value and how you can help others. Connect with influencers in your niche, share their content and over time you two can collaborate in a giveaway, or you can feature them in a blog post and tag them on social!
All of this social chatter will help your blog get noticed!
Is There a Blog Traffic Recipe?
Yes! There is! This is a proven recipe that works for any niche and for any blogger! I’ve started many blogs and I have many blogs right now! I test these strategies and only share my most successful tactics to help my audience build traffic.
So, what are you waiting for?
Tell me how you grow your blog traffic without social media!
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