Blog traffic.
Ugh!
If you’re a new blogger then you know trying to generate traffic is freakin’ hard. And it’s not like you’re trying either. You know exactly what to do to drive visitors to your blog.
You know Pinterest is the way many bloggers are growing their blog traffic so what do you do? You jump on the Pinterest train and start pinning the crap out of your content.
You also heard that Facebook groups are a goldmine for traffic, so you start joining every and any group you think your target audience hangs out.
Okay.
You know the common ways to bring traffic to your blog. But, it’s just not working. No one is commenting, you aren’t getting many shares, and you barely have any followers; so, what gives?
What are you dong wrong?
Nothing really. You’re just not doing ALL the things you could be for driving traffic back to your blog.
Now before I get into my post, I know full well that SEO and keywords are a HUGE help in generating traffic to your blog.
The thing with SEO is that it takes time for it to work. For me, it took around four or five months before one of my posts to rank on the first page of Google.
But trying to fit SEO in the first three months of blogging shouldn’t be your sole focus. Instead, be natural and write for your audience!
Okay.
So what other ways besides the common ways can you get more blog traffic? Here are seven other ways that helped me and will help you now!
1. Use Your Site’s Name in Your Comment
Okay.
When I found out about this traffic generating trick, I couldn’t believe how great and quick it worked.
Whenever you leave a comment, on the spot for your name, put your name and your site’s name too.
It would look like this:
I use the | spacer instead of the @ symbol (sorry, my brain can’t think of the real names of those).
The @ symbol can be used, but with some commenting programs, it’s viewed as a spammy comment and puts your comment in spam.
I’ve had much more success using the | symbol.
When I comment, I noticed I get a bit more traffic back to my site, which rocks because every little thing counts right?
2. Post More Often
I’m sure you’ve heard the opposite of what I’m about to tell you. That it’s much better to post one great long and value-filled post rather than two or three tinier and more fluffy type posts.
Well, that’s not the whole story.
I see it like this:
Instead of posting great posts once a week or once a month, post good posts twice a week or more.
In the beginning when you have your new blog, you need pages on your site. Google needs to index your posts. You want people to stay on your site longer to improve your bounce rate. All of these metrics help improve your overall blog’s profile and helps you with growing your traffic (because you can promote more).
Now, why would I say this when I’m a freelance writer?
I mean, I get paid to provide some hella good long-form content to my clients.
But, I know for a fact that the more I posted, i.e. the more frequent I posted per week, the more traffic I generated.
For awhile I’ve been writing a post once a week. Most of these posts are informational, actionable and full of great tips.
My pageviews for September dropped from 21k to 17k. Ouch!
Last week was the first week I posted twice.
Within a day of doing this, my pageviews went from 17k to 18k. Now, it’s not a huge jump, but at least it’s going in the right direction.
So, take it from me, post more often!! Try to post at least 1k words for each post, though.
You still want quality for each post you publish. If I could, I would post three times a week. But, I also have another blog where I post once a week and I have my client work.
And I’m a mom first 🙂
But I always make a goal to write two posts on Twins Mommy.
3. Guest Post
An easy way to find a new audience is to guest post. Guest posting just means writing a post on someone else’s blog.
There are many places where you can get paid at least $100 when you guest post too. Win-win there!
For me, since I get paid to write, it’s hard for me to find the time to guest post, but I’m trying to make this a priority.
I recently became a contributor for Huffington Post and will hopefully have my post published soon. I also had a guest post on Living for Naptime, and I’m working hard on two other ones.
The goal is to find a blog to guest post on that is more established than yours. They have more traffic, more subscribers and aren’t a new blog.
But, that’s not to say that you can’t guest post on those blogs. It just might not bring in a lot of traffic in the end.
Find out how popular a site is. As an example, here’s mine:
The higher the domain and page authority, the more popular and established your blog is. For the normal blogger, if your DA is 30+ that’s good, 40+ is very good, and anything over 50+ is great.
As a comparison, here’s Alexa’s site profile for Single Moms Income:
This is only a rough guideline when viewing other blog’s DA and PA. It’s pretty neat though, to see how their site or even your site looks like in Google’s eyes (and I have no idea why my spam score is so dang high! Twins Mommy is an aged domain but the content on this site before mine wasn’t spammy at all. So I have no clue why it’s high?)
You can use this to help decide where you want to guest post if you want.
4. Feature Other Bloggers
One of the things I did early on and that helped me grow my blog quick was to do round up posts and feature other bloggers.
In the beginning, since you don’t have a lot of content, you’re going to be linking to external blogs, so why not feature those bloggers too?
One of my first roundups was 22 Freelance Services You Can Offer as a Stay-At-Home Mom. From here I made sure to tag the bloggers I mentioned in my tweets. This helped me reach a new audience if the blogger RT’d my post or at least opened a door of communication with the blogger.
So, go ahead and feature other mommy bloggers and let them know! I love it when I receive an email letting me know that my Twins Mommy blog was featured!
5. Offer Help in Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are awesome for traffic generation. If you belong to a group where your target audience hangs out and if the group has promo threads, then you can promote your post in front of your ideal reader.
But, did you know that you can also generate more blog traffic by helping other bloggers and not just by using the promo threads? The trick is not to make it look spammy.
This is what I mean by spammy: Someone asks a question on how to use Pinterest to bring traffic to their blog and like ten people comment leaving blog posts, email courses, products and more.
Yeah, not the best way.
A better way is to give value when you answer a question a blogger has. This is how it works. If you notice a question in a FB group that you can help out, provide a response that doesn’t promote your blog in any way, but rather, promotes your knowledge.
Here’s a question I saw in a group recently:
There are a lot of ways to increase your inbox open and click-through rate so I thought I would help her out by offering a tip:
As you can see not only did the blogger who asked the question responded to my comment, but other bloggers were thankful for that tip.
Now, how does that bring traffic to your site? Well, if the blogger or anyone is interested in getting to know you more, they can click on your name and find out more about you.
And if you’re smart, you would have updated your personal profile to include your blog!
People can then click and look at your blog 🙂 BOOM! Traffic.
6. Email Your Subscribers Weekly
Do you have an email list yet? If you want to start monetizing your site, you should start a list ASAP. But, don’t get in the habit of emailing them periodically.
A lot of bloggers email infrequently even when they have a product or are monetizing their blog. Why? Well, I’m not sure but maybe they feel they can’t provide value every week or sending more than one email a week is way too much in their opinion.
In either case, if you want to build a loyal tribe of followers, you need to make that connection on a weekly basis. Don’t be scared to email your list multiple times a week if you’re selling products.
But don’t go crazy. Three times a week is pushing it, but if you “train” your list, they will come to expect an email from you in their inbox.
And it’s a great way to let your subscribers know what’s happening on your blog. With my emails I tell my subscribers about my latest blog post and I try hard to also provide more tips and value that you can’t find on the blog.
7. Network
One of the best ways to get traffic to your blog is to network with other bloggers in your niche. When I started Twins Mommy, I didn’t know many mommy bloggers at all.
I was and still am following the big influencers like Allison from Wonderlass, Melyssa Griffin, Caitilin Bacher and Kristen from Believe in a Budget.
I had to search on Pinterest and Facebook for more mommy blogs and mompreneur blogs to start to follow.
But, once I found them I was immediately welcomed by this wonderful group of mom bosses. And that opened the door for me to feature them on my blog.
Collaborate
I love collaborating with other bloggers. It’s like two bloggers are stronger than one. And it’s like we aren’t competing either even if we are in the same niche and have the same target audience. We are all here to help each other out and to share our tips with a bigger audience.
Around three or four months after starting Twins Mommy, Candis of Smart Mom Blogger was letting people know that she was doing these 10-minute webinars for mommy bloggers. I signed up to participate, and a few weeks later we did our little webinar.
She later used these as a lead magnet for a while to help her grow your email list. But, it also helped me reach a new audience and showed my sweet Pinterest skills 🙂
Email Them
If you want to learn more about another blogger, go ahead and sign up for their email list and email them. Ask them a question and get their advice.
Every day I get replies from my welcome email series asking for my advice, and I love it. They enjoy my emails and love my content.
If you’re new to blogging, go ahead and email another mommy blogger and start a relationship. You never know, doing that can turn into doing joint webinars or interviews. And the more you reach a new audience, the more traffic you’ll generate for your blog.
Traffic Doesn’t Always Come Easy
If you follow me, then you know I have my struggles with generating more traffic. SEO and backlinks can really help your blog get noticed and get traffic.
But that takes time and it takes nurturing.
And with all the other common ways to gain traffic, it can still be a challenge for many to reach even 5k pageviews.
That’s why these other seven ways to drive more traffic to your blog can totally help you out. The biggest takeaway from all this is to connect with your target audience and connect with bloggers in your niche. It’s a little easier when we band together!
Over to you – did this help you out? How do you drive traffic to your blog?
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