If there is one question every single blogger has asked at least 20 times during their whole blogging career, that question is “How do you increase your blog traffic“.
Yes, no matter what your niche is about, no matter what strategy you use in order to make money with your blog, traffic is what gives life to your blog and we always want to get more and more.
-Are we on the same page? I bet we are…
I’ve been there many times before, and I know it’s normal to become crazy and try every single thing we see out there, just hoping that something will finally work.
And that’s the trick, indeed, what works for me is maybe not guaranteed to work the same way for you or someone else.
So you have to take that route sometimes, just try about every possible way of driving traffic to your blog until you find the one thing that really works well for you.
-But that’s not the case today.
Today I’m going to share with you the same strategy that helped me increase my blog’s traffic by 60% in just 30 days, and it has not only worked for me.
After I started using this strategy I also noticed that there were other people doing the same thing, maybe with a different approach, and it also works well for them.
So let’s get right in! I’ll show what I’m talking about…
Table of Contents: [hide]
Increase Your Blog Traffic with The Hanging Fruit Method
How to Increase Your Blog Traffic 135% in 60 Days:
Create Evergreen Content for Your Blog
Optimize your Content for Long Tail Keywords
Craft Irresistible Headlines
Include Images for Pinterest
Add Social Sharing Buttons
Link out to Influencers and Let them Know you’ve Featured them
Make use of Appropriate Internal Link Building
Answer Questions on Quora & Reddit
Use The Hanging Fruit Method
Share Your Old Content on Social Media
Optimize Your Site’s Speed
Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
Publish Guest Post and Link Back to Your Articles
Increase Your Blog Traffic with The Hanging Fruit Method
As some of you might already know, I started this blog back in December of 2016 and just like everyone else, I had no traffic, no social followers, no backlinks, no anything.
I also don’t publish new content very often because I don’t like to publish content just to publish content. I really like to publish high-quality content that really helps others, and that takes time.
Also, check out: Increased Email Subscriptions by 200% Using Optinmonster!
In March of this year, my blog was getting about 1,700 page views per month, not a huge number, but this was all people who found my content one way or another and ended up reading it, so I didn’t need to find them, they found me and that’s the whole point.
So you don’t need to find your readers, they need to find you and your content.
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Analytics report for the month of March:
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
One thing that really got me surprised when I noticed that I was getting this amount of page views per month, is that I had not published any new content for about 8 months.
So that gave me a very important lesson, you don’t need new content in order to increase your blog traffic.
Your old content is actually what’s going to bring most of the traffic to your blog, however, however, in order to continue to get traffic from your old content you need to always write “evergreen content”.
Evergreen content is content that stays always relevant. Interesting and relevant content that is always useful and never gets outdated is what really helps you get traffic from search engines and become an authority.
Therefore, the number one thing you need to do in order to increase your blog traffic is to make sure that your always writing evergreen content.
-Now, writing evergreen content without doing anything else is not going to give you great results either, that’s why I’m going to show you exactly what I did and my so-called “hanging fruit method”.
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Analytics report for the last 30 days:
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
So that’s exactly an amazing135% increase from the previous 60 days period. Here’s exactly what I did…
How to Increase Your Blog Traffic 135% in 60 Days:
Create Evergreen Content for Your Blog
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Since I’ve already mentioned some of the benefits of creating evergreen content for your blog, you already know this is a very important strategy to generate constant traffic to your blog and have it grow exponentially.
Evergreen content is the type of content that will always be useful to others, therefore, people will always be searching for it.
Some good examples to mention are “Tips” and “How-to” guides that retain their value, unlike news content which becomes useless with time.
One tip I could give you in order to find evergreen content ideas is to think about your audience as one person, what kind of questions is this person always asking, what are the struggles this person is always finding.
-You see? Maybe you were that person at some point.
Thinking about your audience needs will help you find answers to all of their questions and add more value to them with every new piece of content you create.
CLICK TO TWEET
The best part of it is that there will always be someone asking the same question, and your content will be there.
You can also find common questions on sites like Quora, Reddit, and even on Facebook groups.
Also, check out this full guide on writing evergreen content:
-How to Create and Write Evergreen Content to Boost your Business by Jeff Bullas.
Optimize your Content for Long Tail Keywords
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Why does everybody talk about long tail keywords?
Yes, I know it’s maybe not the first time you read about long tail keywords, but I gotta make sure that you fully understand this, and that you also take full advantage of it.
Long tail keywords basically search phrases, phrases composed of 3 or more keywords. Let’s say I’m writing an article about “Car Insurance“, I might think that “Car Insurance” is a perfect keyword to target since my article is about car insurance.
Now, a long tail keyword for that would be something like “Best Car Insurance in Miami“, “Cheap Car Insurance Policy“, etc.
Most people interested in buying a car insurance policy would rather be searching for one of those long tail keyword terms, than simply looking for the term “car insurance”.
Always focusing on long tail keywords is a great strategy to increase your blog traffic continuously, these are always easier to target because there is less competition for these phrases.
And being honest, as well, targeting long tail keywords is really your only chance of ranking for anything on Google.
You can find long tail keywords by using Google autocomplete when searching for a certain keyword. Let’s say that I’m looking for the term “Chess Opening”. If I go ahead and type that into Google’s search bar, it will immediately suggest other long tail keyword terms based on search popularity.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Another great tool I also use for finding relevant long tail keywords is a tool named SEMRush. This a complete SEO suite, and it’s probably also the best tool out there when it comes to keyword research and SEO audits.
You simply type in any keyword that you’d like to analyze, and SEMRush will give you data such as search volume, competition level and a whole list of suggested long tail keywords with their metrics as well.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more trafficYou can use this link to try SEMRush 14 days for free.
Once you’ve been able to find a long tail keyword to target, you’re pretty much halfway through in your way to producing a winning piece of content.
Craft Irresistible Headlines
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
If you want to create content that attracts a lot of visitors and becomes viral, you should always make sure that you’re creating irresistible headlines for every article you write.
Your headline is the first thing that calls people’s attention and drives them over to your site.
No matter how great is your content if your headlines are so boring that people don’t even feel like reading what’s in there. I’m being serious here…
Your headlines must be absolutely irresistible.
When you’re creating a new article look at the first 5 results for the one keyword you want to target with your article and try to come up with a better headline than the ones on those articles.
Also, copy Google Adwords headlines. If there are ads for the keyword that you’re writing about, then copy those headers, use something very similar to what they have because those are usually optimized for conversion after a lot of A/B testing.
If you get the headline right, 8 out of 10 people will click or your article to read your content.
Check out this full guide on how to write killer headlines:
-7 SNEAKY WAYS TO WRITE IRRESISTIBLE HEADLINES by Jonathan Fields.
Include Images for Pinterest
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
I’ve been talking about Pinterest a lot, lately and the reason why is because I’ve just realized how much traffic you can drive with this platform if you use it the right way.
I started to use Pinterest to drive traffic to my blog, since last month. There are still many things that I really don’t understand and I’m kind of guessing with it, but anyway, I was able to get 65 visitors from Pinterest last month.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
-I know what you’re thinking… 65 visitors? That’s nothing!
Yes, that’s true. But those are just the people who actually clicked on my images and visited my site. Now let me tell you something else, with only 100 followers on Pinterest, I was able to reach over 6,000 people last month.
I’m pretty sure you can’t do that with Facebook unless you pay them to promote your content. Indeed, the traffic I got from Pinterest was almost triple the traffic I got from Facebook, not to mention Twitter and Google+ where I really promote my content a lot.
And the best thing about Pinterest is that when you share content in there, it doesn’t die in one or two days like Facebook or 2-3 hours like Twitter. I still get traffic from the images I’ve shared last month and they’re still being shared by other people too.
Bottom line, I love Pinterest and you should love it too.
Add Social Sharing Buttons
If you want to go viral and increase your blog traffic dramatically you have to make it easy for people to share your content with others.
Now, you need to be strategic because adding the wrong social sharing buttons could end up having a negative impact, or no impact whatsoever.
The key point here is to identify which are the most relevant social networks for your audience and give them the buttons they need when they want to share your content.
For example, I use Sumo to add sticky share buttons to the left side of my blog, that way the can always share my content at any time while they’re reading.
I also use Social Warfare in order to add some nice share buttons at the end of each article, and both things work really great for me and I wouldn’t change it.
These two plugins are by far, the best social sharing plugins I’ve used with WordPress.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
If you write content for small businesses, it may be helpful to include a LinkedIn share button. If you’re a designer or you write for designers and graphic artists it would be good to include a Pin it button with all your images.
Link out to Influencers and Let them Know you’ve Featured them
When you first start your blog from scratch, you really don’t have a clue about who is going to read your content, you have no social followers, no nothing.
But there are also other people in your niche that already have influence and they were exactly where you are, at some point.
So what how do you take advantage of that?
-Well, you reach out to them and ask them to share your content… Simple!
It’s really not that simple, being honest, but it’s 100% doable. Ever since I learned this strategy I do it all the time when I publish new content and I always get people to share my stuff.
First of all, you have to take care of all the steps I mentioned before and make sure you’re writing a killer piece of content and then link out to other posts written by influencers.
Linking out to authoritative sites not only provides additional insight and complement your post, but it’s also an SEO ranking factor, so it’s always a good practice to do it anyway.
Now you also go ahead and let the influencers know you’ve mentioned them and ask them if they could please also share it.
If your article deserves a share and you’ve also managed not to end up in their spam folder, then I assure you that 8 out of 10 influences will share your post.
Another important thing is also your approach. How you reach out to them is up to you, I’ve found direct messages on Twitter, and email to work very well.
Here’s an example of the type of message you could use:
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Nothing from another world. But notice the fact that I’m not only asking him to share my content, I’m also asking for his feedback because I value his opinion.
And I’m adding even more value by offering to write for him since he has not been writing very often.
-Sweet! 🙂 🙂
Now guess what… Not only this person shared my content, but I also wrote a guest post for him which included a link from a DA 57 blog.
The best part of it and also one of the main reasons why I started doing this, it helps me build relationships with other bloggers. At the end of the day, blogging is about connecting and helping others.
Make use of Appropriate Internal Link Building
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Everybody knows how important is link building when it comes to SEO, increasing your domain’s DA and driving more traffic to your blog.
But not only is important to get backlinks from other sites to our blog, you can also take advantage of the power of internal links in order to increase your blog traffic and also pass link juice from some of your pages with high SEO value to others that are maybe not doing so well.
Just think about Wikipedia. Every single piece of content there must have at least 1,000 internal links.
There are tons of benefits behind using internal links the right way, one of those being that it makes your site easier to navigates.
The readers will be able to find your content easily if you have relevant internal links to other pieces of content on your blog.
The golden rule here is to always link to pages that are contextually relevant and useful to your readers. You can also take advantage of anchor text internal links, whenever it’s possible.
Check out this full guide on how to improve your internal link building strategy:
-How To Improve Your WordPress Site Internal Link Structure [SEO Tutorial] by Harsh Agrawal.
Answer Questions on Quora & Reddit
This is something that I always do with every single blog post I publish. Answering questions on Quora and Reddit is already a part of my blogging routine.
Even when I’m doing my keyword research before writing a new blog post, I even check for Quora questions that are already ranking on SERPs with the keywords I’m looking at and then I save those questions for me to provide a valuable answer to it later on.
Quora and Reddit represent at least a 13% of my blog’s monthly traffic. That’s the reason why this has become so important to me and I also encourage you to put it into practice.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Now, answering questions can be a huge help to help you increase your blog traffic, specially Quora because there are many people asking questions there.
But you have to make sure not to be spammy when you’re doing it, otherwise, you’ll end up getting your account banned.
Be sure to always provide valuable information and not only answer a question to leave one of your links there. Also be careful not to copy & paste directly from your blog.
Use The Hanging Fruit Method
Now we’re going to talk about my so-called “Hanging Fruit Method”, indeed these whole set of steps should be part of it because you won’t be able to take advantage of this one step if you didn’t take care of the rest first.
So, this step is all about finding keywords that your existing content is already ranking for on page #1, #2 or #3 of SERPs although your content is not fully optimized for those keywords.
This is the one step that’s really going to help you increase your blog traffic tremendously.
Let me show you how to do it…
The easiest way to do this is by using a tool named SEMRush, I’ve already mentioned this tool here and to me, this is one of the best SEO tools available in the market.
If you don’t have SEMRush, you can grab a 14-day Free trial here!
Step #1:
Go to your SEMRush account and create a new project for your domain. This is going to help you see all your analytics through SEMRush in one single place, you’ll also be able to get many useful reports and audits.
Simply go to Dashboard and you’ll see the option to create a “new project“, type in your domain name and click on “Create” (See image below).
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Then you’ll see many options for all the different reports you can run using SEMRush, I encourage you to check those later, you’ll be surprised with all the things you can do here.
This time you’re going to click on “Organic Traffic Insight” (See image below).
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Step #2:
Now you’re going to connect your SEMRush account with your Google Analytics account.
Make sure to complete all the fields as indicated in the image below, and then click on “Select Database“.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Next, you’ll select the country for which you want to analyze the organic traffic, select the device and then click on “Go to Organic Traffic Insights” (See image below).
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Step #3:
In this step, you’ll see a list of all the pages that are already receiving organic traffic, and you’ll also see how many keywords are those bringing the traffic to your blog.
You want to click on the keywords discovered by SEMRush for any of the pages you’d like to improve.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Once you’ve done this, you’ll see all of the keywords that are already bringing traffic to your blog and the position in which your blog is currently ranking for those keywords.
Those are your “Hanging fruits” and they’re just waiting for you to take them off of the tree and eat them.
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
This way, for instance, I could take the keyword “make money online with google” which is already ranking on position 21 and has a monthly search volume of 2,900 queries, and optimize my article for that keyword.
You can also follow the same process if you want to see what keywords your competitors are getting traffic from and then create content that’s better than their content and outrank them.
Can you see now why I call this The Hanging Fruit Method?
It’s like a fruit that’s already there, and just waiting for you to take it off and eat it!
Let’s look at some other actions you can also take in order to increase your blog traffic.
Share Your Old Content on Social Media
I’ve already said this before, and now I’m going to mention it one more time… Your old content is what’s going to increase your blog traffic, it’s not your new content.
If you have great content that you’ve already shared in the past, make sure that everybody notices that content, make sure to keep it alive.
Sharing your old content on social media is not only going to help you get some traffic to those from social media itself but when your old content gets shared, again and again, search engines are also getting signals telling them that your content is of good quality and that people like it.
Therefore, it’s always a good practice to share your old, great content on social media.
Optimize Your Site’s Speed
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Your blog’s loading speed represents an important ranking factor for Google and it also makes a huge impact on User Experience.
Nobody wants to wait 20 seconds for your site to fully load and just then be able to view your great content. That being said, you need to make sure your site is, at least, fast enough.
If you’re using WordPress, one thing that sometimes puts a lot of weight on your site’s loading speed is your theme, that’s why I’ve always used and recommended themes from Genesis Framework by StudioPress.
Check out their themes because they’re not only super fast, but they’re also optimized for SEO and have a very attractive design with lots of functionalities.
Also, my colleague Tom Dupuis from [onlinemediamasters.com] has written the most epic WordPress Speed Optimization guide I’ve ever read, so take a look at it and you’ll get a lot from it.
Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices
How to increse your blog traffic, increase my traffic, how to get more traffic
Once again, in case I lost you for a second, we’re talking about increasing your blog traffic, right?
How about starting to get more traffic from mobile devices?
Nowadays, people spend more than 3 hours a day on their tablets or smartphones. Optimizing for mobile devices is a must do for bloggers and online businesses.
One of the things you can do in order to make sure your site is fully optimized for mobile devices is to use a theme that’s responsive and mobile friendly.
Once again Genesis Framework by StudioPress can help you a lot with that.
I have also written a full guide in which I show you how to enable Accelerated Mobile Pages in your WordPress site, go ahead and take a look, I’m sure it will help you as well.
Publish Guest Post and Link Back to Your Articles
So you’ve already created great evergreen content, you have targeted long tail keywords for every article, you’ve also added social sharing buttons to your site, and everything else I’ve mentioned in this article.
Then now we’re going to use the well-known guest posting approach in order to get more people to know who you are and read your content.
Also, guest posting is going to help you build rapport with other established bloggers in your industry, which could lead to many other benefits that I don’t even have to mention here.
As a matter of act, I would say that since nobody knows who you are when you’re starting to blog, you should focus on writing content on your blog 40% of the time, and then the other 60% you write content on other recognized blogs.
And, please don’t get me wrong…
Many people make use of guest posting with the sole purpose of getting backlinks, and if you get them, that’s perfectly fine, it’s even better!
I love getting do-follow backlinks too.
But keep in mind that it’s not the approach I like to give guest blogging. Do it because you want people to know you, do it because you want to connect with other bloggers.
When you do it like this, I can almost assure you that most of the people will add a link to your site proactively or even ask you if want to include a link to any of your articles.
If you’d like to get started somewhere, then check out the requirements to publish a guest post here, if your article meets the requirements then I’ll get it published.
The last step to increase your blog traffic massively using this strategy; Rinse and repeat! That’s it!
Other Helpful Resources:
How to Make Money With a Blog: The Definitive Guide For Beginners
30 Ways to Make Money Online Legally – Make even $5,000 From Home
Content Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Becoming an Expert in 10 Days
I hope you enjoyed this article! If you liked it, please don’t forget to share it! I’d really appreciate that!
Leave your comments below, and I’ll see you around!