How To Get Traffic To Your Blog In 6 Easy Steps
Have you had a blog for a while, but are you unable to
increase the website traffic to your blog?
Does it happen to you regularly that you have a great idea
for a new article? Such a moment where your fingers literally fly over the
keyboard and the words appear very quickly on the screen?
After all the hard work, do you click the 'Publish' button
with super high expectations, but hardly anything happens afterwards?
I recognize that disappointment all too well! All that hard
work that you put into writing the new blog article, and it doesn't deliver the
result you'd hoped for.
You become demotivated, you might start to doubt yourself
and the threshold for writing a new blog post has become a bit bigger.
Don't get discouraged and let me help you with the following
6 steps that you can use to get traffic to your blog from the time of
publication.
These steps have helped me, so I am sure it will be the same
for you! After applying the steps I noticed that more people from social media,
Google and other websites are coming to my blog.
A small suggestion. If you are just starting out with your
blog, keep in mind that it can take several weeks for these steps to work. They
are real steps that you will only notice the effect in the long term. Keep
constantly busy with the steps that I describe, because that will ultimately
yield a lot for you!
1. Find a subject
Finding a subject sounds pretty easy. You may already have a
company and you would like to write about it. Every now and then you write a
message about a new product and sometimes you share something that has happened
behind the scenes. They are nice messages, but you wonder if your audience
wants to read these things too!
Go write what your audience wants to read and not just what
you want to write about yourself. If you don't write things the public wants to
read, it won't work. You will not attract people to your blog with your posts
and you will not achieve the success that you want to achieve with your blog.
I assume that you will keep your blog up to date because it
will eventually (perhaps indirectly) also generate money. Make the blog
attractive to the people who are going to read it by writing about what these
people want to read. What do people look for, what do they want to know more
about?
It takes some time to find a good topic for your blog. With
a tool such as Google Keywords Planner you can look at which words, themes or
even sentences people search for on Google. The most popular keywords are the words
that you can use as a subject for your blog.
Do really focus on a topic that is related to your company
and that your target group wants to know more about. Choose a topic that is not
too popular, but that you can still write very good blog posts about. And of
course make sure that you choose a topic that is fun to write about.
The Google Keywords planner is not the only way to find
topics for your blog. I will mention a few more:
Conduct a small survey among your target group. You do not
have to e-mail with a questionnaire in a Word document. Nowadays there are very
handy tools on the internet that you can use to conduct a small survey among
your target group, such as Facebook Survey or SurveyMonkey . By asking the
right questions you can see what your target group would like to know more
about.
Use your own statistics. Of course you do not necessarily
have to conduct a study to get certain statistics. For example, Facebook
already keeps track of the statistics for your Facebook messages. Look at which
messages had a lot of reach or were shared a lot. Does that say something about
what your target group finds interesting?
Look at what your target group is talking about. Keep track
of what your target group is talking about on various social media and forums -
related to your industry. Which subjects are regularly discussed, which
problems does your target group face?
Listen to your target audience. You have probably received
and answered a tremendous number of e-mails and you will probably get responses
under the messages you post on Facebook. These messages all tell something
about what your target group wants to know. What questions do customers ask by
e-mail? Or as a reaction to a blog post or what you have shared on Facebook?
2. Refine the subject
You have chosen a topic for your blog and the blog posts
that you will write for this blog. But be honest, aren't there already
thousands of blogs on this subject? If this is the case, it is very good to
specify your topic a little more, so that you start writing blog posts about
topics that are not touched on other blogs.
Imagine that you want to keep a blog about getting married.
An industry that is always popular, because there are always people getting
married. But at the same time that also means that there will be a lot of blogs
about getting married. Getting married is a very broad subject. You may find
that your target group does not want to know so much about getting married in
general, but about what you put on the invitation to the wedding. Perhaps the
research you have done has shown that many people search for 'Wedding cards'
and 'Texts'. Then it is very interesting to focus your blog on this topic.
Before you actually continue writing, search the sub-topics
you have chosen on Google. See how many websites are coming up. Are those large
websites that you can hardly compete with? Then you better search further.
Write the subject down! This way you keep a list of topics that have been
reviewed and from which you can still get inspiration when writing your blog
posts.
3. Start writing about the subject and the subtopics
You should now have a whole list of all kinds of (sub)
topics. Get started and write blog posts. Keep in mind which topics your
readers want to know more about. I already mentioned it in step 1; you write
for the reader and not for yourself.
Don't be afraid to go into the depths. The times when a blog
post of 400 words scored well in the search results on Google are over. These
days articles of 1,500-2,000 words do much better! Try to answer all burning
questions of the reader in such a comprehensive way. Above all, test what works
best for you. Is a shorter blog post much better read? Then don't hold on to my
tip to keep writing more elaborate messages, but listen to the target group.
Remember that lists, a step-by-step plan or a blog post
about how you can best do something work very well! And do new questions arise
as a result of the article? Put this of course on the list as subject for next
blog posts!
4. Use the keywords in the blog post
You have used the list of (sub) topics to determine the
subject of your blog and blog posts. Be sure to use this list to include the
keywords that you have found in the article. Google nowadays has advanced
methods to find out what a blog post is about. But don't let that stop you from
using keywords regularly.
For example, place a keyword in the URL of the blog post or
in the title. Be sure to use the keyword in the headings and subheadings in the
blog post. Consider whether you can link certain tags to images. And of course
make sure that you regularly use the keywords during the blog post.
I suspect that most readers of my blog posts keep track of
their blog in WordPress. You have a very handy tool for WordPress, namely Yoast
SEO . With that you can link one or more keywords to the blog post, which of
course is good for your ranking in the search results.
5. Place internal links regularly
An internal link is a link in the blog post to another blog
post or another page on the blog. It is extremely important to regularly place
internal links! You can increase the traffic to your blog and also to other
blog posts enormously!
Let's take a look at the example of the blog about the
invitations to a wedding. Imagine that I have written a blog post about the
texts that you can place on an invitation to let people know the dress code. It
is very interesting to link to a blog post that I have written about how to
make the theme of the wedding appear in the invitations. Or to a blog post
about beautiful dresses for the bridesmaids.
Posting an internal link is not only interesting to increase
the traffic to your blog and other blog posts. You also ensure that people stay
on your website longer. As soon as someone stays on your blog longer, this
means that the website is interesting for Google. And this is good for your
ranking in the search results!
Don't just put internal links in the new blog posts that you
write. Regularly grab an older blog post that you have ever written about a
certain topic and see if an interesting new related blog post has been
published about it. In this way you help the readers of your blog to find the
latest articles.
6. Promote your blog posts to the public
Just writing and publishing a blog post is not enough to
make a blog successful. You wish people to read your blog posts. It is
necessary to promote your blog posts.
You may have designed your blog so that people can sign up
for the mailing list. These people receive a message as soon as a new blog post
is published. But if you do not further promote the message, you therefore only
reach the people on the mailing list. And you are not sure that people actually
click further in the e-mail.
Make sure you have a plan for the promotion of every blog
post that you write and publish. Let the promotion of the blog post enhance the
effect of keeping your blog up to date. You can do this by:
- post a link on social media
- promote the message among the people on your email list
- place paid advertisements on social media such as Facebook
- let people know if you mentioned them in your blog post. Maybe they will share your blog post with their audience
- forward the message to the people who were previously customers with you. These people may still be interested in the topic you are writing about. Make sure that you do not attract the 'old customers' too much.
- name or tag people for whom the blog post is relevant as soon as you share the link on social media
I always share my latest blog posts via a mailing list and
on Facebook:
By following these steps you will ensure that more traffic
comes to your blog. But you really have to do the steps. Before writing a blog
post, think carefully about which topic you will write. And keep in mind the
topics that your audience wants to read about.
If your blog post is read by more people, it is more likely
that the blog post will be shared by more people. And the more often the blog
post is shared, the greater the reach of the blog post. Of course I don't have
to explain to you that greater reach is also good for the ranking in the search
engines! Ultimately, this circle leads in the long run for much more traffic to
your blog.
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