How to Increase Website Traffic with Your Blog
As an online marketer, you can use fence signage or printed banner mesh to increase your website traffic, but the best way to increase traffic on the web is with solutions that utilize the web.
[guest post by Sarah Smith]
A blog is a great way to provide valuable content to your audience, but you have to get that audience on your blog or website in the first place.
Your Blog’s Content and SEO
Some bloggers and online marketers are afraid to be seen as spam-producing content writers, but when SEO is done right, the audience rarely registers that it’s optimized for search engines. The average number of searches on Google per day is over 5.9 billion. Online marketers who aren’t optimizing their SEO for an audience that large is missing out on a lot of traffic. If you’re using an SEO-friendly website like one that has widgets and plugins for SEO, you’ll be able to blog with SEO like a professional.
Keyword Research
This tip fits with the one above since you’ll need to have your keywords in hand before you can create SEO-rich posts. You need to know the exact terms and phrases your target is actually searching for when they type into the Google search bar. For example, you’re marketing a product like jewelry. Instead of using the simple and broad term, you can narrow down the focus to wedding rings, wedding bands or wedding bands for women to get more directed traffic to your site. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that can give you some ideas while there are other paid services that can give you in-depth information on your search terms.
Analytics for Your Blog
Online marketers should be tracking where visitors originate. This is easy to do with a free analytics tool like Google Analytics. When you pay attention to the source of traffic, how long that traffic stays on your site and what page sends them off your site, you’ll have a guide for your future marketing campaigns. You’ll learn where you’ve been successful, so you can focus on high traffic, quality sources in the future. While some sites might send a lot of traffic, how long visitors stay on your site from that source matters too.
Find Your Target Audience on Forums and Communities
Using the wedding ring example above, you might want to join a wedding forum where you can provide value to the community. You wouldn’t want to spam links to your site without talking to other people since they’ll call you a spammer. Create an account on the site and make sure you understand what’s appropriate for commenting. You can comment on posts regarding rings for those who are confused. When you provide value to the community, you won’t even have to drop your link. People will want to find out more about you, and they’ll find you on the web themselves.
Social Media to Connect with Your Audience
With over 1 billion users on Facebook, over 270 million on Twitter and over 300 million on LinkedIn, it would be foolish to ignore these social media platforms for gaining the attention of your audience. You can create an account, fill out your profile and start connecting with your targets. Once you’ve done that, you can use social media as an advertiser to bring in web traffic. You can do that by linking your blog posts to your accounts, or you might decide to pay for ads on the social media giants.
Comment on Other Blogs in Your Niche
There’s an art to leaving comments on other blogs. You can’t drive-by and leave a boring comment that doesn’t add value to the conversation. When you leave comments, you want to bring a level of insight to the conversation. You don’t have to agree with the post either. If you have a different take on the same topic, you can spark conversation in the comments with others who will want to travel back to your blog to find out about you.
When you’re trying to learn how to increase website traffic, there are many ideas out there that you’ll have to try yourself to see what suits your website best. Make sure to track your analytics, so you can see what works and what doesn’t. You don’t want to waste your time in a method that isn’t bringing you traffic.
** About the Author: Sarah is a small business owner, and is currently learning about marketing, using the internet. Aside from working on her own business, she likes to use social media and read travel books. Find her on Twitter.
