How To Increase Blog Traffic In 2022 – 10 Actionable Tips
If you’re wondering how to increase blog traffic.
This post will provide you with actionable tips to help you get more traffic to your blog.
So without further ado, let’s dive right in!
Blogging is good when it’s good.
But if you don’t have any traffic and no engagement on your posts then it can really seem like you’re writing in a vacuum and no one’s even listening. That sucks!
Especially when you’ve poured your heart and soul into writing a great blog post.
Truth is that blogs die every day because they have no blood flow. And blood flow for a blog is traffic and engagement.
In fact, traffic is the lifeblood of every site.
No traffic equals no visitors, no user engagement, no leads, no sales…and well…you get the point. Without traffic you have nothing.
You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you have no audience then what’s the point? Unless you just want to bask in your own content.
You need to generate some traffic to your blog if you are ever going to make it on the web. Build it and they will come is just not how it works, not on the Internet. Unless of course you’re lucky.
But you can’t take chances on sitting back and waiting for lightning to strike if you ever want your blog to be successful. You’ve got to treat it like a business, even if you’re doing it part-time.
And with business comes things like marketing, advertising and promotion in order to gain exposure for what you have to offer – which is why we wrote this guide for you.
How To Increase Blog Traffic
Table of Contents:
1) Content Is King
How To Increase Blog Traffic? It all starts with some useful content.
If you don’t have this, then you need to go back to the drawing board. You’ve got to have something worthwhile to offer in order for people to want to visit your site.
There is just too much garbage on the internet these days, so your post had better be good or you might as well forget it.
Don’t just write some mumbo jumbo. Put some thought and passion into your writing that actually gives your visitors some takeaways.
You don’t have to write a book or be Shakespeare or anything, but you definitely need to say something that stimulates the minds and emotions of your readers.
And don’t try to write for everybody. That’s one of the biggest mistakes a blogger can make: trying to spread themselves too thin. You need to identify and focus on a niche that you want your posts to be based around. This will help people easily recognize and identify with what your blog is all about.
Focusing on a particular niche will give your blog an identity – instead of someone trying to be a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None.
Be real, be relevant, and be useful in your writings and people will be motivated to naturally spread the word about your blog and share your content – which in turn will generate even more traffic to your blog.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few easy ways to come up with topics in your niche:
- Visit forums in your niche and analyze questions that are regularly asked
- View other blogs and articles in your niche and analyze which topics get the most visitor engagement
2) Forums
Forum posting is also a great method for how to increase blog traffic.
For this to be effective, you need to really get involved in the forum community and become recognized as a helpful resource.
Don’t spam!
I repeat, DO NOT SPAM! People will hate you for it and you will quickly get banned or lose a lot of respect real quick by doing so.
So it’s best not to join forums with a promotional type of mentality. That’s not gonna work.
Rather, what you should do is approach forums from the angle of give, giVE, GIVE!
It’s all about reciprocity.
You give people what they want and they will be drawn to you – which will eventually get you what you want: more traffic, leads, followers, sales, etc.
No one wants to deal with someone who just wants to come into their territory and spam their links, especially if you’re a newbie.
How in the hell would you feel if someone came into your circle and did that. Not a good impression right?
OK, so don’t do it to them. Just slow down, relax and help people out and the traffic will start to come like bees to honey.
An easy way to jump into a forum and build a positive image is to simply introduce yourself, not promote, just a basic introduction. It’s ok to tell people what you do but just don’t sound promotional.
And then from there just start answering some questions, particularly ones that are relevant to your niche.
Also, it’s best to refrain from even attaching a sig, at least for the first couple of weeks, so that there won’t be any hint of promo on you.
Just go in there and position yourself as a great and refreshing resource, and then gradually start easing in your sig and profile links.
Now people who are drawn to you can start visiting your blog to see what other helpful info you have to offer.
This is the “soft sell” approach and the best approach that we’ve found to work with forum marketing. Remember: Forum Marketing Is Attraction Marketing!
Also, starting relevant threads is a great way to attract people to you and position yourself as an authority.
And even going the extra mile and really posting an EPIC post can make you an instant hit in a forum and can pay off in dividends for you – because people will visit your post unlimited times for months and even years to come.
And who knows, the forum admin might even decide to make your post a sticky – which will translate into greater traffic and more exposure for you!
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few ways to find some relevant forums in your niche:
- Find A Forum
- Visit Google or your favorite search engine and type: YourKeyword Forums
(So if you’re searching for marketing forums, then use the word marketing or a related term for your keyword. If your keyword is more than one word, place it in quotes to get an exact match.)
3) Blog Commenting
Commenting on other people’s blogs in your niche can really help to draw relevant traffic to your site.
It’s another proven method for how to increase blog traffic.
Plus it creates an element of networking and really helps to build your credibility and trust in the blogosphere.
Moreover, blog commenting is a great way to add value to other people’s blogs while at the same time attracting their visitors back to your blog. It’s a fair exchange – A Win/Win situation!
This works particularly well when you leave relevant comments on larger blogs in your niche.
Also, be sure to use a gravatar. This is an easy way to promote your blog without coming across as spammy or overly promotional.
In fact, many blogs have become standard in displaying Gravatars, and many don’t even approve comments if you don’t have a gravatar. So be sure to set up one today.
There’s really no reason not to have one because it’s FREE!
You can set up your gravatar here.
In addition, you’ll also be able to include your website link in the website field that’s usually provided on the comment form.
And that’s fair game because if the blog you’re commenting on shows a website field, then the blog owner is in essence giving you permission to include your link in that field.
The main thing to avoid is not to come across spammy.
They gave you an inch but don’t try to take a mile.
Avoid trying to be slick by linking your site to a keyword in the name field. That’s so old school and played out so don’t do it, because it will quickly get you flagged as a spammer!
It’s best to just use your real name or author name in the name field just to be on the safe side. People will respect you more and if you won’t come across like you’re just there to get a backlink.
Just put yourself in their shoes and think about the types of comments you’d like to see on your own blog.
It’s no different when you’re commenting on other people’s blogs. Just use some common sense.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few ways to find some relevant blogs in your niche:
- Find A Blog
- Visit Google or your favorite search engine and type: YourKeyword Blog
(If your keyword is more than one word, remember to place it in quotes to get an exact match e.g. “social media”)
It’s that simple!
4) Social Media
Social media is one area that you just cannot ignore.
It’s everywhere these days, we are in the age of social media. And it’s doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere – if anything it’s just getting stronger!
People now have the power to share, like, comment, and inject their voice on the web like never before.
It has given them a liberating experience, which has opened the floodgates for people to truly be able to both build and destroy brands.
Therefore, social media marketing is very powerful and something you should definitely use to your advantage.
This is one of the more common ways that most people think of when they’re wondering how to increase blog traffic.
But what is the best way to go about social media marketing?
Well, the best way is to just drop the word marketing out of the term and just focus on the social media part.
This simplifies the whole process and makes it what it should be, a social experience: sharing interesting and relevant content and interacting with others in the community. Simple.
Quite naturally, you’ll want to get involved in popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But you don’t have to only concentrate on these large social networks.
You can also target smaller less popular networks that are relevant to your niche.
Who knows, you might find yourself a traffic goldmine by doing so!
As long as the community has people there who are interested in your niche, then that’s all that really counts. Be helpful and add value to the community and soon you will attract more traffic and followers to your blog.
And being that you can’t possibly have the time to be involved but in so many different social networks, for the others you could just syndicate your content using tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and Zapier.
Oh, and another thing, don’t forget to include hashtags in your social media posts and join relevant groups within the social media networks. This will increase your exposure and help to increase traffic to your blog.
It’s a great and easy method for how to increase blog traffic.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s some useful ways to find social networks relevant to your niche:
- Explore this list of social networking services
- Visit Google or another top search engine and type in: YourKeyword “social network”
(So if you’re searching for business social networks, then use the word business or a related term for your keyword. If your keyword is more than one word, remember to place it in quotes to get an exact match.)
5) SEO
If you really want to learn how to increase blog traffic, then search engine optimization just can’t be ignored.
Love it or hate it, it’s a very important step for attracting traffic to your blog.
Forget about thinking you can just write great content and the traffic will follow. That’s some bullsh!t.
In a perfect world that might be true. But it’s not a perfect world so that’s not the way it works for the mass majority of bloggers.
You’ve got to increase your chances of getting found by optimizing each of your posts around a targeted keyword. This will give you the best chance at ranking on the first page of Google, Bing and other search engines.
And don’t just pick keywords that sound good and look pretty. Be sure to analyze that each keyword you target actually has some significant search volume to it.
There are several keyword tools that you can use to find relevant keywords. A few are free and some are paid tools.
A good free keyword tool to get you started is the Adwords Keyword Planner (see source). This will help you to find some relevant keywords that people are actually using to search.
All people want to do is get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
And you can be the one to provide this for them by targeting the right keywords to position yourself directly in front of this hungry crowd!
Use these great keywords that you have discovered and inject them into your content.
Include them in places like your post title and subtitles; sprinkled naturally throughout your content (particularly within the first few sentences); then somewhere in the middle of your post and in the closing paragraph.
Doing this will optimize your post and help search engines instantly understand what your post is about. And the faster and easier they can understand your content, the faster and better they can index your content.
A few other things to remember is to also include tags in your posts. You can use relevant keywords as your tags.
Also, when using images, remember to include an alt tag in your image. This is a helpful move to increase your blog traffic being that Google and other search engines can’t read images, but they can read text.
All of these steps are very important to increase traffic to your blog.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few good keyword tools to give you more SEO insight:
More tips on how to increase blog traffic
6) Q&A Sites
Q&A sites have become very popular over the years as trusted sources where people can get answers to their questions.
These people are raising their hands with questions that they desperately need answers to.
Just think about it… they are actively seeking help.
This is pure GOLD!
And this is where you come in:)
Go to these sites and give the people what they want: Answers!
When you provide people with helpful answers to their questions, they will respect and appreciate you for it. And they’ll have no problem visiting the sources that you recommend – which of course will include your blog posts at times;)
Note: Don’t link to your site on every answer. This is an amateur mistake and will get you banned on most Q&A sites. Link to other sources on some answers. And also, even on some answers where you link to your site, you can include your link along with a few other good links related to the topic.
There are a number of different Q&A sites on the web, so don’t think you just have to limit yourself to only the most popular ones.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here is a list of QA sites for you to explore:
7) Email
Email is no doubt a great internal traffic source.
Once you’ve built a list you’ll always have a captive audience to connect with.
You can start small and then eventually grow your list to an unlimited amount of subscribers that you can communicate with in the click of a button. This is ultra-powerful stuff!
This means you won’t have to wait for Google or other outside sources to send you traffic; you’ll have your own built-in traffic source!
Now I know you’ve probably heard that it takes money to build a list, and maybe you don’t have the funds or aren’t ready to invest the money into list building yet.
Well, that’s definitely understandable – especially when you’re just starting out.
But what you need to realize is that just like everything in business, it’s an investment. And the investment in building your list can turn out to be one of the best investments you could ever make.
The sheer returns that you can get from building a solid list is definitely worth the investment.
Don’t worry about the money.
There are free and low-cost email management solutions available that you can get started with now and scale up as your needs and income grow.
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here are a few email marketing solutions for you to check out:
8) Video Marketing
How to increase blog traffic with video marketing???
I know you might be scratching your head on this one, but hear me out.
This is the age of video marketing. In fact, it’s the age of all things visual.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video has got to be worth a Million!
Studies have shown that many people learn, absorb and retain information better when it’s fed to them through video content.
No doubt, video marketing is a very powerful and effective way to market your blog and generate traffic to your site.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, only 2nd to Google – and it’s owned by Google, so go figure.
That right there should be reason enough for you to jump in on the video marketing craze. It doesn’t have to be hard or complicated at all.
You can simply start by repurposing some of your blog posts into video format.
One thing you could do is simply display snippets of text from one of your blog posts on the video screen while you read along with it through the audio.
Or you can record yourself live and in person on video explaining the very things that you write about on your blog or on a particular post.
Or, you could simply combine some slides, images, or video footage in the background and have some text flowing on the screen to go along with it (with optional music and/or voiceover).
The opportunities are endless… just experiment and do something that works for you.
See there, it’s not hard at all to get started generating blog traffic through video marketing, so don’t sweat it.
You can always improve upon an existing video later if you want – or just create new and better videos to add to your growing video archive!
Be sure to optimize your video around a targeted keyword. And remember to add a handful of relevant keyword tags to your video as well.
Also, it’s good to include your blog link both in the video and at the very beginning of the description box under your vid. This way it will be instantly visible for people to visit your site.
And don’t just limit your video marketing to YouTube. There’s other places that you can syndicate or upload your videos to as well. Doing this will help you increase your exposure and gain even more traffic!
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few free sites to upload your videos to for broader exposure:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Daily Motion
9) Document Sharing Sites
Now this is one of the simplest, yet underused methods for How To Increase Blog Traffic.
Uploading your blog posts to document-sharing sites is a great and quick way to repurpose your content and gain more exposure.
It’s real simple. And you really don’t have to change a thing about your blog posts to do so.
You can simply upload it as is and be sure to link back to your blog where readers can find more of your great content!
By uploading your content to a document-sharing site, you’re simply presenting your content in a different format.
Now people will have the convenience of reading your content online or downloading it to their computer where they can read it offline.
Also, most document-sharing sites have easy embed options. This way, readers who like your content can easily embed and share your documents on their site or others – exposing you to an even greater audience!
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a few document-sharing sites for you to check out:
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Additional Resources:
How To Increase Blog Traffic from SlideShare
10) Traffic Exchanges
Traffic exchanges are yet another way to generate traffic to your blog.
Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking right now, “Traffic exchanges don’t work!”.
And maybe that’s true in a lot of situations, but not in all situations.
Truth is that traffic exchanges (manual traffic exchanges) have live people sitting behind those computer screens.
And they’re just clicking their mouse surfing from one site to another just waiting for something to reach out, GRAB their attention and shake them out of their zombie-like state.
So you need to get on their wavelength and present them with something that will SNAP! them out of their trance and demand their attention.
With traffic exchanges, you have to understand what these people are there for and what they want.
They are there because they are concerned about their site (or offers) and desperately want to drive more traffic to them.
So if your blog is anywhere in the field of business building, web marketing, traffic generation or related topics, then you might just have a chance to soak some value out of this “useless” traffic source.
Who knows…it’s all about trying & testing and finding out what works for YOU.
You can try marketing other verticals there as well, but the categories mentioned above will work best for traffic exchange audiences.
One thing not to do is slap your article up on a traffic exchange – or try to directly sell something in a traffic exchange.
No one there has time to read an article while surfing – and they damn sure aren’t about to stop and purchase your product right then & there. You’ll have a greater chance at winning the lottery before that happens.
Just keep things short and snappy in traffic exchanges.
Maybe a big bold colorful headline that stands out and makes them want to visit your site.
Or a squeeze page with a strong call to action that makes them want to opt-in to your list giving you an opportunity to follow-up with them later.
One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
Traffic exchanges may be considered garbage to some, but there are some savvy marketers that have figured out a way to turn this “traffic trash” into “traffic treasure”!
How To Increase Blog Traffic: Here’s a couple traffic exchanges to try:
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed and gained something useful out of this How To Increase Blog Traffic Guide.
Surely there’s something here that you can use or adapt to your own style.
Remember, writing blog content is just the first step.
You’ve got to take action to attract traffic to your blog if you ever want it to thrive and gain the attention it deserves.
Ongoing learning and trying out different methods for yourself – is the only way that you’ll really learn how to increase blog traffic.
So put the above tips in action and discover what works best for you.
Bonus: Another proven method for how to increase blog traffic is by getting more comments on your blog.
This is a very important engagement-boosting strategy that many bloggers fail to realize.