Let’s look at how to increase your blog traffic. This is especially for owners of offline businesses who want to use their blogs or websites to get more customers.
You might be surprised to learn that there are more than 210 million websites on the internet, according to Netcraft. Every single hour 20,000 new domain names are registered, which means every single day that 210-million site number grows.
What does this mean to you and your website? Quite simply it becomes harder and harder to place well with the search engines. After all, there are likely hundreds of thousands of websites selling similar products/services that you are offering.
That means to achieve your goal of growing your business offline and online, you will need a website that gets a good traffic flow that continues to grow and a website that places well within the search engines.
How To Increase Your Blog Traffic
Here are some well-known methods on how to increase your blog traffic.
Create Videos
Videos are a great way to generate traffic and they are also a good way to build trust among your visitors.
It’s really easy to put together a video using a digital camera. It doesn’t have to be very long, it just needs to contain some value for your viewer.
Then download it to your computer, edit it using one of the many easy to use editing software packages and then upload it to YouTube.
There are other video sites you can use, but YouTube gets millions of viewers daily, so it’s a good place to be.
Create Quality Content On Your Blog
The search engines are always seeking out quality content.
Blogs are normally seen as a great source of information for online visitors. This can work well for you as it is easy to create a blog for free and when you write on your blog regularly people will find it more easily.
If your blog is separate from your website, make sure to link it to your website.
If you make sure you write quality content, people will want to read and share it. Pay attention to what keywords you use and make your content relevant.
Click here to learn how to do keyword research.
Make Use Of Social Media
Build relationships with your customers by using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etc. There are many popular sites that you can take advantage of to build a strong following and of course, you are going to be providing links back to your website.
Let’s look at how Starbucks, which is an offline business generated traffic and business successfully.
Starbucks is a very successful offline business, that has certainly learned how to use online and offline marketing effectively. In fact, there are many lessons that most businesses could learn a thing or two from just watching how Starbucks does it.
How is it that every Starbucks feels like its own unique local coffee shop? How is it that Starbucks was able to turn its online Starbuck Rewards program that uses the smartphone app into such a success?
Few would argue with the fact that Starbucks is a leader in the coffee industry and with their marketing. So let’s see what we can learn something from them.
Examples Of Marketing That’s Been Successful For An Offline Business Namely Starbucks
Online:
- Starbucks uses Twitter to engage with their followers. If you follow them, they’ll follow you back. They engage in conversations with the audience. That might be wishing students good luck on finals or it might be talking about Starbucks nail art. Users can even Tweet a gift card to anyone they like.
- Starbucks offers their customers free Wi-Fi and that perk has encouraged customers to stay in the coffee shop rather than to get their coffee on the fly. Once customers connect to the Starbucks Wi-Fi they can enjoy the Starbucks Digital Experience. Services that generally charge like USA Today, are free through Starbucks.
- The Starbucks app has made it very convenient to pay on the fly. But it does more. It allows you to build stars for free drinks. It’s a win-win all the way around and it has been a huge success with customers.
Offline:
- The iconic red cup rings in the holidays every year. When you see someone carrying out the Starbucks red cup it means it’s time for those special holiday drinks. It elicits emotions and other small businesses should take note and figure out how they can match their products/services to a season and turn on their customers ‘joy.’
- Starbucks loves to run contests where those participating must be the first to post a new ad or poster. They cleverly integrate their website along with their social media to encourage customers to participate.
That’s just a few examples of what Starbucks has done and been highly successful with.
Take examples of successful offline business’s successes and break it down for your own business as there are plenty of great examples out there.
Online Tactics To Increase Your Blog Traffic
Sometimes finding free online traffic isn’t all that easy to find if you are new to the task of building targeted traffic. Let’s have a look at what you can do to help this along:
Free Search Engine Submission
Most of the search engines offer an easy to fill out form that allows you to submit your website to the search engine to be included. There’s no need to pay for this service even though there are plenty of companies that offer such a service.
Free Link Checker
Broken links on your website can be a real problem and discourage the search engines from sending you traffic. There are a number of these slick little tools that will find any broken links on your website for you and then you can fix them.
Try the plugin Broken Link Checker, but beware it may slow your site down, and Google also loves quick to load sites.
Free Link Popularity Checkers
These tools will help you to find out just how popular your links are in the search engines. This can be a useful tool when you are working on your search engine optimization.
Use SEO On All Your Articles
If you want to understand SEO better seek out one or more of the many free SEO tutorials that are available online or read this article all about Search Engine Optimization. These can be very helpful in teaching you how to make the most out of your SEO work. For many new people, this can be a real challenge and so the more you understand the better you will be at it.
I have learned everything I know about SEO through Wealthy Affiliate. You can check out some of their SEO training here.
Remember that great SEO is all about these important things, especially when it comes to how to increase your blog traffic:
- Keywords
- Links
- Relevance
- Visitor Satisfaction
Keyword Density
Your keyword density is important. You don’t want to get caught keyword spamming by placing too many keywords of the same type within your writing.
I use a plugin called Yoast SEO to check each post I do before I publish the content to my website.
Stay Around For Awhile
The longer you are online and the longer your website is online, the more likely that you will pop up in the search engines for related keywords.
So continue to publish content on your blog or website for the long haul, as you will be rewarded with far more visitors in this way.
Participate In Ethical Link Building
Off-page SEO relies on keyword embedded links. These links are free and can be of great value if you do it right.
Embed hyperlinked keywords back to your website for the keyword you are currently targeting . If the source that is referring you has a high Google page rank, in just a couple of months you should begin to notice a difference in the amount of traffic you are getting to your website.
Never purchase from link building services as this could do more harm than good.
Receiving natural links from other websites and building your own internal links will do the trick over time.
The better your content is, the more links you will get coming in. If you promote a website or company within an article, you could always write and tell the webmaster and ask him to post a link to the relevant article.
Optimize All Your Articles
There are things you need to optimize your article or web page. You need keywords, a description, and your meta title. This is so simple to do and you will benefit immensely. It will help you start to rank much faster for your keywords.
Once again the Yoast SEO plugin will help you to get this done efficiently.
Use A Good Keyword Tool
Everyone who has a website that they are building online should have access to a good keyword tool. It is vital to do keyword research before each article you write so that people who are looking for you will find you.
I use Jaaxy because it is so quick and easy to find both long tail and short tail keywords.
Just remember this. Never ever try to outsmart Google or any of the Search Engines for that matter. It may work temporarily, but eventually, you will be penalized and it will take you a long time to regain trust within the search engines.
Create a Free Product/Service On Your Website
One way of bringing traffic to your website is to give something away for free. This can be a simple as having good content on your site where visitors can find answers to their questions, or it can be more complex where you are giving away free products/services such as with a lucky draw.
Create Joint Ventures With Other Businesses
Deal with other persons and businesses to create joint ventures to reach a huge target audience. This is an excellent method when it comes to how to increase your blog traffic.
For example, let’s say that you own a landscaping business in DC, and then you could joint venture with every landscaping related business in the DC area. You can even cross-promote so that you can all benefit.
Signatures
Whenever you send an email out or even offline correspondence, make sure that you include a link to your website in the signature.
This is an excellent and totally free way to get more visitors to your site.
Offline Tactics To Increase Exposure
There isn’t a great deal of conversation around internet marketing and how you can use free offline methods. This is likely because internet marketers seldom use these methods and so they get put to the back burner.
Just because they don’t tend to use them doesn’t mean they aren’t good – in fact, if you do it right it can bring you top quality traffic.
Generate Traffic From An Event
If you need to figure out who your target market is and then you need to figure out where to find them, then go there or create your own event to bring them to you. Don’t underestimate just how powerful this offline tactic can be.
Look for community events where you can hire a stand and get out there and get your brand known.
Seminars In Your Industry
In every large industry, there are almost always seminars going on from time to time. At these events, there are often thousands of people you can meet up with. These seminars are a great place to find customers so don’t be afraid to spend your money to attend these types of seminars.
There are a few ways you can use these seminars to generate online traffic. For example, you might speak at the seminar or you might simply network during a break and exchange business cards that have your website clearly printed on them. Take advantage of every opportunity that finds you!
Business Cards And Flyers
All your business cards should have your website address printed on them and the same goes for your flyers. People who are interested like to have something they can go to and read.
Flyers and business cards work well if they are distributed to the right audience. So try placing on cars that are parked outside an event that is offering something that you can do. This is a better way than just randomly distributing your flyers on a street corner.
Use Offline Promotions
Offline promotions are often forgotten about, but they are a good way to get traffic for free.
These days we spend so much time focusing on online promotions that we forget there is still a whole offline world of advertising and promoting.
Make sure that you include your website address on all printed materials you use. But also remember there are other promotions you can try like T-shirts, pens, mousepads, etc.
If you have any other great ideas on how to increase your blog traffic, especially offline, please feel free to comment below.
