Are You a Blog Owner?
Blog owners keep hunting for better and faster tricks to attract as many viewers as possible. You can find hundreds of tips on the internet regarding, ‘how to promote your blog’ or ‘how to increase blog traffic, most of which are fad techniques, evolving means that either does not work outright or involve a surge in viewership for a few days, but no lasting & sustainable traffic.
If you’re new to blogging you should first learn, “How to write a blog post to rank high in Google“.
Broadly speaking, there are two actions to make your blog popular with stable viewership and income. The first is to make a first-time reader take interest in your blog through engaging and genuine content. And the second is to make existing viewers come back for more, through subscriptions or simply arousing interest.
Here are 5 fail proof tips that would help you to achieve your traffic goal in no time.
[Disclaimer – Personally, I don’t run any blog currently but mentoring many successfully running blogs of my digital marketing training students.]
1. Get Your Readers to Subscribe
A blog subscription is a vital objective of every successful blog out there. It is, getting your reader to enter his email id to join your newsletter and allowing you to send the newest posts of your blog directly to them as soon as the post is published.
Studies have widely proven that blog subscribers increase the viewership of your blog by several folds as well as it’s good to increase website traffic. The problem then is to make the viewer take their time and make an effort to subscribe. Here are a few ways to get there.
a. Include a blog-subscription dialogue box
This may be simply a translucent dialogue box that would pop up when your blog loads on a viewer’s computer for the first time or it can be included in the sidebar or at the end of each post. It would contain a form for the entry of viewers’ details.
Using this box would prompt the viewer to subscribe to your blog, especially if they are coming back for the second time.
b. Choose Your subscription words carefully
Instead of saying, “Enter your email below to subscribe to this blog”, say a much more promotional thing such as “Enter your email to get Free stuff/latest news” or “Get the latest content first, Join the winner’s team” etc. to attract visitors. How you market your subscription options goes a long way to increasing your number of subscribers.
There has been a groundbreaking marketing study in which Chris Spooner included a small free giveaway with every subscription witnessed an overnight doubling of their subscription list. Chris mentions “Subscribe and Get a Free Resource Bundle, Download Now!” As You can see, your words matter more than you think.
c. Strategically Place Your Subscription Boxes
As I mentioned above, you can place your subscription box immediately below your blog content. This helps because only those users will reach these boxes who have read the entirety of your blog post.
Or, you can use a lightbox to pop up your subscription box on the screen after a certain amount of time.
If a visitor has read the whole of even a single post on your blog or stayed on your site, then it is clear that he is interested in your content and more likely to subscribe.
Placing a strategic subscription box guide & remind visitors to join your blog.
2. Publish Attractive Content and Keep Bribing Your Visitors
No doubt, new and fresh content attracts visitors even from Google’s organic search results. Most importantly, you ought to remember that viewers will not take a second look at your blog if you do not post content that they like to read.
Therefore, it’s important for you to pay special attention to, not only how often you post, but to what you post.
Bribing for subscription, this depends on the kind of blog you’re running. If you run a blog as a parallel initiative to your business and there are products that you’re selling, it might be a good idea to include a small gift packages to keep coming back. If you sell tangible goods or products, you can include coupon codes or promo codes for free in various position of your blog. If you’re running ‘information only’ blog you can offer eBook or ‘7day email course’ etc. similar against subscription.
3. Run a parallel Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube page
Running a page for your blog on social networking website or video sharing website would go a long way to increase the popularity of your blog. This is a commonly practiced tactic and is coined as SMM (Social Media Marketing). Social Networks allow you to showcase your best of products on a website featuring billions of people.
It’s a common fact that people who are less likely to subscribe to your blog are still more likely to connect you on Facebook or Twitter.
While in general, I tend to discourage buying popularity, I concede that buying you initial popularity on these social media websites would serve as a good kick-starting tactic.
It’s however, important that you keep updating your Social Media Pages frequently and with pictorial and/or other forms of interesting content to keep the followers coming back for more. Social media is now an excellent source to increase website traffic for free.
4. Use the Right Site Structure
The structure of your blog determines how easily users can find your past posts and your most popular posts. In general WordPress and other blogging platforms offer you with several choices of blog structure templates for Free. I suggest using a structure that would have all post records listed by category on the right sidebar of your blog so that anyone interested in reading more would be able to fish out similar posts with ease. You could also go as far as introducing an extra tab on your blog for your most popular posts.
Furthermore, the categories for blog sorting should be chosen at par with SEO techniques to make sure that people get exactly the phrase that they think of when looking for a category.
Include more similar posts at the end of each post to let your blog reader dig more content. Remember, here your prime objective is to achieve multi-page views per user. Keep doing experiment to gain the most possible engagement of your reader.
5. Links, Reviews and Information
Linking up your blog to other blogs, links to reviews and specifications of products, and general information regarding the purchase, usage and maintenance of products help e-commerce blogs. Similarly, coming up with content and sources on the internet that further aid a reader’s knowledge horizon would help blogs which serve typically as a knowledge base.
Give the reader openly and abundantly anything that they will get in other places through their online research anyway. Remember that your objective is to make people read your blog since you share the useful and interesting information with them which they might be hunting through Google.
Now here’s what I want You to Do:
If You found this post helpful, share it with your friends.
I wish to help as many people as possible, and I need You to help spread the word. So, thank you in advance.
And now, I’ve more homework for you…
- Check your daily New visitors from Google Analytics & your no. of subscribers. If you’re running with 2-5% conversion rate you’re doing good, but if not, do some experiments with language, color, placement & offering in your subscription box.
- Do you have some interesting offer for your visitors? If not, think of one & start promoting it.
- You might already be running a Facebook page, try Facebook paid marketing to increase your reach & study the effects for next 7 days.
- Take help of your social network (friends & fans) to collect inputs about your blog structure, ask for some suggestions of improvement and implement them immediately.
- Be generous and helpful, start sharing and linking expert posts in your articles in favor of your loyal of readers.
And You’re done!!
I hope, You would love to share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment, so that I could learn more from you.
Happy blogging 🙂
