How Can I Get More Traffic To My Website or Blog?
Looking back on my blog over the last year and on previous blogs that I have worked on, I realized there are some real solid strategies to building a blog and driving large amounts of traffic. I decided to write out 5 extremely useful strategies that everyone should be using and will guarantee you an increase in traffic.
Strategy 1: Website Design
There are so many ways you can go wrong with your website’s design. You need to have a layout that is clear and well defined. You need to have a good solid structure that shows the user immediately where your content is and there shouldn’t be any clutter around it. So many times we make up a great website, fill it with good content, and then the average user can’t easily get to the good content and leaves. You aren’t just making it for you. You have to understand the way that the average user interacts with the computer. They want content right in front of their face when the page loads or many of them will leave.
The second part of website design is you have to have a fast page load time. If you spend to much time bogging down your website with flashy banners, images, media, etc. the load time for you website will increase. The average internet user wants to see a page loaded within 2 seconds. If you page takes longer than that to load you will be losing lots of traffic.
Strategy 2: Find Your Voice
So you have a great website design now what? You need to figure out what sets you apart from other content developers. There are millions of new blog posts every day. You have to do something to let your readers know who you are and what you’re about. Put your touch on everything. Remember you are producing content for humans and not machines.
Strategy 3: Get Known In The Community
This strategy is probably one of the most important things you can do to increase your traffic. If you spend the time to really get known in the community, people will come to your blog and become fans. You need to go out and join forums, discussion groups, guest post, etc. Wherever people from your niche are hanging out, you need to be there and leave a presence.
Guest posting is very very crucial to bringing in more traffic. Guest posts benefit you in two different ways. The first is they bring in traffic on there own from another community. If you post on ABC blog and 1000 people read your post, several of them will follow your links back to your main blog and read more of your content. If you have a newsletter or subscription setup they will more than likely join. Also, guest posting gives you a high quality relevant backlink. This backlink will give your blog more ability to rank in the search for your articles and increase your organic traffic.
Strategy 4: Be Social
Who doesn’t have some sort of social account? Get yourself known on facebook, twitter, google +, linkin, pinterest, etc. Let the readers of your blog follow you and post regular comments on your accounts. Share images, articles, other people’s stuff or anything else that might be interesting. Make a community page and fill it up with great information. So many times have I had something go viral and I get an instant boom of traffic to my website. I had 600 people in less than 30 minutes one time on just a quote I posted. This can be very powerful once built up.
Strategy 5: Write High Quality Content and Lots of It
The last strategy is absolutely the most important. You have to write good quality content and lots of it to rank in the search and keep people reading. I know some people say they get tons of traffic from 10 articles, but something like that is rare. You need to try your hardest to produce at least one piece of content each day. If you can’t do it everyday then do several on your days off and schedule them to post one day apart.
Quality is very important. If you don’t produce something that’s worth reading people won’t share it or link back to it. It will actually make your site look worse. If you produce something valuable people will link to it naturally. You want to get as many natural backlinks as you possibly can. My articles that have the best results are the ones that answer question for the reader. The “how to” do the best. Next behind those are lists. For some reason people really love lists.
However it is you create your content do it with you own voice. Never produce low quality content even if you have to wait longer to put it out. Never copy someone else’s work either. Search engines know this stuff and will penalize you for it. These things on my list seem very simple, but after doing this for over 5 years I can tell you they have at least 90% of the impact on your traffic. It does take time to see the effects, but if you have patience and stay focused you will build that high traffic website you dream of. Good Luck!