9 Strategies To Increase Traffic To Your Blog For Free
Let me assume that you’ve started a blog and would like to make money from it. The major problem is, you don’t have enough traffic. In this article, I’m going to share with you 9 strategies to increase traffic to your blog for free. These strategies are always at your disposal but you might not be utilizing them to maximize your traffic.
Let’s dive right into the 9 strategies:
1. Focus On Quality Instead Of Quantity
Now, it’s a common myth that the more content you create, or in this case, the more blog posts that you create, the more traffic you will get to your blog posts. I must say that I’m a new blogger and 80% of my traffic comes from just 4 blog posts on my site. So, contrary to popular belief, you don’t need more blog posts to get more traffic.
You’re probably wondering how to figure out the right type of content for your blog. There are so many tools that you can use to determine the right kind of content to publish on your website. You can use tools like Uber Suggest, Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, and other tools to find out what people are searching for. You can even use Youtube, Quora, and Pinterest to see what people are asking questions about.
So the best way for you to create quality content on your blog is to identify keywords and topics which are not highly competitive, so you can have a better chance of ranking on page one of the Google Search results.
2. Find Your Audience
You have to go where your audience is. So the way you go about it is to create an ideal reader persona or an avatar. That’s what some people like to call it in the marketing circles where you identify who exactly is your ideal readers. You need to take a step back and narrow down your ideal reader profile.
Figure out what are the characteristics of your ideal reader profile. Is it a female? Is it someone who has a high school education or a college degree? This will not only help you to better understand your audience but will also help you figure out exactly where your tribe is hanging out. So once you’ve written down what the characteristics of your ideal reader are, you need to research and find out where they’re hanging out.
Is your audience on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and so on? Once you figure out where your audiences are, you need to create a strategy to go to them instead of waiting for them to find you. Remember there are billions of blogs out there and you are just one of them. So if you’re just starting, chances are, people are not going to find you organically. You have to make some effort to promote your blog to the right audiences.
The one thing that I do want to warn you about is not to get carried away with too many social media platforms. It can be tempting to post on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and pretty much every other platform out there. You have to take into consideration that you will have limited time and limited reach, so make sure to maximize your reach on the platform where the majority of your tribe is hanging out and where it is easier for you to connect with them.
3. Make Friends In The Industry
It is way harder to grow in the blogging world alone than it is to grow together, so what you can do is to locate other bloggers who have a similar audience to yours and who are not too big and not too small and have pretty much the same audience that you have.
These are the bloggers who would be most likely to collaborate with you on your requests. There are three ways of going about collaborating with bloggers and making friends in the industry.The first way is the most popular way which is reaching out to bloggers for a guest post and pitching them a particular blog post of yours on their blog to get you some additional exposure.
The second way to reach other bloggers is to ask them for a code for a particular round of posts. So let’s say that you’re creating a post on 20 bucket list items in the world that you must complete before your 30th birthday, you then reach out to various bloggers from different backgrounds and ask them for a code in exchange for a link on their blog.
Even if you don’t directly get a link to your blog, just opening up the conversation is going to help you further along the line when you are ready to collaborate with these particular bloggers.
The third way to start a relationship is to ask a blogger for an interview. Now you can either pitch yourself as a guest in someone else’s blog or you can ask them to be an interviewee on your blog.
Now what this does is, build a relationship with fellow bloggers in your industry who will share your blog and your social media channels with their audiences as well.
I know that collaborations are not that easy and it can be hard to keep pitching and sending cold emails. However, if you just go with a simple aim such as one collaboration per month whether it’s a guest post or an interview, that’s a pretty decent target to aim for. One collaboration per month would be 12 for the year and I think anyone with a little bit of extra time should be able to manage that.
4. Leverage Facebook Groups
Now, I don’t know about you but when I first found out about Facebook groups, I was pretty shocked. I didn’t know that there were so many groups out there that would help me share and promote my blog.
There are different types of Facebook groups and Facebook groups that exist just to share knowledge and to talk about problems. You have Facebook groups that exist for the sole purpose of promoting your blog posts and growing your traffic. Even groups that are directly about backlinks as well as guest post requests.
Your job is to find out the most relevant groups in your niche and find ways to participate in the conversation. Even if you don’t directly go and come on your legs on a Facebook group you can use these groups to connect with people. Look for guest posts collaborations etc. Facebook groups are also a great way for you to keep up with the trend in the industry because you always know what’s going on with the chatters in these groups.
5. Use Pinterest For Traffic Generation
Pinterest is the biggest reason why I’m getting traffic to my blog and I’m able to drive a reasonable number of visitors to my blogs every month consistently for free. Many people underestimate the power of Pinterest but if your ideal audience or your particular industry is on Pinterest then there is no platform out there that can help you grow faster than Pinterest can, especially when you have a strategy on how you show up on Pinterest.
Now, Pinterest users are accustomed to browsing the platform for new ideas and are willing and ready to buy products and services, which is great news for bloggers. Whereas if you were to move on Facebook or Twitter, people are primarily there to meet friends and not necessarily to read blog posts. This is what makes Pinterest really unique and the user base that Pinterest has is unique as well. This means, for you, there’s so much opportunity to generate traffic from Pinterest.
6. Utilize Medium As A Traffic Source
Now you might have heard of Medium or come across various articles interesting stories and news reports that are free to consume and pretty interesting as well. There are a ton of freelancers and copywriters and comment creators that contribute to medium for free. What you probably don’t know is that you can publish the same content that you have on your blog to Medium by using the Import tool that they have.
Google does not consider this strategy to be duplicate content as there will be a reference on Medium to automatically determine the source of the article. In this case, it would be your blog website. Using Medium as a tool is free, you don’t need to pay for anything. Also, you can even get paid by Medium for this content that you’ve already created for your blog. All you have to do is go to Medium sign up for the free partner program which is called Medium Partner Program.
This will allow you to monetize all of the articles and stories that you post in your Medium account. It will depend on how much engagement you get in terms of how many likes, claps, and views to your posts. Medium is a pretty large community of users so not only can you republish the same content that you created on your blog, get more people back to your website, get people to sign up to your blog, consider you as an authority but also actually make money on all of the articles that you have on your medium profile.
I wouldn’t recommend you only blog on Medium if you want to be a professional blogger. However, you can use it to generate a ton of free traffic to your blog or website.
7. Using Quora To Leverage Your Traffic
Quora is simply a question-and-answer forum that you can use to connect with readers, viewers, and subscribers from all over the world. The way it works is that you essentially post a question and then the answer is crowd-sourced so anybody who has a Quora account can easily sign up and answer any questions.
Sometimes you’ll find even celebrities stopping behind to answer questions that are asked. Not only is Quora an excellent tool to search and validate your ideas and see what kind of content would resonate with your audience but it is also an excellent way to drive free traffic to your blog.
How can you utilize Quora for free traffic to your blog?
How it works is that you look for the top questions that are related to the blog posts that you have.
So let’s say you have a blog post on the top 15 ways to make money online. What you’re going to do is go on Quora and search for questions that have the maximum number of followers. You will search for questions like, “the best way to make money online”, “how can I make money from home?“.
You will search all of these questions and then categorize them based on how popular they are. Some questions might have only one or two followers but some might have more. The more followers a question has, the more people will be notified each time you post an answer to that question.
What you need to do is go step by step and post an answer which is helpful, valuable and also add a link to your website or to your platform which will provide further information. I’ve used this to generate free traffic, especially at the beginning when nobody knew about my blog. You will get people to interact with you.
People who are looking for these answers are also looking for the next step, so they’re looking for generally more information about the type of content that they ask for. It’s a great way to reach more people, get free traffic back to your blog, and also build Authority in the Quora community, which is a pretty large community.
8. Optimize For Success
Now think about it, how many times has it been that you were on a website which took minutes to load and you just bounced off from it and never came back to the website again? There are so many things that we ignore as new bloggers that we should not ignore, especially when it comes to optimization for SEO and optimization for readability.
Now if your text is too small or your website is taking too long to load people are going to bounce and not come back. It’s important to remember that growing your blog’s traffic does not happen in a flash. There are so many different factors that contribute to your blog’s traffic. You have to ensure that from the time someone discovers your blog, to the time that they click through and come on your blog posts, to the time that they leave your blog, all of these steps have been optimized and carefully thought-out.
An easy way to go about optimization is to just send your blog’s link to your friends and family and ask them for feedback on what their experience with your blog was. Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to be investing in high-end themes or high-end plugins. A lot of free themes and free plugins can do the job for you especially as a new blogger.
You just need to ensure that you spend some time understanding how these themes and plugins work together and ensuring that the readers’ experience on your blog is nothing short of stellar. The theme I’m using for my blog is the Colormag theme and it is the free version, which is quite amazing.
When your reader is happy they are going to come back to your blog, again and again, resulting in more traffic. This leads me to my final strategy on how to increase traffic to your blog for FREE.
9. Use Google Search Console
If you don’t already have an account I would highly recommend that you go on Google Search Console and sign up for it immediately. You will have to verify your website first to be able to sign up. Now, you’re probably wondering what exactly is the Google Search Console. Google Search Console is essentially the back end of your search performance on Google and Google being the largest Search Engine in the world, it helps to understand what is working on Google.
When it comes to your blog, what are the keywords that are ranking on your blog? How about the different backlinks that you have collected on your blog? This will help you over time is to understand what kind of content people are looking to read on your blog versus what kind of content not getting any traction from your visitors.
One tip I have for you is to check out all of the longtail keywords that your blog is ranking for, in your Google Search Console, and make sure to update your old articles or your old blog posts that link to those keywords. So essentially, what you do is instead of changing the entire blog post, you just go back and optimize it, making sure that you naturally add these keywords that your blog is ranking for.
What happens is that over time, it helps you go up and up in Google search which is the aim for you when it comes to driving more traffic from Google. One of the other features that I love about Google Search Console is the site links feature. You can identify which of your blog posts are gathering the highest links and you can even identify where all of your links are coming from.
You don’t need to even pay for this service it is completely free and I would highly recommend that you check it out if you’re serious about growing your blog traffic. Now I know how hard it is to drive traffic to your blog especially when you’re starting in the first six or eight months and because of this reason I identified Pinterest as a source of traffic for me early on in my second blog and made sure that I was successful using that platform.
So there you have it. You have to start right away and implement these strategies to maximize your traffic. If you think that these tips and strategies were helpful to you, I would appreciate it if you could share them with others. Hit the share buttons below to share it now.
Thank you for reading to the end and I hope you will visit again and again.
