Tag: Blog Traffic
How to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic
Ever feel frustrated when trying to grow your blog? Feel like you are doing everything right but cannot increase your blog’s traffic?
When my blog at Meet Penny was only a month old, a new blogger asked me about how to increase blog traffic:
I read your Advertising/PR page and I was very impressed. I am a new blog, almost 3 months old. I am now getting about 6,000 views a month. I was wondering if you are willing to share how you got 12,000 views a month in such a short time. What is the difference between pageviews and visitors?
What great questions!
Because you cannot understand how to increase blog traffic until you understand how to read blog analytics, let me explain the definition of page views and visitors first.
The difference between page views and unique visitors
A “unique visitor” is a computer, smartphone, or tablet’s IP address that connects with your website. Every computer, smartphone, and tablet has a different IP. So, the number of unique visitors is assumed to be the total number of original devices to visit your website. From my experience, this is the most important number in your statistics.
“Page views” is a completely different stat because each unique visitor might look at more than one page on your blog.
Ways to increase your blog traffic
While those numbers are completely true, they might be discouraging to new bloggers. You have to keep in mind that I had two websites previously and then combined them into this one. Those websites were getting about 2,000 unique visitors each. The traffic is now redirected so if someone follows an old link, it brings them to the new website.
I find that writing content that people want and placing it with an image that communicates well encourages the readers to pin on Pinterest. If I look at my top three referral sources over the last three months, Pinterest is always there.
Self Promotion
I have been a reader of several blogs for so long, I know the type of content they want to share with their readers and I create content they will want to share.
For instance, freebie bloggers love printables for homeschooling. When I have something of high quality to share, I send a note to a few bloggers letting them know what I have posted and the url. It is then up to those bloggers whether or not they share it, but when someone does… BAMM! Big traffic spikes.
Commenting
When I leave a comment on another blog that adds to the post, not a spammy “Follow me back,” I get a lot of click-throughs.
Guest Posting
I do not guest post on other blogs very often but when I do, I see a surge in traffic.
The key, of course, is writing a quality post for a blog of high regard. You can always swap guest posts with a friend and see a few readers added to your traffic but to see a large spike, you have to approach larger blogs.
Promoting Others
Most of all, I get a ton of help from other bloggers. When I promote them through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon, they promote me. Their readers may not know me but they trust the author of the other blog and will then come see what I am all about.
How to Get Blog Traffic
When I decided to get serious about blogging as a business, I knew that I did not have anyone else that was going to put my name in front of people like I could. I could not make money without blog traffic. But if I wanted blog traffic, I had to go get it.
After spending time researching the various social media outlets, I made a checklist of ways I could attract people to my blog and each day, I worked off this checklist.
This is the exact printable checklist of what I did every day to bring traffic to my blog, but you can use it too if you want to grow.
The daily traffic boosting list includes:
- Check email and respond,
- Schedule updates on Facebook,
- Add my post to Google+,
- Comment on a blog in my niche,
- Pin ten posts to Pinterest,
- and ten other tasks.
No one said that blogging was an easy business and if they did, they were lying. You have to blog because you love it, and if you want to make blogging a career, you need to spend hours upon hours getting your name out there.
You can do this. Get started.
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