Want to start a blog, but have no idea how you are going to get traffic to your blog?
Or
You built a blog, but nobody visited? Don’t worry, I feel your pain and so does millions of other bloggers around the globe.
There is nothing more gloom-ridden when you look at your Google Analytics and realize nothing is going on, on your blog. It’s like a barren wasteland, a dream that’s dying a slow and painful death.
But, you are determined to make it work and will do whatever it takes to send traffic to your blog.
If you are starting a blog, I have good news for you! We here in South Africa are very lucky that we can build a blog and get some traffic to your blog relatively easy due to lower competition we have. On the international scene, it is a different story.
If you already have a blog and seems to struggle to send any kinds of traffic to it them, I would suggest you work through this article and act today.
11 actionable tips that can boost the traffic to your blog.
Table of Contents
1. SEO
SEO is by far the most important factor when it comes to driving traffic to your blog. It is also the most technical.
A lot of the lingo in SEO is enough to make your head spin and it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all, especially if you are only starting your blogging journey.
I am going to share some SEO tips even your mum will be able to follow.
So, what is SEO and why is it important?
SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the practice or a set of rules one has to follow to optimize a website in such a way that Google will favour the website and rank it higher than other websites for the same or related search term.
It’s all about free traffic to your blog and free traffic is king.
SEO can be divided into two main components-
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Let’s look at On Page SEO first.
On-page SEO is the optimization of everything website related, like content, URL’s, Title tags, ALT text, and keywords.
Content-
If you want to write great articles that are optimized for SEO you need to remember a few things:
Do keyword research before you write and see if you can come up with a keyword that is creative and not difficult to rank for. I use Ubersuggest and Google Keyword Planner.
Here are “how to videos” to both Ubersuggest and Google keyword planner.
Ubersuggest.
Google Keyword Planner
They are great tools for keyword research. Once you have your keyword, you can sprinkle it throughout your post so your articles will read naturally and NOT something like this for example:
For the best pizza on the south coast, come to the best pizza place on Elm Street, our best pizza will blow your mind. There is no place that sells better pizza than our best pizza on the south coast. Come give our best pizza a try.
Write long and helpful articles, the more the better. Most of Web Nomads articles are in the area of 2000 words or more. Google favours longer articles. Although, there is no yardstick or actual number one can put on the article length.
Just give yourself enough room to write articles with a lot of useful information. Remember, content is king and if you rush through an article and think 600 words are going to be enough to rank in the number one spot of Google, I have news for you.
What I do to help with this is I use Google Docs to write my articles and one thing I like about it is that, you can hide the word counter.
When the article is done, it is usually way more than I’ve planned. I have found that if I use word processors with word counters, I tend to focus so much on the word count, that I lose track of what I am writing about and slowly but surely start finalizing my post when I hit the 1000 mark.
Provide good quality and long content.
Focus on your visitors first, design and build an attractive blog with easy navigation for your visitors to follow. Great designs coupled with great content will give your visitors a better experience on your site and it will lower your bounce rate.
*Time spent and bounce rate is a metric Google also uses to rank your website.
Title tags
Be sure to use clear and precise title tags for the articles on your website. Also, use your keyword in the title tag as it makes it easier for search engines like Google to understand what the page or blog article is about.
Below is an image of a great example of a Title Tag –
One of the keywords Web Nomads is trying to rank for is “build a blog” so I made sure it is part of my title tag.
The title is a clear description of what you will find when you click through to the page.
An awesome plugin you can use to create title tags and meta descriptions for your posts is Rank Math. When it is time for you to download the Rank Math plugin you can have a look at this “how to video” below to get a better understanding of what it takes to set up Rank Math and how to use it effectively.
Rank Math
Meta Description
Once again, this is an area where you can place your keyword in a natural manner. Write an appealing description of what your blog is about. Remember you only have about 155 characters to grab someone’s attention.
URL’s
A URL is very important for Google and your readers to understand what the link is all about. If you use WordPress, make sure your URL format is set to “post name” and your URL’s will have a solid structure. For example:
https://webnomads.co.za/the-best-blog-in-the-world
It should not look like this:
https://webnomads.co.za/post/73638322/tph/
Even to the untrained human eye, the first URL link is much more appealing and it immediately tells you exactly what the link is about.
You can change your URL settings in your WordPress dashboard under settings > Permalinks > Select “Post Name and save.
Alt text for images.
Google is smart and super sophisticated, but sometimes it needs a little help from humans. Believe it or not, Google can’t tell what a picture is or what it is about.
So, it is your job to tell Google what the picture is about by adding Alt text to the pictures. This might seem stupid and like a time waster, but it is part of your fundamental SEO basics.
WordPress lets you complete your image Alt text before you upload the image. Make it a habit from the very beginning of your blogging career and it will become second nature to add a ALT text to your images.
People also do searches for images, if you don’t add your alt texts to your images, you are possibly missing out on a lot of FREE traffic to your blog.
We have covered the basics when it comes to on-page SEO and it should give you a good start. Implement it from the very beginning and start learning more about SEO.
On-page SEO will take some good practice and you’ll see the more you learn and implement, the better you will become at it.
Just remember, you are not just building a blog for people, you are also building it for search engines, which will, in turn, generate traffic to your blog.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is the efforts taken outside your blog or website. These efforts play a major role when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines.
Link Building
This is probably the number one factor for Google when ranking your site and sometimes it feels as if it is the most difficult to obtain.
Let me explain a bit more about what it is:
Websites have a Domain Authority score of 0 to a 100, and when you write an excellent article and it gets shared by 100s of readers on different social media platforms, those links are considered as Back-Links.
If a high authority website links back to your website, it tells Google that your content is great and rewards you with a higher ranking.
They are almost considered as the alpha and the omega when it comes to SEO. Google sees this and gives you a better ranking for being a trustworthy source of information.
Aim for high-quality links and not quantity.
You get two different kinds of backlinks namely –
Dofollow links – All links are
Nofollow links – Well, it is just opposite of
How do you get backlinks?
Write amazing content
Create awesome content and people will start to share and link to it. This is by far the most organic and best way to build links to your content.
Add outgoing links to other bloggers’ sites in your niche and contact them. Tell them you referred them in your article and ask them if they would be generous enough to do the same for you with one of their articles. Obviously, try to contact bloggers with much higher domain authority as you.
You can use the Moz Chrome extension to check website domain authorities.
Business directories
It used to be a great way to get some good quality backlinks to your site but a lot has changed since. More than 50% of the directories has modified their websites to produce
Here is a link to a list of
Email list.
Another great opportunity to build high-quality backlinks to your content. Produce newsletters weekly and send them out to your subscribers.
Guest Posting
If you write an article for another blog in your niche you have the chance to add a bio with your article and within the bio, you can add a backlink to your blog. It is once again a great way to get traffic from a blog with a lot more readers than your own.
Leaving comments.
Leaving comments on someone else’s blog post can help boost your backlink strategy but before you run off and start writing pointless comments just for backlinks remember you want to build a relationship with the owner of the blog.
Write tactful and helpful comments, engage with the post or add value to the post. A new trend these days that can lead you in the right direction to what to comment is that the author usually at the end of the article asks if anyone one can tribute to or provide more info on the topic.
This is your chance to leave a great comment with your link.
Just so you know, comments are reviewed first before the authors will publish it.
Here is a great article for rules of link building
Social Media
Join social media platforms to promote your content is a great way to get backlinks to your site. If you pay close attention you will see that Pinterest is the new hot stuff for bloggers and everyone that is everyone has a Pinterest course they sell.
Although social media does not carry strong link juice but is great to have these social triggers for search engines. Basically, it tells search engines how active your site and social media profiles are.
Give the following social media platforms a try –
It is best to start with one platform and learn as much as you can from it before moving on to the next one. It’s better to be an expert at one than a novice at a few.
For blogging, I would recommend
Social Bookmarks
Social bookmarking is interesting. These sites are mostly a place where bloggers, content creators and many other related services go to, to share their content for other people to see.
It has great potential to drive a lot of traffic to your site.
Figure out a way to get your articles or answers to go viral and you are bound to have a ton of traffic headed your way.
Think about using the paid ad service by Reddit to get your content in front of an audience. They are selling ad space relatively low compared to other platforms like Google and Facebook.
Just to give you an idea what kind of traffic you can generate from sites like Reddit. Check out these statistics by Statista. Reddit received more the 1.6 BILLION visitors from February 2018 to October 2018.
That is insane!!!
Check out these websites for social bookmarking.
Getting and focusing on an SEO strategy should be one of your main focuses as a new blogger. The sooner you implement all the basics the better it will be in the long run.
Look at it this way, it seems like a lot of hard work and it is, it is the perfect long-run solution for your blog. It takes time for SEO to kick in but there is nothing like free traffic to your blog.
Join our Awesome Community →
Let’s look at some more ways to get traffic to your blog.
3. Advertising.
For those who have money to spend driving traffic to your blog from day one, you are one of the lucky ones as this will help bump your website traffic up in a short period of time.
If you create great content and use ad services like Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Pinterest Ads or any kind of paid advertising to drive traffic to your blog or lead magnets. Use this opportunity to turn those visitors into loyal readers.
Once you have them and part of an email list you can bring them back to your blog time and time again.
Loyal followers are the typical visitors who share your content and this leads to more eyes on your content.
4. Social Media Groups
Build relationships on social media. Join social media groups relevant to your blog’s niche. Start engaging in conversation and become a sort of expert in the industry.
People will slowly start to realize you know what you are talking about and sooner or later start linking to your content.
Here’s an article that shares more than 62 Facebook groups you can join.
Active communities on platforms like Facebook groups are great ways to engage with new bloggers and it gives you time to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Make new friends and become an active contributor to questions and post being made.
Don’t look at these communities like they are defenceless animals waiting to be slaughtered.
What I mean by this is don’t use this opportunity to self promote all the time. It’s annoying and you will get banned.
Engage, share and help out where you can without any strings attached.
Create your own group.
Create your own group and establish ground rules for your community to follow. Be active and network with your community.
It is an easy and fun way to make new friends and establish authority.
Another big social media platform you can join is Pinterest. It has become a blogger’s favorite way for driving tons of traffic to your blog.
Pinterest can be without a doubt be a bit tricky to figure out and drive traffic to your blog. I can suggest a Pinterest course you can use to get things going.
Have a look at this course for only $19 on how to boost your Pinterest traffic.
Social media can be tiring and extremely draining to be and think creatively all the time.
Make sure not to burn yourself out. Use tools like –
to help you organize and schedule your post for the maximum exposure.
Find more great tools in this article.
5. Social Share Buttons
A very effective tool to help readers to share your content in a matter of seconds.
Use them on your blog posts and also on your website pages. Always remember NOT to plant social share buttons in your readers face. Use them in a strategic place like the beginning or end of a post or a very commonplace to have social share buttons are on the side of your content.
One plugin I recommend and use myself for a few years is Monarch, a plugin by Elegant themes.
It is simply the best and easiest plugin to use when it comes to sharing content straight from your blog to media platforms.
6. Questions and Answers Websites.
Websites like Quora has great power to send a lot of traffic to your website. It is going to take some work and effort from your side to get traffic but it will be well worth it.
What they essentially are is a place where people go to, to ask questions about a specific topic. You then have the opportunity to answer the question and when people like your question they can vote it up.
The more upvotes you get the higher your answer will move until you reach the number one spot. It is just amazing the stream of consistent visitors you can get from one solid answer and it lasts long too.
Use your questions to sprinkle in your blog’s link or a supporting article in your blog. You can also create a profile for your blog where you can add more links to your content, do it right and play the game like a boss and people will start to follow you.
My personal favourite is Quora and I use it on a regular basis. Check this awesome “Guide to Quora” You will learn how to set up and use Quora for the ultimate exposure.
Some more websites you can use to drive traffic –
The following we already discussed in the SEO section, and we can quickly run through them again as it is important to use every method you can to drive traffic to your blog.
7. Email List.
I can’t stress the importance of building an email list enough. You have to find a way to capture your visitors to your blog’s email addresses.
It is at the heart of your blog’s success.
Why?
It is the best way to establish a relationship and trust with your readers. You get to know them better. By knowing them better you can promote more products, ask them for shares and even invite them to join in on seminars.
The conversion rate is much higher and you can continually promote more products to them.
Get more traffic to your blog, bring them back to your site to read and share more new content.
How?
People have grown smarter through the years from opening and closing websites. It has become more difficult to get visitors to sign up for your newsletters.
You have to be a bit more creative and think about giving your visitors something for their email address.
Think lead magnets. The best way to generate an email list. Just have a look at this one I created. It is nothing major, but I am giving away a free “Guide to Blogging” E-book in exchange for an e-mail address.
First, you subscribe then you can download.
8. Guest Blogging
A lot of bloggers turned to and started allowing guest blogging as it produces more articles to their blogs and creates more authority.
Most blogs that do have guest blogging opportunities will have terms and conditions you have to adhere to when starting writing articles for them.
Once again, this can be a great way to get some visitors to your blog. Write articles on much bigger blogs than yours. They obviously have a bigger audience so, when you write an excellent article you have a good chance their readers will check out your content on your blog.
This, as I mentioned before is a more of an SEO tactic to get a backlink from a high authority website.
However, it is a link back to your website, and we need links to drive traffic to your blog.
The next two I am sharing is more SEO related than a direct method of producing more traffic to your blog.
9. Mobile Responsiveness.
A whopping 52.2% of all the worldwide searches made in 2018 last year was done on some kind of mobile device. (Phone, Tablet)
Because of this statistic, Google had no other choice to make it one of their ranking factors. If your blog, theme or whatever you are using to run your blog on is not optimized for mobile responsiveness you can forget seeing your website on page one.
It goes without saying, if you are not featuring on page one you lose a LOT of traffic.
When starting a blog, begin with the end in mind and choose right from the start. Choose the Divi theme from Elegant Themes and WordPress. Divi is super mobile responsive and above all your site will look great on mobile devices.
10. Speed up your website.
Another ranking factor used by Google to rank websites. It might sound stupid and kind of pointless but the idea behind it is to create a better user experience with websites. Everyone can agree with me, a website that’s loading too slow is like watching paint dry.
Before you can help yourself you close the website and look for something else. Google knows this and you being the “client” of Google they want to provide the best service.
Make sense? Let’s move on.
There are a number of things that can make your website slow, and we are not going into many technical details here today, but we are going to discuss the most obvious and easiest to fix.
Use hosting companies that provide tools like –
Cloudflare – Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) will cache your website content and will distribute it over multiple data
A Caching tool – Caching is the temporary storage of web documents such as HTML pages and images. Basically your web browser stores copies of web pages you’ve visited recently to reduce its bandwidth usage, server load, and lag.
So, basically, the caching tool helps to delete all the temporary files, clearing the memory of unwanted files.
Caching plugins you can use in WordPress –
SSD Hard Drives – New technology in SSD are way more advanced, faster and stable than HDD.
These tools are only the tip of the iceberg but a good start. Look for these tools when choosing a hosting company and you won’t regret migrating at a later stage.
Two companies I can recommend using –
Both these companies provide the tools mentioned and more.
Check them out. You won’t be disappointed.
Optimize your images
A big culprit for slowing down a website is your images. Optimize your images for better speed. If you have a website with loads of pictures I recommend using a plugin in WordPress called –
Wp-Smush optimizes your images without losing quality upon upload so you don’t have to worry about it.
Lazy Load loads the web pages without loading the images with initial load and will only start when the visitor starts to scroll down. This helps to get the page open a lot quicker.
Quick tip – Use the correct sizes for your images. No need to have an oversized image when a smaller is recommended.
If you are not sure what the size specs are, ask your developer of the theme or just plain Google for the sizes.
Use Fewer Plugins
There are a lot of plugin junkies out there and it is not necessary. Way too many plugins will slow down your website drastically. Use only the recommended ones or use a theme like DIVI that has everything you need.
Plugin – a plugin is an extension, a tool you can install on top of your theme to add particular function.
Use the following websites to check the speed of your website. Google recommends a website with load time less than 3 seconds.
3 seconds is not a lot of time, you see why it is important to optimize your site to be the ultimate speedster.
How long does it take to get traffic to your blog?
Well, from day one you can see traffic knocking on your door. You can go the paid route and see instant traffic or you can start an SEO campaign and work hard at it and start seeing a steady flow of visitors in 6 months or so.
Use every bit of resources you can to drive traffic to your blog. It is key for its survival.
Use social media to the fullest. Buy guides or courses about each and every platform you wish to pursue and become an expert. Don’t burn yourself out and give your mind a rest every so often.
The most important thing is, is to not give up! Work, create and share like a mad person and you will reap the rewards!
Can you get a lot of traffic to your blog for free?
Yes, you can. Use every day and work on your techniques for driving traffic. Use every method you are comfortable with and you will see the results of your hard work.
Remember, the goal here is to get visitors to come back to your site and that starts with content.
I don’t want to beat the old drum again but if your content sucks you will have a hard time getting visitors to come back or share your content.
Wrapping it Up
No matter how you look at it. Free or paid, you are going to need traffic to your blog. It is the number one reason why blogs succeed or die like the millions of other blogs starting daily.
Work hard and smart and harness the power of social media and drive traffic to your blog. Start an SEO strategy from day one and your blog will climb the ranks in no time.
Don’t give up, the amount of time spent on content creation is nothing compared to the time you are going to have to put in driving traffic.
You can do this!
Happy Blogging 
If you have any questions regarding this article please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you.
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