So you’ve made the decision to start a company blog? Or perhaps you’ve been blogging but have not seen any results and an increase in traffic. It is not always an easy task, especially if you rely solely on search engine traffic to bring in leads and visitors. Here are 6 ways webmasters and their bloggers can increase traffic to their blog without spending money on ads:
1. Promote it
Your blog will become a sensation faster if it is promoted on social media sites (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Snapchat) as well as on Reddit, Quora and Tumblr.
The key to successful promotion is good visuals (i.e., videos, images, cartoons, infograpics). Unique and eye-catching visual posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are prone to more engagement and organic reach than those without. And if you choose not to embrace the visual, you will be selling yourself short of 3 social networks with potential client reaches – Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat.
What social media sites should you use? The best advice I can give you as a Social Media Marketing expert is to poke around and play. Take the time to find out what’s happening on each social network and where your competitors do/don’t have a presence. Look at the pictures, watch the videos and search for your favorite brands. Most importantly, pay attention to what is being posted and try to mirror the best practices.
2. Link to Other Blogs
The best blogs are those that are well-researched and whose facts and statements are validated by well-posed inferences of experts in the field. At the end of each blog, we usually recommend adding a bibliography or list of resources with backlinks so that your readers can explore the topic in more detail.
Once the link has been created, send a quick and friendly note to the recipient webmaster to see if they are interested in a link exchange. Keep in mind that the bigger and the more popular websites (i.e., CNN, CBS News) have tons of these requests. It is therefore recommended to target small websites and blogs.
3. Website Optimization
As an SEO company with 10+ years of experience, we have seen many of our clients give up too soon on building traffic through organic reach. SEO takes time and rankings do not appear over night. Make sure you follow all the right steps in the onsite SEO process and do not take any shortcuts, as there are no shortcuts in SEO.
Another piece of advice is to use Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends to find topics that will get you the most optimal reach.
4. Create a Mobile Version of Site
Google’s last algorithm update on April 21, 2015 was the Mobilegeddon. It targets the mobile friendliness of websites. In fact, Google has begun to penalize sites that are not friendly to the mobile users. Also considering that 1 in 3 users are mobile users and that number is expected to grow, creating a mobile version of your blog and website will help you increase traffic or at least help you keep traffic engaged and looking at more than 1 page.
5. Reruit Guest Influencers
The key to keeping your blog traffic flowing is to get key industry influencers to write for you. That means reaching out to bloggers in your niche with the largest social followings and networks and showing that you can consistently write good content to those interested in it.
6. Create a 6 Second Preview of Your Blog
Vine is an iPhone app that lets you create 6-second looping video shorts. A Vine video is a great way to give viewers a 6-second teaser about the blog post contents.
iRISEmedia.com is a Toronto digital media agency providing Social Media Marketing, SEO, PPC and online branding services in Toronto, Ontario, the GTA and throughout Canada as well as globally.
