How To Increase Blogger Traffic

So, you’ve figured out how to start a blog, and now you wonder what’s next. If you’re a blogger newbie, things might seem slow-going at first, and it will take a while to see those site visitors show up. So you’re probably wondering how to increase blogger traffic on your website at this point. What are the steps you should take and what should you do next? How in the world are you going to get all those readers you so desperately want to help onto your blog?

I believe I can help you with that! Over the past nearly two decades of creating online business through blogging and creating digital products, I’ve discovered a few key ways to help bring traffic to my website so I can generate an income while helping others. So, let’s get started right now with some basics about how to increase blogger traffic to your site!

Let’s figure out how to increase blogger traffic!

Identify the right blog topics.

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure your topics are wanted and needed. 

What do I mean by that?

Well, ask yourself a few questions. Let’s go back to the beginning of your blogging endeavors and ask yourself: 

“Why did I choose to start blogging?” 

“Who is my audience?”

“What is motivating me to create content for my audience?”

When you think back on all the reasons you’ve started a blog, quite possibly the main reason is to help your readers and offer a solution to a problem they’re having. Now, how you deliver the content: your style, your message, your tone, is totally up to you and is flexible, depending on what you offer and how you want to offer it. 

So, the main reason you have for blogging is not how you blog, but why you blog. Once you’ve figured out your why and you are set on helping your audience solve their problems, you’ll need to dig deeper and do some research in order to truly help them.

When you first started blogging, maybe you were just thinking of topics off the top of your head or writing about a topic that is close to your heart at the moment. Maybe a friend suggested a hot topic and you wrote about it. Maybe you found something that stirred your heart- on the news, in a video or another blog post, or maybe a conversation you recently had with a coworker or relative.  

But are those blog posts gaining any traction? Perhaps they are, especially if they are seasonal, trendy or noteworthy topics. But in order to sustain a blog for the long haul (and not be tempted to throw in the towel- as I have a few times in the past), you’ll want to find a topic that not only strikes a nerve for you but that you’re passionate enough (or eager enough) to talk and blog about for the next five years. 

(I suggest a five-year commitment because it generally takes about a year of consistency to even see a return on your investment. If you are consistent for at least a year you should see a nice, steady income as a result of your blogging endeavors. By the five-year mark you might feel pretty comfortable with the results, especially if you’ve chosen the right niche.)

You’ll also want to find a general overall topic that has many subtopics and subcategories that will keep you blogging for weeks, months and years to come. So for this, you’ll need to do a bit of research.

What you want to find out is what people are looking for regarding your topic: what are their questions, anxieties, problems, and pain points? How can you solve their problems with your blogging?

Be sure that the blog topic you choose is something you’re passionate about and that you can write about for a long time. Remember, this is all about you serving your audience for the long haul. 

Later on in this post, I’ll be sharing about how to find SEO-rich keywords for your blog posts, as this is a major step for choosing topics your audience is actually looking for.

Keep your blog topic focused.

I think this step goes without saying. Have you ever visited a blog that seemed to cover every topic the writer could think of? On one post they’re blogging about their afternoon on a Disney family trip, and on the next post, they’re discussing essential oils and weight loss.

It can be confusing- both to readers and to the search engines- when figuring out what the blog is really about. If you’re blogging about losing weight, then keep your posts focused on weight loss topics. If you’re blogging about family trips, then focus on vacation-related topics. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative once in a while and bring in topics that are a bit different from your norm, but you’ll want to make sure that somehow your blog posts all tie into one major blog theme.

Make sure that the purpose of your blog is clear so that when your audience comes to visit your blog for the first time, they are extremely clear on what you’re offering to them.

Write quality SEO-rich posts

If you are trying to figure out how to increase blogger traffic, you absolutely need to apply this particular step to everything you do online. Be sure to write quality SEO-rich posts! What do I mean by SEO-rich?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to unlocking traffic on your blog. This is all based on keywords and keyword phrases. To run an effective blog that is bringing in quality traffic, you’ll need to grab your potential audience through search engines like Google, by positioning your blog with just the right keywords that your audience is typing and searching for.

You’ll want to find keywords related to those subtopics that are guaranteed to bring you traffic because they are already being searched for monthly.

This means keyword strategy should help you to find exactly what you need to be blogging about for your audience. In order to find those keywords people are looking for you’ll want to use the right tools to help you do that.

Here’s how to increase blogger traffic with your keyword research strategy:

Pull up the Google Keyword Planner and search for a topic you would like to blog about. Click on “Get Volume Searches and Forecast”

Let’s say that your blog is about meditation and yoga practice for postnatal women. Take a look below at the volume of monthly searches in relation to the competition rate.

If the competition is low and average monthly searches are over 1K, I like to snatch those keyword phrases for my blog. This means that with competition being low, I have more of a chance to rank for these keywords. 

Medium competition means that it will be slightly harder to rank for those keywords. In this case, the keyword that has over 100 searches and ranks for medium competition is “postpartum yoga” and “postnatal yoga”. 

Some of the other keywords which are easy to rank for don’t get as much traction during the month (like “yoga for postpartum depression”), but it would be an easy phrase to rank for on your blog.

Finding the right keywords can take some time, but really start using Keyword Planner and try different variations of keyword phrases you think your audience would be searching to find solutions to their problems. This is one of the first steps you’ll want to take when figuring out how to increase blogger traffic. Make sure you have the right blog topics that your audience is looking for. 

When you’ve done your initial research in Keyword Planner, try Uber Suggest by Neil Patel to narrow down your research even more. Keyword research means you’re mining for key phrases and long-tail keywords that will place you in a competitive position and yield you the best results. This means, always shoot for low competition and a good amount of searches monthly (I like over 1,000 but over 500 works for me too).

Later, when your blog picks up steam, you can start to use more difficult keyword phrases that are slightly more competitive – perhaps in the medium-difficulty range.

Now that we’ve got the foundations squared away on how to increase blogger traffic, you can move on to the next step.

Create evergreen content.

Evergreen content is content that never gets old and isn’t seasonal, so it is relevant no matter the time of year. You can write this kind of content and expect to have a constant flow of traffic from interested readers. It’s a pretty easy way to bring a healthy number of people looking for your topic onto your blog.

Time-sensitive topics related to holidays (Christmas or Halloween, for example), seasonal, news announcements, sports events, or current world news (such as COVID) have a tendency to run their course and not always do so well in future searches because they are time-sensitive. That’s why you’ll want to put most of your energy into creating evergreen blog topics.

Evergreen topics are important because they show your authority and expertise on the topic, which Google loves to see. One important tip: avoid using dates in your titles.  But if you must, be sure you can easily change the dates. For example, “10 Top Work From Home Jobs in 2021” can easily be changed to “10 Top Work From Home Jobs in 2022”.

Here are some ideas for creating your evergreen topics:

• Step-by-step tutorials on how to do something
• Frequently asked questions
• Testimonials
• Product Reviews
• Tips
• Listicles

Regularly update your articles.

Don’t just set it and forget it. Instead, go back over your old articles every so often to see if there is information you can add or edit.

Keeping your posts updated and refreshed is wise to do, especially since your industry might be changing rapidly and you’ll want to make sure your readers are getting the most updated information.

I used to write an article and never look at it again. Whatever traffic it attracted was just fine by me, and I thought that I couldn’t do anything to add to what I’d already written. Truth be told, in the world of education, new things are on the horizon constantly, and there was so much I had learned that I could have added to my homeschool posts that would have kept them more relevant to my reader. 

What I like to do now with my new blogs is to keep tabs on all of my marketing and solopreneur posts on a spreadsheet, and periodically revisit them to see if I can add anything or make edits as necessary. The world of marketing online is changing so rapidly and it’s important that I am sharing the latest and most relevant information with my audience.

Other things you can do to keep your posts updated are:

• Focus on improving your SEO for each post. This should be an ongoing task.
• Add better imagery. Make sure your readers have a wonderful experience while reading your post and break your content up into checks separated by pictures and on-brand imagery.
• Be sure to include new information such as updated links to your content.

Cross-promote to your email list.

If you haven’t already started to grow an email list, now’s the time! Once you have a list, be sure that every time you write a new post to your blog, you let your subscribers know that there is new content available to them.

In your newsletter, you can add the first few sentences of your latest blog post and “keep reading…” which links to your post. This gives your subscriber a heads up that you have new content, and you’re asking them to please take a look and respond.

Also, make it easy for them to subscribe to your blog and to respond to comments. Inviting comments on your blog is a great way to communicate with your audience and receive engagement.

Speaking of comments…

Leave helpful comments.

Blog commenting is still a viable strategy for online marketing and can be a great method for how to increase blogger traffic. 

Your traffic depends a lot upon how often your backlinks show up in Google. If your links are not out there to be found, no one will find your blog. So we want to make sure your blog gets seen.

There are a lot of ways to get backlinks to your blog, including guest posting, and making sure you offer share buttons so readers can easily share your content (which creates backlinks). One other easy way to get some backlinks is to make it a point to comment on other blogs. You can set aside a few minutes each day to read and comment on someone else’s blog post, leaving a link back to your blog.

This happens in the comment section. Usually, you’ll see a place to add your name, email address, and website, along with the comment box. The spot for your website URL is what you want to make sure to add your website address to as you\’re filling out the comments.

Just set aside about 30 minutes a day to find blogs you really like, and be sure to leave a helpful comment. (None of that “great post” kind of comment either.) Leave a valuable and insightful comment. Really take the time to read the post your commenting on and show that you care about what the blogger has written.

This is how you create engagement for their blog and add value while it also gives you an opportunity to build backlinks for yours.

Start guest blogging.

Lastly, I’m going to add the value of guest blogging. If you are looking for how to increase blogger traffic, there are so many more ways to succeed online. 

However, I’m going to end this post with guest blogging because, again, as in leaving helpful comments, writing blog posts for others also adds incredible value.

So here’s what you’ll want to do: 

• Choose a blogger whose niche is similar to (but not the same) as yours.
• Write a post that you know their audience will respond well to.
• Be sure to include your blog URL in your bio.
• Make certain your bio with a backlink is okay to be included in your post before you agree to write .

These few tips should help you to get seen on other blogs besides your own while also building up backlinks to your blog.

Have these tips been helpful to you? I hope you have been encouraged on how to increase blogger traffic and get those site visitors you’ve been wanting.

That’s it for now. Until the next post, my friends!