Question: “I have a new business blog that nobody knows about. How can I increase traffic to my blog, in order to get more customers?”
If you asked an Internet marketing company (which I’m not), they would tell you about all kinds of “secret” techniques for boosting your traffic levels. In truth, there’s nothing secret about the process at all. Do you want to know the one thing that will increase blog traffic, more than anything else? Here it is. Prepare to be amazed…
Create a high-quality blog that’s worth visiting.
If you can do this, everything else will take care of itself. Here’s what I mean. Let’s talk about the different ways people can find you online. Most people will reach your site in one of three ways:
- They will come from another site that is linking to you.
- They will find you through the search engines.
- They will visit your blog directly, by typing the URL / web address.
If you publish great information on a regular basis, you will increase traffic through all three of these paths. The more useful your blog is, the more people who will link to it. This helps you with items #1 and #2 above. The steady acquisition of inbound links (from other sites) will improve your “site referral” traffic as well as your search engine rankings. As for item #3 above, people will remember your blog and revisit often if they find it useful or engaging in some way.
Here’s the bottom line. There are millions of blogs online today. Literally. So launching a new one is similar to putting another grain of sand on a beach. If you want to attract links, boost your search engine rankings, and increase traffic to your blog, you have to develop quality content. Everything else is secondary to this.
More Tips for Blog Traffic
This blog is just a hobby of mine. So I’m not concerned with how it ranks in the search engines, or how many people link to it. But I do put a lot of effort into my network of real estate blogs, and I’m very concerned with the traffic they receive. Here is how I increase blog traffic to those websites:
- I publish often. Quality of content is most important, but quantity helps too. I post at least one article per day on my other blogs. This gives people a reason to come back. It also makes those websites serve as valuable resources, which encourages other webmasters to link to them.
- I create useful, in-depth information. The Internet is overcrowded with “puff” pieces. These are articles people write just for search engine visibility. You’ve probably encountered this kind of content online. It doesn’t say anything specific, and it’s not very useful. It’s just full of puffery. Nobody will link to an article like that, and nobody will remember it either.
- I do plenty of audience research. The best thing you can do to attract a target audience is to find out what interest them. You can use keyword research tools like this one at Google to generate topic ideas. You can also visit web forums related to your industry to see which topics are generating the most buzz. Talking directly to your customers / readers certainly helps too. The more you can learn about your audience, the better you serve them with useful information.
- I seek feedback constantly. About once a week, I check my website analytics to see which pages / articles are generating the most traffic. This helps me understand what interests my audience the most. I also check my backlinks (links from other websites to mine) to see what pages are attracting the most links. It only makes sense to create more of these pages.
- I create a lot of lists and step-by-step tutorials. These are helpful to my readers, and they also attract links from other bloggers and web publishers. This improves the overall search engine visibility of any website.
These are just a few of the things you can do to bring in more visitors. Just don’t forget about the conversion side of things. All of the traffic in the world won’t help you if people simply leave the site. So you need to work on your lead- and sales-generation at the same time.
This article answers the question: How do I increase my blog traffic to find new customers? There are many more Q&A sessions on the way. Be sure to check back often.
