5 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your New Blog

When it comes to running a blog, understanding the ways to boost traffic is essential. After all, the reason you’re publishing articles is because you want people to read them!

So it should come as no surprise that starting a new blog is super exciting, but attracting visitors can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.

With millions of blogs competing for the attention of your target audience, knowing how to boost traffic and reach the right people is crucial.

In this guide, we’re going to explore five actionable strategies to grow your audience, drive traffic to your site, and establish your blog as a go-to resource in your niche.

1. Leverage Social Media for Blog Promotion

It should come as no surprise that social media is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to reaching new people, which includes driving traffic to your blog. With over 4.9 billion social media users worldwide, you have an immense potential audience to tap into.

To make the most of social media, there are a few things you should be doing.

Sharing Blog Posts to Social Media

The first is sharing your blog posts on platforms where your target audience spends time. For example, Pinterest works well for visual niches like food or fashion, while LinkedIn is ideal for professional topics.

It may feel like the best move is just posting links to every single social media platform, but that’s going to be a waste of your time. Instead, spend some time thinking about your target audience and which platforms they’re most likely to be using.

Once you know that, you can then begin publishing links to your articles. Make sure to include compelling reasons why people should leave the platform and read your articles, such as key insights, quotes, freebies, and more.

If you don’t have time to post on social media every time you publish a new article, you can use the scheduling tools available natively on most social media platforms. This will let you bulk schedule posts, saving you the time of having to post content every single day.

Engage with the Comments

Something that a lot of people forget – and this goes for both smaller creators up to huge, established brands – is that social media is a conversation.

The job doesn’t stop when you post a link to the platform. Instead, you should spend some time reading through and engaging with your audience by responding to comments.

This allows you to actively participate in discussions, showing your audience that you’re going beyond just publishing a few links, and care about both helping and educating them.

When done strategically, social media not only increases your blog’s visibility but also fosters a loyal community around your content. But remember, social media is an investment, which means you may not see a return right away.

However, if you stick with it, you’ll gradually begin to see your audience grow and your blog traffic increase!

2. Collaborate Through Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the act of writing content for an external blog or website, in return for a link back to your own, and can be a highly effective way to boost traffic and establish credibility.

By writing posts for other popular blogs in your niche, you expose your content to a wider audience. And by writing articles for other established websites, you’re able to tap into an already existing audience of readers, instead of needing to build your own.

Here’s how you can easily get started with guest blogging:

• Research: Identify blogs with overlapping audiences that have strong domain authority. Tools like Moz’s Domain Authority Checker can help you assess their value.

• Pitch Ideas: Pitch unique, valuable topics tailored to the blog’s audience. Ensure your ideas are fresh and engaging. Write down the list of ideas, and send them via email to the owner/editor of the website.

• Backlink: Once the article has been written, include a compelling bio and backlink to your own blog. When done right, this will encourage readers to visit your site.

This is of course a very simplified overview of how guest blogging works. If you want to pursue this method of boosting your blog traffic, be sure to read through our full guide to creating a winning guest blogging strategy here.

3. Reshare Content on Medium

Medium is a platform aimed at writers and content creators, allowing them to create and publish articles, guides, stories, and more. With millions of readers and a user-friendly interface, it offers great exposure for your content.

There are two ways in which you can use Medium to your advantage:

1. Publish original content on the platform (articles that won’t appear anywhere else, not even your blog), and then create promotions for your website content within.

2. Reshare the blog content you’ve published on your blog onto Medium, with a backlink to the original article at the bottom.

For the Side Hustle Blueprint, we go for the second option. You can see how they all look on our Medium page here.

Regardless of which option you go for, you can then optimise your Medium articles with relevant hashtags. This allows your content to be searchable on the platform, providing you with additional options for discovery.

Much like with the social media points in section one, engaging with the Medium community by clapping for and commenting on others’ content is super important. Doing this shows that you’re interested in forming relationships with other creators, as well as furthering the discussions in which you participate.

4. Optimise Your Blog for SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for driving organic traffic to your blog. If you don’t know what it is, it’s the act of optimising the content on your website to ensure it has the best chance of showing up in search engines like Google and Bing.

By ranking higher in search engines, you’re able to help your website appear in the searches people make, which in turn allows more visitors, who are actively searching for topics you cover, to find your blog.

SEO is a long-term strategy, but with consistent effort, it can become your blog’s largest source of traffic. If you’re not sure where to start, be sure to use our free 25-point SEO checklist for every article you publish.

5. Build a Newsletter

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build a loyal audience and drive repeat traffic. As we’ve already covered, there’s a lot of noise online, what with everyone competing for attention.

Your blog is competing for traffic with other blogs, and your social accounts compete with other social accounts. But something that allows you to cut right through that is a newsletter.

With a newsletter, you’re able to show up right in your readers’ inboxes, making it a fantastic way of bypassing all the competition and speaking direction to your audience.

To get started, find an overview of what you need to do to set up a newsletter below:

• Offer Incentives: Offer valuable resources, such as free eBooks, checklists, or exclusive content, in exchange for email sign-ups.

• Use Tools: Use tools like Mailchimp or ConvertKit to create automated email campaigns that keep your subscribers engaged.

• Promote: Use both your blog and social channels to promote your newsletter, highlighting the various incentives you’ve created.

Once you start getting subscribers, and are ready to begin sending out newsletters, share your latest blog posts as part of them to encourage click-throughs to your blog.

This is of course a simplified overview of how newsletters work. For a much more in-depth guide, check out our complete guide to building a newsletter here!

Conclusion: Take Action and Boost Your Blog’s Traffic

Attracting visitors to your blog requires a combination of smart strategies and consistent effort. Additionally, there are many different routes you can take when it comes to boosting traffic.

From leveraging social media to tinkering with SEO, each method can significantly boost traffic to your blog, when implemented effectively.

Now, if you want to know more about how you can use a blog to generate passive income, we’ve got just the thing for you! Learn how to create a blog and start creating passive income in our ultimate guide here!

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