Probably your blog is fairly new or you’ve been blogging for some time but you’re still struggling to get traffic.

This post is for you.

In this guide, you will learn how to increase blog traffic organically (without paid ads), how to build a dedicated audience and make visitors fall in love with your blog.

So basically, You’ve created an awesome blog.

Now the next step is to get people to see it.

Having great content on your blog without a good traffic is the worst nightmare of every blogger.

It’s like going through the trouble of getting all dressed up but having nowhere to go — it’s both sad and depressing.

Inability to attract visitors to a blog is the predominant reason many bloggers pack up their website and give up on blogging.

Low blog traffic equates to low blog income. And low income has a peculiar way of sucking up enthusiasm. 

The goal of every blog owner is to foster new tricks and techniques to increase blog traffic.

No one ever complains of too much traffic. Even if your page views run into millions monthly, you do not mind getting extra more.

This is because the life and soul of every blog are in its traffic. 

Getting traffic to a new blog used to be a bit easier during the early inception of the internet — there were fewer sites and much less competition.

Back then you simply need to create a blog post and spam forums with your links.

Compared to our present day, getting visitors to your blog requires a different and more strategic approach to the conventional method we were accustomed to.

In this guide, you will learn the best tricks and organic methods on how to increase blog traffic fast.

If your blog is new or you’ve been blogging for a while but aren’t satisfied with the traffic you’re getting on your blog, this post is for you. 

Consider it the divine intervention of providence that you stumbled on this post.

In this guide, you will learn how to write amazing blog posts that attract visitors, how to increase blog traffic organically (without paid ads), how to build a dedicated audience and make visitors fall in love with your blog. 

Generating blog traffic isn’t rocket science and there is no special secret to it.

All you need is a strategy.

Fortunately, these strategies have been enveloped in this guide.

It’s been presented in such a way that makes it seamless even for beginners to apply and start seeing the result.

If you follow the tips discussed in this guide, you’re bound to encounter success in boosting your blog traffic immediately. 

Paid or organic traffic: Weighing your options

There are two ways [approaches] of generating traffic to a blog. Namely: paid traffic and organic traffic.

Paid traffic: Using money to get visitors to your blog.

As the name implies, this involves paying to get traffic.

It encapsulates creating ads on social media platform or search engines intended to drive traffic to your blog.

If you’ve got the budget and eager to see quick jumps in your blog traffic, this is the go-to approach.

Although paid traffic is the fastest way of getting visitors to your blog, it is often not the best on a long term perspective. 

It is a short term strategy and should be used when you have something you are selling on your blog. This is very important.

Before using deciding to pay for traffic, ensure that you’re getting a ROI on your budget. (ROI means Return-on-investment)

Have this at the back of your mind when considering the paid traffic approach:

Profit = Income – expenditure

Right. So what does this mean?

It means you should ONLY pay for traffic when you’ve run your calculations and you’re fully convinced that every amount you’re spending to get visitors on your blog is equally bringing an equivalent profit.

Phew! That was a long sentence.

This is good wisdom and you should read it a second time.

Most beginner bloggers often make one common mistake — After setting up their blog, in an attempt to see quick blog traffic, they go on a spending spree on ads without doing proper cost analysis.

Before incorporating paid ads into your traffic strategy, you should have a definite goal and precise objective on why you’re doing it.

Are you selling a product? Or probably collecting emails to generate leads? Bottom line: have a goal that corroborates for a reasonable ROI before choosing to pay for traffic.

Getting started with paid traffic is pretty much very easy provided you’ve got the cash.

You simply need to choose a platform (could be social media or search engines) and run an ad campaign. Whenever someone clicks on your ad and land on your blog, you get billed.

This is the reason I’ve overemphasised on the need to run a cost analysis and determine what each clicks means to you from a business perspective, ensuring you’re getting something reasonable in return.

Should you pay for traffic?

It depends.

First, consider your goals.

Are you offering a product or service and you need quick traffic to drive sales?

Establishing your goals beforehand will help determine if paying for the traffic you need is worth it.

A lot of businesses spend thousands of U.S Dollars on ads and paid traffic.

In such cases, they are not merely blogging for fun. They’ve taken blogging as a full-time job and treat it as a business.

Before venturing into paid traffic, ensure you’ve established a goal. 

It could be anything and can take any form such as: collecting emails to generate leads, increasing brand awareness, promoting a product etc. These goals are focused on one thing… Generating income.

Don’t invest in paid traffic just for the fun of it.

There’s something just as worse as a chronic disease… wasting money. Always have a backend goal before paying for traffic.

Second, consider your method of blog monetization.

How do you make money on your blog? Is it through affiliate marketing or an ad network (such as AdSense)?

Must Read: How to Start a Blog in Nigeria and Make Money

To increase blog traffic through paid ads, take inventory of how you intend to make a profit from the money you’re investing in ads.

In essence, consider how your blog is monetized.

If your primary means of monetisation is Google AdSense, using paid ads to increase blog traffic wouldn’t be the best route.

Google AdSense yields a better turnout when your traffic is predominantly organic.

Here’s why.

Let’s assume you already have AdSense on your blog. On average, AdSense’s CPM is often less than a dollar.

CPM means Cost per thousand impressions — the cost AdSense pays you when 1000 people see an AdSense ad on your website.

As we’ve earlier said, this is often less than a dollar [although there are factors that might influence or alter this price. Such as location, blog niche, keyword etc.]

Roughly put, you’ll be paid between $0.99 – $0.01 for every 1000 visitors you’re able to drive to your blog [assuming all of them see your AdSense ad on your blog.]

The question that should probably pop into your mind is…

How much will it cost to drive 1000 visitors to my blog?

Keep in mind that when driving traffic from social media or search engines through paid ads, you’re billed based on CPC (cost-per-click). It means you’re billed per every individual that lands on your blog.

Taking Facebook ads as a case study, for example, CPC is about $0.27 on a VERY mild average (it could be as high as $5 depending on factors such as competition, ad quality etc.)

This translate that for every visitor that lands on your blog through a Facebook ad, you pay $0.27.

Now do the maths.

Getting 1000 visitors through paid ads on Facebook will cost you $270! Remember that this is simply putting it very mildly. It could be much more than this. 

Make sense? Good.

Now, if your method of blog monetization is Google AdSense, and you choose to employ the use of paid ads to get traffic to your blog, you can see that you’ll be running at a massive loss!

This is the reason organic traffic is much better when it comes to making money with Google AdSense.

We’ll discuss organic traffic in detail below and why it is the best way to approach in achieving long term blog success.

However, another channel of blog monetization is affiliate marketing.

In this case, it is often safe to use paid ads to drive traffic to your blog.

You’ll most likely make a profit if you’ve done a good job researching your affiliate products, niche, keywords etc. Details of affiliate marketing exceed the scope of this guide.

The illustrations above are designed to give you a basic perspective on the need to determine your blog goals before choosing to pay for traffic.

And that you should only run paid ads when you’re convinced that you’re bound to make a profit from your investments.

If you’re not sure whether or not you should use paid ads to drive traffic to your blog, you should go organic.

Organic traffic: Best approach to increase blog traffic for free 

 

This is the purpose this guide was created. You’ll be taught how to increase your blog traffic free and fast.

Ensure you read to the end and apply every tip meticulously.

Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic. It involves getting blog traffic without having to pay [money] for it.

Building traffic organically has a tremendous long term advantage and pays long-lasting dividends.

If you are trying to get traffic to a new blog or seeking a free and more advantageous way to increase blog traffic, the following steps will help you get the results you need.

How to increase blog traffic for free.

 

Step #1: create great content.

The aim of creating quality content is first, to increase your search rankings.

Second, to increase the tendency of your content being shared on social platforms.

“content is king.”

You must have heard that been said time and over again.

Well, I used to hate hearing it when I started blogging newly. Because it meant I had to invest more time and energy in creating content capable of getting me the results I wanted.

Like most new bloggers, I wanted quick results but I wasn’t ready to work for it. I was writing blog posts that were barely up to 600 words.

Consequently, I was getting meagre traffic and making pathetic income on my blog.

I learnt a hard lesson and eventually saw truth to the old wisdom… content is king.

Before thinking about how to increase your blog traffic, you should first consider improving your blog’s content. 

A blog littered with poorly written blog posts will not retain visitors. Money may get you blog traffic, but the content is what keeps visitors.

A blog tends to grow its traffic when it can garner a dedicated following of loyal readers. Visitors will only become loyal to your blog when your content can convince them that you know your stuff.

The secret (which is no secret at all) to every successful blog is hinged on its ability to provide value.

How much value you’re providing on your blog will largely determine your blog traffic. This is the basic fact and there is no way to go around this.

Developing great content isn’t necessarily about writing long blogposts (although this is often part of it), but it is more about being able to provide readers in your niche with the exact material and information they need.

It first begins with knowing your target audience, understanding their problems, and providing answers or solutions to those problems. That’s the core of great content — providing the right information to the right audience.

Developing great content to increase blog traffic: 

1. Know our audience: 

The first step in coming up with great content is understanding who your audience is (whom you’re writing for).

Strong knowledge of your blog niche will give an added advantage in developing content capable of driving traffic to your blog.

Developing an audience persona — having basic information about the general audience in your niche such as their age, location, and interests can help you narrow your blog content to fit their needs.

When the needs of readers are met, they often become loyalists.

Increasing blog traffic is hinged on providing your visitors with content they are interested in.

Embark on research to know who your audiences are and launch a full campaign in developing and crafting content they care about.

2. Draft a content strategy and set up a content calendar:

There’s one key factor that plays a determining role in ensuring blog success. Consistency.

Being strategic and deliberate with the content you put out, and the time these content are published are more effective than just sporadically pushing content without a plan.

If you want to increase your blog traffic fast, you cannot afford to blog whenever you like.

You must develop a content plan that is rigorously followed by a content schedule.

When it comes to blogging, Consistency (following a regular time pattern of publishing content) is more important than frequency (how often you post).

How often you publish blog posts isn’t as important as following a clearly defined content schedule.

Decide if you’re going to be posting once weekly, or three times monthly. Whatever you decide, ensure you stick to it.

This way, your visitors will get accustomed to your timing and will know exactly when to visit your blog for a new update.

You can use an Excel sheet or Google Calendar to plan your content schedule. Create columns consisting of the blog title, and their respective dates of publications.

Most bloggers struggle and suffer low blog traffic because they fail to plan.

Organised planning is key in succeeding in any facet of life, and blogging isn’t an exception.

Avoid leaving things to chance or luck and begin to take calculated steps in controlling your success. Begin by creating a content plan and schedule.

Personally, whenever am create a new blog, I do in-depth research on the niche to better understand its audience.

It sometimes takes me months to go about this because I do not want to incur loss investing resources [time, energy, and money] on what I don’t understand.

After I’ve concluded my research, I plan a full-scale content strategy and set up my blogpost calendar that runs for two months straight.

This means that before I even start designing a new blog, I already have content ideas to post for 2 months straight along with their corresponding dates of publication.

This relieves me from encountering the unfortunate situation of running out of ideas.

3. Write on popular topics: 

The catalyst for low blog traffic is creating content that no one cares about.

When a visitor stumbles on your blog and doesn’t find anything that meets their interest, they will never come back.

Use Google Trends or BuzzSumo to find out what the popular topics the audience in your niche are reading.

You can also use Google Keyword Planner to research popular keywords and check their corresponding traffic volume.

This will give you an insight into a list of keywords that have the potential for attracting traffic.

Spying on your competitors is by far the most effective way of identifying popular topics (Don’t worry, you’re not breaking the law. Plus your competitors did it too).

The primary essence of doing this is to find out what kind of topics are bringing in the most traffic for your competitors.

If these topics are performing well for them, it should perform well for you too. We’ll discuss more on how to take advantage of this technique and outperform your competitor later on in this guide.

You can make use of Ubbersuggest or Moz Tools to spy on your competitors.

With Ubbersuggest, you simply type in the name of your competitor into the search box and voila!

You get a tremendous amount of information about your competitor including the list of their most popular topics (the content that’s driving in blog traffic for them)

How can I identify my competitors?

Identifying your competitors is as easy as simply making a Google search.

Simply plug in the command site: niche into the Google search box.

Example: assuming your niche is “investment,” simply type in site: investment into Google search box and you’ll be provided with a list of all the blogs/website that write on topics on your niche. Now you can then proceed to spy on them.

4. Use catchy blog titles: 

People often buy the title of a book and not the content. Similarly, the first thing that catches the attention of internet users is your blog post titles.

The title is the very first thing they see before anything. This is the reason you must make it stand out.

Lists posts, How-Tos, and titles that have numbers tagged in them have been proven to deliver the best results.

You can take it a step further by including emotional words in your titles.

Tools such as Blog Title Generator can help grade the effectiveness of your blog post titles and recommend steps to modify them for better results.

Also, you can use this tool to generate unique and effective blog titles as well.

5. Include visuals and images in your blog posts.

They say a picture tells a thousand words.

Incorporating images into your content is an effective way of communicating an idea and making a complex subject appear more seamless.

This will enable your audience to have a better understanding of your message.

Also, use screenshots and other necessary visuals such as infographics to help your audience fully comprehend whatever explanation you’re providing to a subject.

You can get free photos to use for your blog post project on Pexels and Unsplash.

6. Proofread your work before publishing. 

No visitor would share a blogpost that’s saturated with poor spellings or grammar.

Before publishing a blog post, do well to meticulously edit your work and ensure its devoid of unnecessary errors.

Use tools such as Grammarly and Hemmingway Editor to proofread and strips off errors from your work before hitting publish.

7. Write lengthy blog posts. 

Really? Yes!

This tip is particularly very important if you’re trying to get traffic to a new blog.

Let me explain.

The surest and by far the best cost-free way of generating blog traffic is by SEO (we’ll discuss search engine optimization later in this guide).

And one of the dominant factors Search Engines use in ranking blogposts is the time viewers spend in reading it.

When a visitor spends time on your blog, it gives search engines the signal that they like what they’re reading, and this will consequently improve your search ranking.

Bottom line: it takes less time to read a scanty 300-word blog post than it takes to read one that’s 2000+ words.

Hope you get point.

You can see from the screenshot above that blogposts that rank top on Google are usually 2000+ words.

Also, studies show that blogposts with considerable longer length tend to get more social shares.

This doesn’t mean you should stuff your blogposts with a bunch of irrelevant information just to increase your word count.

It will backfire.

The goal here is to avoid writing substandard blogposts that repel visitors. Your aim to write content that facilitates social shares to increase blog traffic.

To do this effectively, make your blog posts between 1000 to 3000 words.

 

#Step 2: Optimize your blog for speed and mobile. 

It’s no news that internet users are not patient. 47% of visitors expect your website to load in less than 2 seconds less than 2 seconds.

Failure to meet up to this expectation means you’ll consistency lose 40% of your traffic.

Why is site speed important to blog traffic?

A blog that takes a long time to load will increase your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who click away after only seeing one page on your blog).

This will harm your overall SEO ranking and consequently lead to a loss in traffic.

It is then very important to improve your blog speed to keep visitors from leaving your site.

Before tweaking your blog to optimise speed, do check out how your blog currently loads before incorporating any speed optimization strategies.

This will help you observe the effect of any changes you’re making to your blog. You can use tools like Pingdom, Google Speed Insight, or GTmetrix to know how your fast your blog currently loads.

The average speed benchmark recommend by Google is 1 to 3 seconds.

If you notice that your blog falls below this benchmark, you should waste no time in getting this fixed.

Tips to improve your blog speed:

 

1. Use only credible themes and plugins. 

There are thousands of themes and plugins currently littered all over the web.

There is bound to be themes and plugins that are poorly coded and will take a negative toll on your blog is installed. Only use quality themes and plugins on your site.

To know if a theme or plugin is of good quality, always check their reviews and star ratings.

A theme or plugin that is mostly dominated by negative reviews will most likely not be a good pick for you.

A person or two may be wrong. But when issues and complaints are being brought up by a high degree of users, their criticism is most likely not to be wrong.

In addition to choosing credible themes and plugins, always keep them updated. ALWAYS!

Themes and plugins companies always release a newer version of their products, always keep them updated.

Failure to do this may put your blog under risk of cyber threats. A site that is considered risky will not attract visitors.

2. Optimize your image files; compress and reduce their sizes. 

Large image files make your blog slower as it takes a longer time to fully render those files.

If you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform, you’re in luck as you can easily resolve issues of having large image files slowing down your site.

You can use plugins such as smush or shortpixel to optimise your images.

Once these tools are set up on your site, they automatically optimise (compress) any image file you upload on your blog without necessarily affecting the image quality.

This will also save you a tonne of disk space and bandwidth in the long run.

The type of image file format you upload on your blog also impacts your page speed. It is advisable to stick with .png and .jpg. You can get quality images of these format from Pexels

 3. Implement Caching.

In trying to increase your blog traffic by leveraging on site speed, implementing a caching system is a good way to make your server render your blog’s files and content much faster.

If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress to power your blog, whenever a user visits your blog, WordPress fetches for information from your site’s database and run several multiple steps before your web page is presented to the user.

This makes your site load slower.

To solve this problem, you’ll have to reduce these several steps taken by WordPress to serve your blog content and files.

A cache system works to temporary save a copy of all your files when a visitor visits for the first time.

By so doing, when a subsequent user visits your site, the saved copy is served and the multiple several processes which are taken to render your content is skipped!

This will consequently make your site load much faster.

All these might seem very techy but you don’t have to be a computer expert to implement caching on your blog.

All you need to do is simply install a cache plugin on your WordPress blog and you can go to sleep. The plugin does all the work for you.

There several cache plugins out there. The most popular ones include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket etc. I use WP Super Cache for all my websites because it is beginner-friendly and seamlessly easy to set up.

Caution: use only one cache plugin at a time. Don’t install more than one cache plugin.

4. Minify and Compress your blog’s files. 

To “minify” your site refers to the process of reducing the size of the files on your site.

This is particularly useful as such a process makes your site loads much faster.

Predominantly, Minification is intended to compress your CSS, HTML, and JavaScripts files by making codes cleaner.

This can be done without breaking a sweat. If you already have a cache plugin installed on your blog, simply navigate to the “minify” settings and have it set up. Most cache plugin comes with this functionality.

5. Incorporate a CDN (Content Delivery Network). 

It is safe to know that geographical location is a factor as to how fast your site loads.

Your blog might be extremely fast to users in Nigeria and could be dead slow to users in the UK.

A Content Delivery Network solves this problem by serving your site’s content much faster to users regardless of their geographical location.

Setting up a CDN is extremely easy. With WordPress, all it takes is installing a plugin.

The most popular and by far my favourite is Cloudflare.

This plugin drastically improves your site speed and also protect your site from crashing as a result of multiple server-sharing of your files.

Install the plugin right now, you’d be glad you did.

These are basic speed optimisation techniques capable of improving user experience on your blog by making your site load much faster.

This will consequently improve your search rankings which will serve as a lift in increasing your blog traffic.

You’re welcome.

 

Step #3: Make It easy for visitors to share your content. 

Social media is an instrumental part of every successful blogger’s marketing strategy.

Almost 3 billion people use Facebook alone; that’s over 20% of the earth’s human population.

For a site that’s just starting, social media is the fastest way to get visitors to a new blog.

Whenever a visitor reads your content and they like it, it would be unwise to rob them of an opportunity to share your content.

Hence, it is to your advantage to make sharing your content to social media easy.

You can implement this by simply including social media share buttons on your blog.

This can easily be incorporated by installing some social media share plugin such as BuzzSumo

Be aware that social media share buttons can slow down your site due to the time it takes for your server to load all the social media scripts.

The entire process of receiving and processing these scripts by your server can be technically cumbersome, and can eventually have an impact on your site speed.

We’ve earlier spoken in detail about site speed and the role it plays as a dominant factor in search engine rankings.

Anything that will hamper your site speed should be given a back seat. However, the role social media plays in increasing blog traffic cannot be substituted for anything else.

So how can you use social share buttons without it affecting your site speed?

Simple answer. Use fewer social buttons.

Mistake most bloggers make is including social networks they don’t use.

Why on earth would anyone include over six social buttons on their blog? If you’re not on LinkedIn, why put your server through unwarranted stress by including a LinkedIn share button?

For the love of fried eggs, stick with 3 share buttons… or at most 4! There’s no point having a YouTube Subscribe Button when you don’t post videos.

I mean, it’s common sense.

Simply add social networks that you’re most active in and where you feel your audience are most likely to be found.

Facebook is general. Irrespective of your blog niche, your audience will most likely be found on Facebook.

But Twitter, Linkedln, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram should be carefully considered before including any of them into your blog.If you blog about insurance services, then you should bid farewell to Instagram.

Always remember: less is better.

Where to place social buttons on your blog.

1. Top and bottom of your blogpost: Research shows that content that has share buttons located at the top get shared

2. The left-hand side of your post:  This makes sense due to the way we read. “Most” humans read from left to right.

Hence, placing your share button by the left-hand side of your content would be wise since it increases the chances of being seen as the eyes move left to right.

 

Step #4: Publish blog posts to social media.

As of 2020, there are 3.8 billion active social media users in the world. And every day; 500,000 new accounts are created on Facebook. The average Instagram user spends over 53 minutes a day . And on Twitter, an average of 6000 tweets are posted per second.

What does this mean?

In simple terms: it means there are over 3.8 billion users on social media who are yet to know about your blog even exists!

Joining one of these social media platforms will be an effective way to build a target audience, grow your brand, foster customer relationships, and drive visitors to your blog.

If you’re not active on at least one social media network, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic.

81% of all small and medium scale businesses use some kind of social platform to target leads.

Businesses wouldn’t be spending thousands of USD on social media ads if it isn’t effective in driving traffic.

As long as the number of internet users continues to increase daily, social media will never cease to be an instrumental part of that growth.

Deciding what social media platform to focus on.

Before kicking off your social media marketing strategy, run your research on the social platform your targeted audience likely spend their time on, so you’d know where to channel your efforts.

If your blog is new and you’re just starting, it is advisable to focus your energy on just one social platform.

You don’t need to join every one of them especially when you don’t have the time to remain consistent with them.

It is better to be on one social media platform where you consistently post and keep in touch with your audience than be on three where you post once in a blue moon.

One thing about social media is consistency. The moment you stop giving attention to one platform, you’d immediately start losing your social media audience.

This is the reason why you should focus on just one platform and gradually expand to others when you eventually can effectively manage them.

Facebook cut across all demographics and niche. Everyone regardless of profession, interest or age gathers on Facebook.

Hence, it would be wise to have your business on Facebook too. Why wouldn’t you? The platform has over 3 billion users!

Instagram is mostly dominated by young folks. 75% of the entire users on Instagram are below 25 years.

Therefore if your blog content is targeted towards the younger generation, you should be on Instagram. Also, the platform is dominated by images and videos. It will be a great idea for a travel blog.

LinkedIn has over 660 million users and its dominated by professionals and business folks.

Most of the audience here are either looking for a job or looking for someone to hire. Hence, if the content you offer on your blog is B2B inclined, LinkedIn is your best choice.

If you post a lot of visual content such as pictures or Infographics, Pinterest has the perfect audience for you

You shouldn’t forget Snapchat. Although it has taken the back sit over the years, Snapchat still has over 210 million users. 

Also, the network is dominated by a lot of young people. Therefore, if you’re targeting high school students or university undergrads, you might want to look into Snapchat.

Twitter is also a powerhouse in driving traffic to a blog. With over 330 million users, 71% of its users use Twitter to get news.

Hence, if you blog about news (sports, politics, finance etc.) you definitely should consider having a Twitter handle set up. Your target audience is certainly there.

How to drive traffic to your blog with social media.

1. Create a professional-looking page: 

Consider your social media page as your brand’s image; a shabby looking page will have a negative look on your overall image.

Whether you’re using Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, you must take deliberate steps to spice up your page and provide detailed information about your brand.

Before anyone decides to follow you, they’ll most likely go through your profile. Anything short of authenticity will scare them away. To prevent that from happening, here’s what you should do:

Write a captivating bio: state explicitly what your brand does and the services/products you offer. On Twitter, you’re limited to just 140 words; you’ve got to make every word count.

No need writing a long epistle on how the idea of your blog came to you in a dream. State in simple English what your blog/business is about.

Include a profile picture and a good header image: You can use your logo as your profile picture and your header image shouldn’t be abstract; it should reflect your blog’s description and the content you offer.

Having a header showing the image of a child when you blog about politics doesn’t reflect someone who’s mentally sound. You’d be taken as a joke.

Each social media platform has its own unique header image sizes. Use only recommended images sizes that align with the specific social media platform.

You can use tools such as Canva to create logos and header images that meet the exact recommended sizes for any social media platform.

2. Schedule your posts: 

Posting content at random on your social media page is bad practice. You should plan out your content and schedule your posts at peak times [when your audience are most likely to see and engage with your posts.]

Best times to post on social media: 

• Facebook: Weekend are generally considered to have the lowest engagement rates on Facebook. Therefore, it is best to post on weekdays; usually between 11 am to 1 pm — this is often the time people take lunch breaks and are more inclined to engage with a post to pass off time.

• Instagram: on an average, 2 PM and 3 PM are the best times to post on Instagram.

• Twitter: the safest time to post on Twitter is between 1 to 3 pm DAILY. It is a very active platform and over 100 million tweets are sent out every minute. To avoid your content from being lost in the mould, you have to be consistent and post at least three times daily.

Use scheduling tools to automatically post to your social media pages.

It would be incredibly cumbersome to manually post content to your social platforms. Bloggers stopped doing that since the Sino-Indian military conflict between China and India in 1962.

Alright… I’m just kidding. 

Basically what am saying in essence, is that there are several tools that you can implement to make posting on social media effortless.

You can configure these tools to automatically publish your blog posts across all your social media platforms at the specific times you stipulate.

• IFTTT: This stands for “If-This-Then-That.” The functionality of this tool knows no bound. You set up this tool to immediately post your new blog posts to your social pages the instant they get published on your blog.

• Buffer: This is by far one of my favourite scheduling tools. You can use buffer to organise your content and automate them to get posted on your social pages. You can link your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts to this app and go to sleep. You can then begin to add content you want to share to the queue and the tool helps you post these contents to all the social platforms you’ve included in the app.

• ReviveOldPosts: Not all your blog posts you share on social media gets to be seen by your audience especially since the recent trend of Facebook’s organic reach recording an all-time low.

ReviveOldPosts helps you automatically re-share your old blog posts which your audience might have missed.

You can also schedule the times these and frequency these contents should be posted. This tool is available as a plugin to WordPress users. Simply have it installed and set up.

• Hootsuite: This is also a scheduling tool which functions just as Buffer. You can use this tool to organise and automate your content sharing also.

3. Grow your audience. 

At this point, you already know the prerequisite needed in having a successful social media page.

We’ve discussed above on the need to make your page look professional; and the advantage of scheduling and automating your posts.These are what you need to have a successful social media campaign.

Now, we’re going to discuss how to grow your social media audience and use it as a leverage to drive traffic to your blog.

Growing your Facebook audience:

Growing a strong social media presence on Facebook is all about interacting and building relationships with your audience.

Posting links to your blog alone will make you appear like as a bot and you’ll lose engagements such as likes and shares.

People want to know that it’s a human being behind your page and not just some spammer who only take them as clicks.

The key to building your brand on social media is developing a relationship with your audience. The goal is to foster trust and establish yourself as an authority. 

Here’s how to go about:

• Provide content relevant to your niche. Posting random content is useless. Content tailored to the right audience is the key to building a strong brand on social media. It is important to understand your niche and know what your audience is interested to see. Provide content that informs, entertain and educate.

• Publish videos. Images are great. But videos are becoming better. It’s no news that the Facebook algorithm tends to favour videos above every other form of content in terms of organic reach.

Convert your content into short videos and include a call-to-action at the end. This is much more effective than spamming your page with links.

Plus, people are more inclined to share videos with their friends than images or mere word posts.

• Join groups. Joining groups that are not relevant to your niche is total hogwash.

Most people think joining random Facebook groups that have thousands of members is what’s important. They soon find out that they were wrong.

A random Facebook group that posts anything with no specific target audience in mind, often have random members too.

And a random audience is as good as useless to your blog. Not all audience make up a good audience. You need an audience that’s interested in the content you offer.

Focus on joining niche-specific groups. There are groups for relatively every niche on Facebook. Find the ones that are related to your niche and start offering value to those groups.

Do not go about posting links of your blogs on your Facebook groups. You’ll be considered as a spammer and eventually kicked out.

Instead, focus on answering industry issues and provide genuine insight to people’s posts. This will establish you as an authority in your niche and might be given the leverage to post links on those groups if need be.

• Post quotes. Everyone loves and interact with quotes. I once used quotes to grow the user engagements of one of my websites by over 500%

You can use Canva or Pablo to create inspirational quotes and publish them to your Facebook page.

Always add your website address to the quotes to specify that the image was created by you.

Once the quote image lands on your page, start sharing them to your Facebook groups. Virtually all groups accept quotes and most importantly, it doesn’t make you appear like a spammer so you won’t face issues having your post disapproved.

Pro tip: Share your quotes directly from your page to other groups. That way, the post will bear your page name along with it.

When people see your post, they may be prompted to visit your page and follow it. I used this strategy to grow my Facebook page likes by 279%. Try it, it works!

• Tag influencers. 

Whenever you cite the words of an influencer in your blog post, ensure you tag them to your social media post. Most influencers are cool. They’ll be happy to share your content if indeed it is share-worthy.

• Partner with other pages in your niche. Identify pages that post similar content as you and reach out to them to share your blog posts to their audience.

There is no such as something for nothing. You’ll have to offer something in return. Try to strike a bargain and see if you can reach a partnership with them. No one would share your content to their audience if your blog isn’t offering valuable information. So your blog needs to be up to par. 

• Interact with your audience. When someone goes through the trouble of commenting on your post, courtesy demands you show appreciation by responding to them.

Don’t just reply to positive comments only, It doesn’t matter if the comments you get are negative. If someone thinks your content sucks, thank them and assure them you’ll work harder to improve on the quality of your content. It shows you’re serious.

Growing your Twitter audience:

• Tweet often. Those who tweet regularly tend to have more followers. Twitter is a very active platform with over 100 million tweets being made every minute.

To stay in the loop, you can’t afford to tweet once a day. You’ll be forgotten! You necessarily do not have to tweet your content only. share the content of others as well [in your niche]. When you do so, they’ll most likely follow you.

Do not forget to schedule your tweets at peak times [when people are most likely to interact with it]. We’ve discussed this above. 

• Join Twitter chats. Twitter chats are a fantastic way to connect with people of similar interests. Simply find chats that are specific to your niche and join.

Participate in those chats by offering your professional insight into the topic of discussion and also interact with other members by following them. They’ll most likely follow you back.

To find Twitter chats, you can simply use Google. Just input the query “topic + Twitter chat.”

All twitter chats have their unique hashtags. Always include the hashtag on your responses. This will ensure your tweets are going directly to the audience in the chats.

• Keep your followers engaged. What’s the point if going through the trouble of growing your twitter handle only to leave your followers dejected?

Don’t just choke your audience with links to your blog posts, be sure to create engaging content in the form of images and videos.

Posting quotes work here too. Twitter users love quotes! Quotes are effective because it cuts across demographics and niche.

So if you ever run out of ideas on what to tweet, pick up some old words of wisdom from Albert Einstein. and on’t forget to reply to folks who comment on your tweets. 

• Use hashtags. Hashtags are particularly great because it increases the reach of your tweet.

Adding hashtags to your tweet is an effective way of making your tweet gain more visibility and increases the chances of being seen by more people.

Identify popular hashtags [in your niche] and include them in your posts. Do not ever send a tweet without a hashtag.

Yeah, it’s that serious! Include at least 2 to 4 hashtags in your post. However, do no overly do it.

Pro tip: In an attempt to grower twitter audience, most people subject themselves to buying followers. Bad choice! There are agencies that offer to get you, followers, for ridiculous prices 

It’s a complete waste of money because most of the followers you get from such app are predominantly bots.

That’s why some Twitter handles have a lot of followers but see very little user engagement. Because most of their followers do not exist [bots] and the few who are humans don’t even know how they got to follow them.

Stick to growing your audience organically. If you do want to accelerate the process and have a few bucks to spend, incorporate Twitter ads.

Growing your Instagram audience and driving traffic to your blog: 

• Be consistent. To grow your Instagram followers, you’ll get instant positive results if you post at least 1-6 times a week.

• Use stories more. Instagram stories have become more popular in recent times and most brands admit that it’s there most preferred choice.

• Use quality hashtags. There’s no social media platform where hashtags are more effective and important as on Instagram.

The right hashtags will expose your content to a targeted audience. Contrary to other social platforms, Instagram users do not get tired of seeing hashtags.

Instagram allows for a maximum of 30 hashtags per post. Therefore, You can include up to 20 hashtags on your Instagram post and wouldn’t be considered a weird freak!

Always ensure you use hashtags that are tailored to your audience [niche and location specific]. With tools such as Focalmark, AutoHash and Purpose, you can easily find quality hashtags that are relevant to your posts.

Partner with others. Reaching out to influencers in your niche and getting them to share your content can be an effective way of driving traffic to your blog with Instagram.

If you have the budget for it, consider hiring the services of an influencer.

Post at your peak times. There is the best time to post for every brand on Instagram, and you have yours too.

To find yours, simply open the Instagram app. Click on Instagram Insight. Scroll down to the “followers” section and tap on “see more”.

There! At the bottom of the page, you should see the times of the day your followers are most active and likely to see and engage with your post.

• Engage with your followers. Posts that have a growing rate of user engagement tend to enjoy higher organic reach and stand a chance of being featured in the top posts of hashtags.

A wise practice is to reply to comments. By so doing, you’re keeping your post alive and growing the conversation. 

Using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog: 

• Create a business profile. Setting up a business profile on Pinterest takes less than 10 minutes. Simply go to business.pinterest.com to begin.

Once you’re done with that, fill in your interest (which will be used to populate your feed), proceed to upload your logo, add your business name, as well as your website URL and description. 

Pro tip: when filling in your profile description, be keyword specific. Pick 2-3 keywords and include them in your description. This will expand your reach and get people who are interested in your content.

• Post long vertical photos that are optimized: Pinterest has its specific photo dimension. You can use Canva to create Pinterest photos. Pinterest functions like a search engine.

Hence, implement the following steps to drive better results: Write catchy titles, write a good description that’s key-word centric and include your website URL to your pins.

 

Step #5: optimize your content for search engines:

Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. are by far the most effective means of getting free traffic to your blog.

Optimising your blog content to meet search engine requirements will give a huge boost to your blog traffic, and consequently scale your blog income.

SEO is a long term approach to generating traffic to your blog. It involves tweaking your blog and its content to make it more visible to search engines.

If done rightly, you can start seeing results in only a matter of months. Although SEO takes time to yield results, it is, however, the best means of generating traffic to your blog.

Making your site visible to search engines. 

Before you can start enjoying search traffic, you need to make your site visible to search engines. To do that, you must have the robot.txt file stored on your server. 

Don’t worry, this is nothing technical. For WordPress users, all you need do is to install the Yoast Plugin on your blog and have the XML site map enabled. An alternative is also to add your site to the Google Search Console.

The robot.txt file helps create a site map for your blog for search engines to crawl and index your blog and its content. This is the first step in commencing an SEO strategy — making your site visible to search engines.

Getting search engines to understand your blog. 

Search Engine Optimisation is divided into two parts. Namely; On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

On-page Search Engine refers to all the actions (optimizations) taken within your blog to make it appear or rank high on search engines. Such actions include adjusting your meta title, tweaking your blogpost titles, optimizing your snippet etc.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to all the measures taken outside your blog to boost your search rankings. Such actions may include, but not limited to, building backlinks, guest posting etc. Getting traffic from search engines is hinged on these two and we’ll discuss how to go about it in order to drive good results.

On-page optimisation. 

For search engines to start sending traffic to your blog, they’ll need to first understand your content to know what it is about. This is known as crawling.

After search engines crawl your site and understand your blog and what its content is about, search engines then stores this information on a retrieval system. This is known as indexing.

So as whenever someone searches for something similar to what you’ve written on your blog, your content shows up on the SERPs (Search Engine Report pages).

Getting search engines to understand your blog is very easy. This can be done by making slight modifications to your blog posts/content to meet the following recommendations suggested by search engines themselves.

1. Use short URL structures. 

URLs with that are long with complex characters are often not best for search engine optimisation.

It is safer and more advantageous to use shorter URLs that give a clue of what the content is about. By clue, I mean adding the keyword of your blogpost into the URL.

2. Optimise your image. 

Image optimisation is also a part of on-page SEO. Every image uploaded on your blog has a file name and search engines will crawl to try to understand what the image is about.

Another way of helping search engines understand your image files is by adding alt attribute to all your image uploads.

Apart from making your images more visible to search engines, the alt attribute appears when a browser is unable to load your image probably due to poor network strength. This also helps users who are visually impaired to seamlessly browse through your site.

3. Make your blogpost titles short and descriptive. 

Your blog post title is the first thing an internet user sees before deciding to click on your link. However, it is not only important to make it catchy to the eyes, but also important to make it attractive to search engines. 

To write a blog title that fits within search engine recommendations, make it descriptive and not overly too long. Here’s how to go about it:

Always incorporate your keyword into your blog post title. Always! The closer to the beginning the keyword is, the better.

Limit your blog title to 30 characters. Anything longer than this will leave your titles truncated when it appears on SERPs.

4. Adjust your meta description. 

The meta description is the short text displayed by engines which usually comes just below your blog post title on SERPs.

Most bloggers do not edit their meta description (sometimes I don’t too). When you leave your meta description blank, search engines will automatically generate one based on the keywords searched by a user.

If a user searches for a term (which might have not been the major keyword used in your blog post, but you touched a bit on the topic or something related), your blog post has a chance of showing up in the SERPs with a meta description closely related to what the user searched.

However, this is not entirely reliable and it might be better to take control of your meta description by instructing search engines on what to display when a user searches for something related to your keyword.

For WordPress users, this can easily be done straight from the Yoast plugin when composing your post.

For best results when it comes to modifying your meta description, you’re advised to:

Limit your meta description to 175 characters. You will have some of your characters cut off if you exceed this limit.

Incorporate your keyword into the meta description. This will have it bolded when the term is searched, thus catching the attention of the searcher.

End your meta description with a call to action. Meta descriptions having a call to action have been proven to have over 43% more click-through rates than those that do not.

5. Modify your headline tags. 

Using different headline tags such as H1, H2, H3 etc. within your blogpost can help structure your content and better aid users and search engines to understand your content.

Search engines crawl your webpages to have a better understanding of your content to index it. You can simplify this process for search engines by including relevant keywords into your headlines tags.

For best practice:

• Only use one H1 tag per web page.
• Use the central keyword in the H1 tag.
• Add other h tags in chronological order, i.e.,
• H2, then H3 and H4 tags.

You can incorporate your focus keyword into one or two of the subheadline tags.

6. Adopt internal linking. 

You should always link your past blog posts which might be relevant to the subject topic you’re writing on. Linking to your previous post within your content will add extra spice to your content and will keep users on your site.

This can boost your search ranking as time spent on a website is also considered as a ranking factor.

When users spend time on your website, Google gets the impression that your content might be of good quality (no one spends time reading content of low quality), consequently, Google might consider increasing your ranking.

 

Step #6: Incorporate Blog outreach.

Guest blogging is a smart way to boost your brand awareness and generate quality backlinks from relevant sites (this improves your Search engine ranking).

To drive traffic to your site through guest blogging, the key is to identify and locate quality websites or blogs that are relevant to your niche, which accepts guest articles from writers.

You can determine the quality of a website by checking its domain authority. You must focus only on websites/blogs of good repute. The effectiveness of backlinks is hinged on quality rather than quantity. In the SEO world of backlink building, quantity is not as important as quantity. Remember this!

Rather than dissipating your energy on getting hundreds of backlinks from low-quality sites or blogs that are not relevant to your subject niche, you should rather focus on finding sites/blogs that cover similar topics that you do.

Getting one backlink from a quality site such as Entrepreneur.com can have a much higher impact than getting 20 backlinks from mediocre sites.

Tips for guest blogging.

Choose sites with High DA: As earlier mentioned, the domain authority of a site reflects its quality. It ranges from a scale of 0 to 100, and every website online has its DA figure which is determined by various factors. You can check a site’s DA by using the ahref or Moz tools.

Send articles to sites relevant to your niche. If your blog niche is Agriculture and you get a backlink from a site whose niche is fashion, such backlink will have a very little positive effect on your search ranking. And it will as well as get you very little referral traffic from such a website because its users are not interested in the topics you cover.

In sending articles for guest blogging, you should narrow down your effort to sites which cover a similar subject topic as you. This is much more effective than getting random links from unrelated sites.

The site should have decent traffic. Your goal is to drive visitors to your blog. It is simply common sense that your guest blogging should be targeted to sites which pull decent traffic monthly. This increases your odds of getting a few referral traffic from such websites/blogs.

Send only quality articles. You should never send half-backed articles that aren’t up to par. No one will agree to post low-quality articles on their platform. Always offer value; No one will turn down a well-written content that is targeted to the right audience.

How to get websites/blogs to accepts your guest post.

• Identify quality sites/blogs: Most high ranking websites have paid writers and do not often accept guest posts. However, seldom does anyone turn down a guest post that is of good quality.

Many websites/blogs might not allow backlinks within their content; but most sites provide an author bio section (which usually comes after a post), that provides you with the leverage to write a short bio about yourself as well as add a link to your blog/site.

You can find quality sites that are relevant to your niche which accept guest posts by simply running a quick Google search.

Simply type in the command niche + write for us into the Google search box. e.g. Assuming you are looking for a blog within the business niche that accepts guest posts, simply type in “business + write for us”

You can, therefore, make your selection from the results by first determining their quality using the tips stated above.

• Begin outreach: After identifying a good quality blog/website that accepts guest articles, the next step is to contact them via email. You can find their emails from their contact page or write for us page.

When structuring your email, be careful not to sound like a desperate spammer. The example below is a pitiful Introductory email that is often commonly sent by thousands of guest bloggers. Of course, they always get turned down!

“Hi, I was browsing through the web and I stumbled on your website (just like that?), and I loved it (for real? What exactly did you love?). I am the founder of so-and-so tech blog and I have expertise in so-and-so topic (seriously dude… like I care?) and I have a guest article which I feel your audience would love.”

There are a lot of things wrong with the introductory email above, and most guest bloggers do not have their articles approved because they keep making the same mistake.

Here is an improved version that will most likely make an editor pay attention to you. Feel free to use it. 

“Hi, my name is so-and-so. I was referred to your site/blog while searching for a term on Google. I browsed through some of your content and I liked the quality and in-depth information laced within your articles. The structure and tone of your contents make it both easy and enjoyable to read. Having gone through some of your content, I’ve developed an article specifically written for your blog titled ………………., this article is intended to enable your audience gain a better understanding of …………….., I’ve made meticulous effort to mimic the style of your writing to fit perfectly with your tone. However, the article is nonetheless subject to editing. Kindly let me know if you’re up for it. Regards.”

• Do not sound too desperate: it is a wrong practice to approach guest blogging from the point of desperation. Be calm in your approach and for the love of God, do not beg! Always offer quality articles that give value. Editors will be happy to feature articles that resonate well with their audience and offers good information

• Do not send out duplicate/plagiarised content: Submitting the same article to two different blogs/websites is often counterproductive. Editors use various tools to determine whether or not an article is plagiarized or have a duplicate version elsewhere. They do this before ever considering publishing an article on their platform.

Therefore, if you plan on distributing the same article to various blogs, be sure you’ll be found out and this might take a hit on your reputation.

If you sent a guest post to a blog and you do not receive a response after a week or two, it is most likely they didn’t approve your article; you’re at liberty to forward it to another blog.

• Edit your work before sending: Before hitting the email to send your guest article, always undergo proper review and editing of your work. No one would want to read content laced with typo errors or ridiculous grammatical blunders. You can make use of Grammarly or Hemmingway editor to edit your work to strike out any mistakes.

Guest posting is a long term traffic building strategy. Do not get discouraged when you get turned down (you definitely will. Sometimes) especially when you’re just starting with little or no popularity.

Another way to go about it is to form alliances or partnership with bloggers in your niche. Reach out to them and try to strike a bargain on how you can both benefit from a partnership.

 

Step #7: Build an email list. 

An email list is undoubtedly the most reliable means of generating traffic to your blog.

Most users who stumble on your website may never return, but setting up a system designed to collect their emails before leaving can be an effective way of getting them back to your site whenever you publish new content. This is known as email outreach.

This is the process of getting users to subscribe to your mailing list; whereby you get their emails to alert them whenever a new blog post gets published on your blog.

This is the reason why it is advised to start building an email list the very moment your blog goes live.

Social referrals are unreliable and search engine traffic is often subject to fluctuations, but your email list is yours and yours forever. It is the most reliable means of getting visitors to your website.

How to use an email list to drive traffic to your blog. 

1. Create an email sign up form: The first step in building an email list and converting your list to traffic is to design an attractive signup form through which people can submit their emails. For WordPress users, the steps involved is as simple as installing just a plugin.

There are various ways you can create an email sign up form. You can use services such as Mailchimp, Aweber, Sumo, Optinmoster, Constant Contact etc.

My favourite is MailChimp. All email marketing services are premium (you’ll have to pay for it). However, Mailchimp allows you to grow your list to 2000 subscribers before you’re asked to upgrade your package to a paid one.

To begin your email list building process, you’ll first need to visit the Mailchimp website to sign up and have your website/blog registered.

2. Incorporate email pop-ups.

3. Offer exclusive content/an incentive/ or a freebie.

4. Create a newsletter/ email marketing services

 

Step #8: Repurpose Old content

Repurposing old content simply means recreating it in another format. For example, if you’ve published an article in the past, rather than allow it sit and rot away, you can bring it back to life by recreating it in a different format (probably as video or Infographic).

This strategy doesn’t just help in getting more traffic to your blog, but it also solves one primary problem a lot of bloggers encounter– stale content.

When you run out of ideas on what to blog about or looking for inspiration on how to generate fresh content, you can simply take out one of your old content and modify or recreate it.

Repurposing your content can help you achieve more social shares and attract new visitors to your blog.

A blog post you’ve written years ago can be modified to tackle more present issues and fit the taste of a new kind of audience. Just give it a try, you’ll be amazed by the results.

4 easy techniques for repurposing old content.

1. Create a video tutorial 

Videos have been observed to attract more viewers than articles and images. Even social media algorithm such as Facebook tend to give videos more organic reach than any other post format. Hence, recreating that old blog post into a video can be a smart idea.

“How Tos” blog posts are great material for videos. You can simply convert such content into a video tutorial.

You don’t have to invest a huge amount of money paying an editor to create a video for you. You can make use of video tools such as videoshop, vidlab, visual.ly, Inshot,  or even Boomerang to create video content. Most of these services are free.

2. Transform your blogpost into infographics.

Who doesn’t love infographics? For status, an infographic is a perfect way to crunch down long content into visuals for easy understanding and remembrance.

Who wouldn’t love that? Transforming your old blog post into an infographic can increase your social shares and generate free backlinks for your blog.

You can make use of Canva to create eye catchy infographics.

3. Convert old blog posts into an eBook. 

If you have sufficient content on your blog, that means you already have a book laying around without even realising it. Creating an eBook is one of the most effective lead magnets that currently exists in digital marketing.

When a new visitor arrives on your blog and you offer them a free eBook in exchange for their emails, they most likely will grab the offer. It presents you as a thought leader in your industry and can help foster your brand awareness.

Going through the process of writing an eBook might be daunting for most. I mean, you barely even have time coming up with fresh content. Nonetheless, if you’ve stocked your blog with sufficient blog posts, you can create these posts into an eBook. You can even sell them.

You can convert your blog content into an eBook by simply compiling your blogposts which addresses a particular subject. Or you can take one of your long articles and turn it into an eBook. e.g. this particular guide (which you’re currently reading) is over 11000+ words. That will make over 20 pages if transferred to a word processor. That’s sufficient content for an eBook.

What I’m saying in essence is, you need not write an eBook from scratch. Dig through your old posts and convert it into an eBook and have it posted on social media. You’ll be pleased with the number of new visitors it will drive to your blog.

4. Share shorter versions of your blog posts on forums. 

Forums such as Quora, Reddit, and Nairaland are fantastic places to share your content and drive traffic to your blog.

Most people are a bit sceptical about reposting their blogposts on forums. They fear search engines might penalise their site for making duplicate content. However, you have nothing to worry about. Google won’t penalise you for this.

Nonetheless, most forums frown at self-promotion. Hence, you have to be careful while reposting your content over there. Quora is a little bit mild. All you need to do is identify a niche where you can offer genuine insight and only post a link to your blog when it is relevant to the subject matter.

Summary: Getting traffic to your blog takes time. If you’re able to implement these tips shared in this post and apply a bit of patience, you’ll see your traffic skyrocket in no time.