Starting a blog lately has become easy with platforms like WordPress. However, once it’s up and running, the subsequent big challenge you’ve got is to bring more traffic to your blog or website.

Don’t worry, you don’t get to be a marketing guru to market your blog. You can easily increase your blog traffic to urge more visitors by using some proven best practices.

In this article, we’ll share a number of the simplest and tested tips to extend your blog traffic like an expert marketer.

 

 

Unlike other articles on growing blog traffic, we are only getting to share tips that we’ve personally wont to increase our website traffic to many page views monthly.

We even have done our greatest to make this the foremost comprehensive website traffic guide, so you will have a holistic blog traffic strategy for your business.

Ready? Let’s get started.

 

Before You Start – Setup Push Notifications for Your Site

Website push notification helps you stay in touch with your visitors after they leave your website, so you can bring them back. These are the top 5 traffic sources on Wehavedigitaltool.

We use the tool called PushEngage. It’s a freemium software that we highly recommend for all bloggers, website owners, and eCommerce sites.

It allows you to send notifications to your visitor’s mobile or desktop device that is hard to miss, so you get away higher engagement rate than social media or email.

The best part is, you’ll communicate with visitors after they’ve left your site.
We use it on all of our websites, and it’s far and away from the simplest traffic channel for us.

Not many website owners realize this tactic because it wont to be hard to line up within the past. PushEngage has made that easy. Here’s the way to add web push notifications in WordPress.
Once you are doing this, any of the ideas below will drive compounding traffic growth!

 

How to Increase Your Blog Traffic 

 

1. Create Audience Profiles to Understand Your Users

 

 

Before you begin creating content for your blog, it’s important to spend a touch time understanding your audience and what they’re trying to find.

You can quickly build an audience framework by answering the subsequent questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
• What kind of content are they looking for?
• How would they ideally try to find the answers to their questions?

Answering these questions will help you get a clearer picture of your target audience.

You can also expand on this by adding further personalized questions such as:

• How old are they?
• What are their occupations?
• What is their education level?
• What is their expertise level in the subject matter of your blog?

These audience profiles are also known as buyer personas in the eCommerce industry. If you run an online store, then we highly recommend that you check out this detailed guide on how to create a buyer persona with examples and templates.

 

2. Do Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy

 

 

Keyword research could also be a way employed by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover specific words and sentences that users type in Google and other search engines to seek out the content they’re trying to find.

Normally, beginners just believe their best guesses when creating content. As you’ll imagine, this strategy may be a hit or miss.

If you use the “best-guess” strategy, then there’s a high chance that your articles will likely not rank high in search engines.

Simply because no one’s trying to find the keywords you’ve got used, or there’s just an excessive amount of competition for those keywords.

By doing proper keyword research, you will unlock the following benefits:

• Discover actual search terms people are looking for
• Find unique content ideas for popular search terms
• Learn from your competitors and beat them with better content
• Create a series of pillar articles to drive steady traffic to your blog

Now the question is how does one actually do keyword research? Luckily, it’s not as difficult as you’d think.

There are tons of free and paid keyword research tools which will help. We use SEMRush for our content strategy.

All you would have to do is enter a keyword, a competitor’s blog/website URL, or your own URL to find out more keyword ideas.

We have created an in-depth guide on the way to do keyword research for your WordPress blog with step-by-step instructions.

 

3. Make an Editorial Calendar

 

 

Once you’ve got done the keyword research, you’ll likely come up with plenty of blog post ideas.
Sometimes, the massive list of keywords can overwhelm beginners to some extent where they simply hand over.

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, we recommend creating an article calendar (a game plan). Remember, no large blog was inbuilt each day.

It takes time and consistent effort to make a successful blog.

Creating an article calendar will assist you to create and stick with the plan.

There are many useful tools that you simply can use like Asana and Trello to call a couple of.

These tools accompany a strong set of features that will assist you to stay top of your game.

The goal is to arrange, create a bird’s eye view of your strategy, and be more productive.

Here are some more tips on managing your editorial workflow more efficiently.

• Don’t be too hard on yourself. Start with two articles a week and gradually increase your pace when you can.
• Be consistent with your publishing schedule. Make sure you follow your calendar and publish regular content as planned.
• Add notes, keyword ideas, and outlines to your calendar. This will help you produce better quality content when you sit down to write.
• Use colors, tags, categories, and other features in your calendar app to make it more visual and organized.

 

 

Here are some more tips on managing an editorial calendar for your blog.

 

4. Create Comprehensive and Useful Content

 

 

 

The most important thing that users and search engines search for is sweet quality content.
For a blog, a top-quality piece of content is typically a comprehensive article on a selected topic that covers all the small print. This makes it extremely helpful for users.

These comprehensive articles are known as “pillar articles”. Other experts may ask them as flagship content or cornerstone articles.

Basically, these are your most important articles. You need to choose the most promising keyword and then provide as much information as you could in one long-form article.

You should create as many pillar articles as possible to hide all the important keywords in your industry.

 

We will cover more tips later in this article that will help you create high-quality pillar articles to get more traffic from search engines.

 

5. Make Your Content Readable

 

 

 

As we mentioned earlier, search engines and users love longer and comprehensive articles that provide all the knowledge they have.

Now the matter is that humans have a brief span.

Slight difficulty in reading or understanding will postpone your users, and that they will leave without watching all the useful information that you simply offered.

To solve this problem before it happens, you would like to form all of your content easy to read.
A good place to start out would be to present your article in bite-size sentences employing a friendly tone and many visuals.

Following are just some basic tips to make your content more readable and user-friendly.

Use smaller sentences and paragraphs. This leaves a lot of white space around text making it easier to look at and read.
Try to improve typography by using more readable fonts, large font sizes, and plenty of line spacing.
Check the readability score of your content. Yoast SEO comes with a built-in tool for that, you can also find tons of other online readability checkers
Use a grammar checker. We recommend using Grammarly, it not only checks grammar but actually helps you write better.
Use images, screenshots, videos, infographics, and other visual elements. These media elements make your article highly engaging and easier to read.

6. Learn and apply the SEO basics to your Website

 

 

 

SEO may be a set of best practices that assist you to make your website more program-friendly. You don’t get to be an ‘SEO Guru’ to enhance your website.

Contrary to popular belief, anyone can do SEO for his or her own websites without hiring an expert. There are many SEO tools and plugins, free advice, and step-by-step tutorials available that you simply can use.

We recommend using an An in One SEO plugin for all WordPress websites. It is the foremost comprehensive SEO and website optimization tool. The free version includes all the SEO features that you simply will need on your website.

You can learn all you would like to understand about SEO, in our complete WordPress SEO guide for beginners. It includes step-by-step instructions, and it’s the precise same SEO setup that we use on our own websites.

 

7. Learn to Write Great Headlines

 

 

When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the primary thing they see is your article headline.

A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a clear and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.

This makes headlines very important.

You need to find out the way to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and obtain more clicks.

Luckily, blogging experts are doing research on headlines for a real while, and you’ll enjoy their findings.

These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:

A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
It offers users a reward and value
It promotes the content by including target keywords

 

Copywriters use powerful words to trigger emotional responses. They tell users why the article is valuable or what they will get from clicking on the headline.

Lastly, a good headline includes a call to action for users which is often subtle and sometimes implied.

To learn more, we recommend you to check out these headlines that went viral and what you can learn from them.

You can also use the following free headline analyzer tools to help create better headlines:

• OptinMonster Headline Analyzer
• MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer
• EMV Headline Analyzer

Our team regularly uses these three tools to create better blog post titles and headlines.

 

8. Make Internal Linking a Routine Task

 

 

Now that you have started creating good content, it is important to link to your articles from your existing blog posts. This is called internal linking, and it plays a huge role in SEO

We recommend making it a habit to link to your older articles from your new articles.

Because internal links play such an important role in SEO, we have even made it part of our pre-publish checklist for our writers.

 

9. Start Generating More Backlinks

 

 

A backlink is an incoming link to your content from an external website. Backlinks are one of the foremost influential signals in Google’s rankings.

Getting backlinks from reputable websites and blogs is extremely difficult. Not only for beginners, but even experienced bloggers also struggle with it.

 

 

 

10. Add Images, Charts, Infographics to Create Visually Attractive Content

 

 

In step 5, we mentioned that adding images and charts to your articles makes them more readable.
Since visual elements are so important, we believe they deserved their own spot on this list.

As a citizenry, our brain prefers visual elements. We love colors and objects because aesthetics trigger emotional responses in our brains. This makes us more engaged and immersed in our surroundings.

People love watching infographics because they create knowledge engaging and straightforward to consume.

Images in your blog posts grab user’s attention and help them concentrate on the visual element and the text around it.

If you’re just starting, then it’s important to understand that you simply simply simply cannot just use any image you see on the web. Images are protected by copyright and stealing copyrighted material can have serious consequences.

Ideally, you’d wish to use your own images, graphics, and pictures, but not all bloggers are graphic designers or photographers.

Luckily, there are numerous great resources to hunt out royalty-free images, and there are even tools that you simply simply simply can use to create your own graphics. Here are some helpful resources:

• 16 best places to find free public domain images
• 16 best tools to create better images for your blog posts
• Guide on how to optimize images for blog posts

 

11. Add Videos to Your Articles

 

 

Videos are the foremost successful sort of content on the web. Users spend longer on blog posts containing videos than simply text and pictures.

Adding videos to your articles in WordPress is super easy. However, you ought to never upload videos to WordPress because it’s not optimized to stream videos.

A video hosted on your WordPress hosting server will take up too many resources, and therefore the user experience would be terrible.

The best thanks to adding videos to your WordPress site is by uploading them to YouTube then embedding them in your blog posts.

This gives you even more exposure as YouTube itself is that the world’s second-largest program, and a well-liked social media platform.

 

For video editing, if you are using Mac, then iMovie is perfectly capable of performing basic video edits. Windows users can use free video editing software like Lightworks or Shotcut for basic editing.

 

12. Utilize User-Generated Content

 

 

User-generated content is essentially any content generated on your website as a result of user activity. This includes comments, testimonials, guest posts, user reviews, and more.

User-generated content helps you bring more traffic to your website because it gives users multiple opportunities to participate and obtain involved.

Users are more likely to return, share, and even purchase from your website once they spend longer thereon.

There are many various sorts of user-generated content that you simply can add. You need to settle on what works best for your blog and begin from there.

For more ideas, see our guide on how to use user-generated content in WordPress to grow your website.

 

13. Keep Your Website Design Clean and Clutter-Free

 

 

There are tons of great WordPress themes available on the market. The problem is that a lot of beginners want to use a topic with all the bells and whistles. These themes aren’t always the right design for your website.

Bad website design stops your users from spending longer on your blog which decreases your page views.

Whereas an honest design helps them discover more content, explore different sections, and spend longer.

We are often asked by users the way to choose the simplest theme? Our answer is to always strive for simplicity.

A simple, clean, and functional theme makes an honest first impression and offers the only user experience.

If you are looking for some theme recommendations, then check out our expert-pick showcases:

• Best WordPress themes for writers
• Best free WordPress blog themes
• Best simple WordPress themes

14. Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster

 

 

 

In this era of instant gratification, nobody wants to attend for an internet site to load. If your website is slow, then users will simply leave your website before it even loads.

Search engines like Google also consider website speed and page load time as important ranking factors.

To make sure that your website loads fast, you would like to optimize your WordPress performance. This means you would like to use caching, avoid unnecessary bloat, and optimize your images.

We have prepared a step-by-step WordPress performance optimization guide that will assist you to speed up your website without hiring a developer.

 

15. Start Your Email List Right Away

 

 

Most beginners spend an excessive amount of their time bringing new users to their website. However, quite 70% of users leaving your website will never return.

The trick to growing your blog traffic isn’t to only get new visitors, but you furthermore may get to keep existing visitors returning.

How does one confirm that users return to your website?

You do that by asking them to subscribe to your blog.

Users can subscribe to your website’s social media profiles. However, most social networks limit your reach, and your users can only see the variety of your content.

This is why you would like to start out building your email list.

The best thing about your email list is that you simply own it. No one can limit your reach, and you get direct access to your user’s inboxes.

Email marketing is that the most cost-efficient and highly effective marketing tool at your disposal.
You are losing potential subscribers every day without an email list.

For more on this subject, please read our article on why building an email list is so important.
Once you’ve got an email list, you’ll send regular email newsletters to bring more visitors to your blog.

We recommend using Aweber

Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to create an email newsletter.

 

16. Automatically Share Your Blog Posts

 

 

When we stress that you simply should build an email list, we don’t mean that you simply should stop building a social media following.

Quite the other, in fact, we would like you to continue building a social media following on all the important social platforms and even find new niche platforms that you simply can explore.

The problem with social media websites is that you simply need to regularly post content to stay your profiles active and drive traffic to your blog.

If you are doing that manually, then you’ll soon be spending quite a lot of your time on sharing content.
This is where IFTTT comes in. It is a free online service that permits you to automatically share your WordPress blog posts on social media websites.

 

17. Regularly Share Your Old Articles on Social Media

 

 

If you’re like most blogs, you almost certainly only publish one article each day, this suggests for the remainder of the day, there’s no update from you on social media.

On platforms like Twitter, your Tweet will soon disappear, and your users will probably not even see it.

Wouldn’t it’s nice if you’ll automatically share your old content at regular intervals throughout the day?

This will assist you to get more traffic from social media by increasing your visibility and keeping your profiles more active.

Luckily, you’ll automate it with tools like Buffer and Revive Old Posts.

With Buffer, you’ll need to bulk-upload your updates manually. On the opposite hand, Revive Old Posts will allow you to automatically share your own old articles.

 

18. Explore Other Social Networks

 

 

There are numerous social media websites out there, but most folks spend all of their time on a couple of top platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Obviously, you would like to specialize in them to drive more traffic to your blog.

However, by counting on your blog’s topics you’ll have more success on other social platforms that are less crowded.

For example, if your blog is about building businesses, then you’ll find more engaged users on LinkedIn.

If you run a lifestyle or fashion blog, then Instagram could also be the platform you ought to specialize in.

You can always spend time on Quora to answer user questions which build backlinks and help increase blog traffic.

We recommend that you simply try spending longer on social networks aside from the large two. You may find a more passionate audience and a much bigger following there.

 

19. Participate in Online Communities

 

 

Online communities are an excellent source of traffic mainly because they have already got engaged users who have an interest in the topics that you simply are discussing on your blogs.

You can find smaller communities on Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, YouTube communities, and more.

 

 

20. Make Your Own Online Groups

 

Another way to create a fanatical following around your blog is by starting your own online group. You can use free platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn and invite your users to hitch in.

As your community grows, so will your influence. The active participants in your group will proactively assist you to promote your blog on their own social media profiles.

After a while, this tiny community can become a serious source of traffic for your blog.

 

21. Participate in Q & A Websites

 

 

You may have noticed that sometimes years old answers from websites like Stack Exchange, Quora, or TripAdvisor would still outrank skilled blogs in search results.

Question and Answer websites are one of the most important online communities on the web.

The advantage of answering questions on these platforms is that your answer will remain alive for a really while which suggests that it can become a daily source of the traffic to your blog.

Once again, we’ll not recommend you only go there for posting your links. Instead, you ought to write actual detailed answers with links to your blog posts as long as they slot in the context.

 

22. Find and Engage with Influencers on Social Media

 

 

Influencers can help you promote your blog and can significantly boost your website traffic.

However, the problem is that most influencers get tons of messages already. Since you are a new blogger, they assume you probably don’t have anything to offer them in return.

So how do you get the attention of an influencer? More importantly, how do you get them to promote your blog?

First, you need to start a conversation with them on social media.

Next, share their content with your own commentary, reply to their threads, leave comments on their blog posts.

Make sure each of your interactions adds value to their discussion.

Influencers love it when users appreciate their efforts. They will notice and remember you. Once you have established a relationship, you can approach them to give you advice.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it helps you build life-long friendships that are mutually profitable.

 

23. Use Social Proof to Get More Traffic

 

 

Human beings are social animals. We wish to realize other people’s experiences as social proof and use them to form our own decisions.

You need to use this social proof on your website, on your social media profiles, in your tweets, and emails to market your blog.

Now you’ll be wondering, what if I’m just starting? How do I leverage social proof on my blog?

There are tons of ways to leverage social proof, even on a new blog.

• Add a feedback form and ask users to leave you feedback that you can share on your blog.
• Directly approach users and collect testimonials
• Ask users to rate your articles
• Ask users to write reviews
• Numbers are brain candy. Share your social media counts, email list subscriber counts, and other numbers as social proof.

Don’t worry if your numbers aren’t as big as other successful blogs, they are still powerful social proof.

 

24. Monitor Social Media

 

 

People are asking questions all the time on social media websites like Twitter. Set up alerts to monitor keywords on social media and then jump into conversations to answer their questions with a link back to a relevant article on your website.

You can also monitor social media websites for your brand name, links, conversations, and more.

There are plenty of tools that you can use for this. Here are some of the best social media monitoring tools that can make it all easy for you.

 

25. Track Your Website’s Keyword Rankings

 

 

After you have started creating content and promoting it, you need to track how well each piece of content is performing. Furthermore, which keywords is it ranking for?

You can do this with a tool called, Google Search Console. It is a free tool provided by Google that helps you see how your website is doing in Google Search. We have a complete Google Search Console guide that will teach you how to use this immensely powerful tool, like a Pro.

Next, you would want to monitor your competitor’s websites. Google Search Console will not tell you who is ranking higher than you and why.

For that, you’ll need a tool SEMRush. This will also give you detailed insights into your competitors, their top keywords, and what you need to do to outrank them.

 

26. Track Your Website Traffic and User Engagement

 

Now that you have started getting some traffic, you need to know where your users are coming from, and what they do when they are on your website. Without this data, you cannot evaluate your strategy or plan your next moves.

This is where Google Analytics comes in.

It tracks your website visitors and helps you see traffic reports, engagement, and other user activity on your website. For instructions, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

The biggest advantage of using Google Analytics is that you can see what your users are doing when they visit your website. See our article on how to use Google Analytics to track user engagement on your website.

Knowing this data helps you double down on what’s working, and stop doing what’s not.

 

27. Continue Learning Online Marketing and SEO

These tips will assist you to increase your blog traffic and continue getting more subscribers.

However, as your blog grows, you would like to find out more ways to grow your business.

Wehavedigitaltool is the largest WordPress resource site. We regularly publish tutorials on online marketing and SEO. We have a YouTube Channel also, where you’ll learn more about WordPress, growing your blog, and SEO.

OptinMonster Blog is another great resource that you would want to follow. OptinMonster is that the best conversion optimization software on the market. Their blog is where they frequently publish articles on the way to get more traffic, subscribers, and sales.

We hope the following pointers helped you increase your blog traffic. You may also want to ascertain our list of most useful tools to assist you extra grow your blog.