Blogs can be a large part of your content marketing efforts.
Each month, about 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages.
If you haven’t already been maintaining blog content for your brand, you might be deciding that now is the time to get started.
Great! But once you launch your new blog, how do you begin to drive traffic to it? Clearly, a blog with no page views is like a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it. In other words, you’re not going to hit any of your marketing or revenue goals with a low-performing blog.
The following are 19 tips to help your new blog get attention.
Determine your target audience
This is a common requirement for any sort of successful content marketing tactic. While many small businesses would love to target everyone all the time (because who wouldn’t want your product or service?), you have to get real.
First, everyone has a budget. And yours is going to go much further when you are targeting a more specific group of people than if you’re trying to reach everyone.
Second, you’ll be that much more effective by targeting a niche of consumers who are most likely to purchase. That’s right. Aiming “small” (but targeted) will lead to a better ROI (return on investment).
Of course, your target audience is more than a handful of demographic characteristics. See our seven tips to help you determine the best target audience for your brand.
Plan engaging blog content ideas
It might sound obvious, but there’s not a huge reason to push for more blog traffic if your content is lackluster. You’ll simply lose the readers you do get and definitely won’t be able to build a relationship with them.
Content that’s clear, engaging and even solves a problem that your target audience might be dealing with will not only attract visitors but also leave your audience wanting more. Both are good things!
Consider as your brainstorming blog topics:
- Your expertise. What relevant knowledge can you share?
- The interests of your readers. What are they wanting or needing to know?
- Trending topics. What can you contribute to the conversation?
Once you have a list of topic ideas, get organized. Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.
Develop attention-grabbing blog headlines
Headlines can greatly impact how well your blog posts perform. They are on the frontlines representing your content and impacting whether an internet user will click through on your link or not.
In a nutshell, you want to be clear, catchy and detailed while also not being too long.
See our 19 tips to write effective, engaging headlines.
Optimize for SEO
Keep in mind the phrases and keywords that your target audience will most likely use in search engines, like Google or Bing. You’ll want to naturally incorporate these throughout your content.
You can try any of these 11 free keyword research tools to get an idea of the proper keywords you should use.
This effort can help search engines find you and recommend your specific piece of content to the potential searching audience, which can then lead to free website traffic.
See our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners to dive deeper.
Consistency is critical
You’ll want to publish new blog posts consistently. Of course, consistency does not mean posting daily at the same time each day. It just means that you must decide on a posting schedule and then stick to it.
This serves your visitors, so they know when to expect new content, but this also can help your ranking for search engines, which trust websites with consistent new content versus those with an erratic posting schedule.
When deciding how often to post, consider your time and resources first. You don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver as soon as you start. Remember that you can always build up your posting schedule over time as it makes sense to do so.
Go long with your content
This isn’t permission to go long just for the sake of going long. There needs to be substance behind it, of course.
Long-form content offers readers deeper, more concise information. But that’s not the only benefit.
Sharing rates typically increase along with the content length of your blog on all the major social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook. In addition, the top ten results for any given search tend to go to content with at least 2,000 words, and the rankings tend to decrease along with the word count.
Just make sure that you break up your longer content with subheadings, images and so on.
Never go out of style with evergreen content
Evergreen content remains relevant over a long period of time. It’s not time-sensitive in any way, but it could be seasonal, where the content can continue to come back every year and be just as relevant. This sustainability will help feed continued traffic to your blog.
To get the ball rolling on evergreen content, think about the questions you’re frequently asked by customers.
Use visuals
We as humans are more visual by nature. Our eyes are drawn to images before text.
Leverage this by incorporating images, GIFs, videos and graphics into your new blog. Plus, you have the ability to properly tag your images so that search engines can understand the types of assets you’re offering to visitors within your text content.
Confirm your website loading speed
About 57 percent of online shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds for a page to load. And search engines are paying attention to your loading speed as well, which will lower your search ranking if you’re slower than you should be.
Not sure what your website’s loading speed is? Start with Google’s Page Speed Insights. You’ll not only find out the loading speed of your pages on mobile but also get some diagnostic advice on how to fix any of the slower pages.
Website loading speed is critically important to mobile marketing in general. Check out our 14 tips to help you optimize for mobile consumption in additional ways.
Embrace internal linking
Internal linking is all about linking to your other content that’s relevant in the current blog that visitors are reading.
This benefits your SEO efforts, and it can help keep visitors on your website longer by visiting that related content in addition to your original content that attracted them in the first place.
Just make sure that you’re only using links that are relevant and valuable. Keep an eye out for opportunities to link to other content as you’re working on new content.
Build up quality backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks that point from one website to another (as opposed to internal links that are linking within your website). About 91 percent of all web pages never get any organic traffic from Google, and that’s mostly due to the fact that they don’t have backlinks.
Don’t be one of those pages.
We all want to improve the search engine ranking of our website, but when it comes to getting others to link to you, it’s easy to feel lost. Plus, you don’t want just any backlink for your site. Quality (meaning that the backlink is coming from a trusted website) is important as well.
See our seven tips to help grow quality backlinks to your content.
Consider guest blogging
By featuring other writers on your blog, you’re not only adding to the value you have with different perspectives, you’re also potentially reaching a new audience.
When you’re working with potential guest bloggers, make sure you agree in advance on how the partnership will work.
- Will they share the content on their own social media channels? If so, how often? What does that look like?
- Does anything need to be linked back to for them? What links? How many?
Of course, this can also be flipped where you’re guest blogging on another website.
Partnerships can truly be a win-win for everyone involved if planned and talked through in advance.
Social media promotion is key
Maintaining an active social media presence goes a long way toward driving traffic to your new blog. You can directly share your content with the context that should encourage users to click through to your blog.
You’ll want to consider every social media platform different and unique. What works on Twitter is not the same as what can work on Instagram.
Consider your audience and the platform when posting. You might even want to consider creating a YouTube channel to work in tandem with your blog.
In addition, having social media sharing buttons that are alongside your content will make it easy for your visitors to share your content organically on their own social accounts as well.
Learn about what you should know about social media.
Leverage email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to build personal relationships with your subscribers, and you can use snippets of your blog content within your emails that can link back to your full content.
In 2022, the number of email users worldwide is estimated to be about 4.3 billion. This is expected to grow to about 4.6 billion in 2025, making up more than half of the estimated world population.
See these 48 statistics that show the value of email marketing.
Even in a world of social media prevalence, more consumers use email than any social media platform, and more than half of consumers check their email before they check their social media in the morning.
Check out our 16 email marketing best practices so that you can put your best foot forward.
Host a contest or giveaway
You can create opportunities for your audience to win prizes by subscribing to, liking, commenting on or sharing your blog content, which can all further the reach of your blog.
Prizes could be a product you sell or a service you offer to keep it simple.
Make sure you plan ahead so that any giveaway works efficiently for you and for the participants. Plus, you’ll want to keep it all legal with thorough Terms and Conditions tied to your giveaway.
Encourage comments and discussions on your blog
Google naturally improves the search ranking of a blog that’s receiving a lot of comments because it indicates that the content is engaging.
Of course, what can help these discussions is your thoughtful responses to any comments left by readers. It creates a trusting relationship and encourages them to continue commenting.
You can always try to get the comments going by ending your blog post with an open-ended question that readers can answer in the comment section.
Participate in various Q&A websites
Question-and-answer websites are definitely one of the biggest online communities in the digital world.
By answering questions on such platforms as Quora, TripAdvisor and others, your answer will be live for a long time and could potentially drive traffic to your blog.
That being said, you want to avoid any link dumping on these sites. Instead, focus on giving as detailed an answer as possible and only include a link if it makes sense to do so.
Experiment with influencer marketing
In the simplest sense, an influencer is anyone with a digital following (or audience) on a social media platform or elsewhere whom you’d like to attract to your own brand.
The purpose of influencer marketing involves increasing brand awareness, targeting new and niche audiences and increasing impressions and reach.
By identifying and partnering with an influencer, you can reach that new audience and drive up traffic to your new blog.
But before you dive in headfirst with your first influencer marketing campaign, check out our seven tips.
Spread social proof across every platform possible
Social proof refers to potential customers assuming that what others are doing is correct based on how often they see those actions. In other words, social proof is about looking to others to figure out the right way to interact in any given situation.
You can use social proof to promote your blog on your website and across your social media channels.
Here are a handful of ideas to get started:
- Use a feedback form to collect user feedback about your blog that you can then share.
- Ask users to rate your blog articles.
- Share your social media following number, email subscribers or any other numbers.
Learn more about what social proof is and nine ways to use it, as well as 17 of the best social proof tools that you can try.
In conclusion
The biggest thing to keep in mind when launching a new blog is to have patience. Growing your website traffic organically can take time.
Focus on offering quality content that resonates and getting creative with your promotion beyond even these tips.
Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing, as well as our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners.
As you gain traction with your new blog, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.
