How to Get Thousands of Visits to Your Blog

So you’ve written yourself a blogging masterpiece.

A piece of content so brilliant it belongs in the Louvre. An article so great, you’re about to go and quit your day job to spend all the riches that are sure to come your way once the world reads it.

Excitedly, you hit publish. And then… Nothing!

1 hour passes and not a single person lands on your site. 6 hours… still not a peep. 12 hours… still no one. After 24 hours you realise your blog post didn’t quite have the impact you were expecting.

Sound like your blog?

Don’t worry. In this article I’ll teach you how to get thousands of visits to your articles.

The image above is a Google Analytics snapshot taken from a blogging experiment I conducted a couple of years ago with a friend from the digital marketing space. We created a tech/futurism blog to test various methods of aggressive traffic generation in preparation for a project we were due to work on. We produced only 12 articles for the blog but quickly grew the visitor numbers. So as you can see, growing significant traffic doesn't necessarily need to take years of your time and hundreds of thousands of words of content.

That said, I think it's important to point out that effective blogging requires experimentation, perseverance and a commitment to quality. 

So if you’re ready, let’s begin.

SEO – Optimise for Search Engines

I briefly touched upon SEO in my article entitled How to Create a Blogging Masterpiece. I now want to go into a little more detail to help you really make the most of your blog and make sure you aren’t missing an enormous opportunity to gain some targeted organic search traffic. After all, an effective SEO campaign can drive thousands of visitors to your blog all by itself.

Step 1 - Keyword Research: Find out what your audience is already searching for

This tip could’ve easily gone in How to Create a Blogging Masterpiece but I decided it would be more at home here because this is a great way to begin thinking about how to get more visits to your blog post.

If you have an idea for a blog post, do some research to see if it’s something your target audience is already looking for. This will give you an idea of whether there is demand for the content, and it will also give you an idea on what keywords you should use.

This can be done in a number of ways.

Google Auto Complete - Google’s standard search suggestion is a great way to research. If you have an idea for an article, simply begin writing what you believe would be a logical title for your article into the Google search box, and you’ll gain some idea of just how popular the search query is.

For example, let’s say I’ve decided I want to write an article that shows people how to wire a plug. I’ve decided that How to Wire a Plug would be a good title so I begin typing it into Google (see image below).

As you can see, how to wire a plug is one of the first suggestions when I type how to wire into the Google search box. This means that it is likely to be a popular search term and is the reason why Google have made that suggestion for me.

The trouble here is, there will be thousands of results with those exact keywords, after all it’s a common thing people need to learn. This means that it might be extremely difficult to rank for that particular set of keywords in the short term.

If that’s the case, look to be more specific so you’re targeting exactly who your article is aimed at.

For example, because I’ve seen that the keyword string how to wire a plug is a highly competitive one, I’ve decided to be more specific. Now I’ve added another word, in this case the country the plug is designed for, to test the keyword’s popularity (see image below).

This keyword string is far more targeted than the previous one as the article I’ve created teaches people how to wire a UK plug. Because I’ve added the country of the plug, I’m far more likely to rank highly for this term as there will be far less competition. In the process, I’ll also avoid wasting people’s time that land on my site expecting to learn how to wire a US or standard European plug.

UberSuggest - Another great free way to get keyword suggestions and find out what people are already searching for in relation to the article you’ve created is UberSuggest. Simply go over to their website and type in some keywords that you want some suggestions for and UberSuggest will scan the web to give you some great ideas.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - This wasn’t specifically designed for SEO but it is a very handy tool for gauging competition on certain keywords and seeing how popular they are. Simply head over to Google Adwords and sign up for a free account. You’ll then be able to take advantage of this great tool without spending a penny.

Google Trends - This is a great tool to compare keywords, see how popular they’ve been over time, and also see predictions on how popular they’ll be in the future. Head over to Google Trends to have a play, it will give you a good insight into what terms are popular with your audience.

Step 2 – Include your chosen keywords in your blog post’s title

One of the first things you should do after choosing the keywords you want to rank for is ensuring they’re put into your blog post’s title. This is one of the main things Google looks at when indexing your site and it holds a great deal of weight. This makes sense because the title of your blog post should obviously give a strong hint as to what’s included in the article.

Make sure your title is also something appealing to your audience, obviously you want them to click on the search result when they find it.

Step 3 – Use heading tags

Heading tags are great for SEO. Especially your <h1> and <h2> tags. An H1 tag defines the page’s title, so on this page for instance, the <h1> tag  relates to the title How to Get Thousands of Visitors to Your Blog. An <h2> tag on the other hand is useful for breaking up a page’s content into sections. For example, on this page my first <h2> tag relates to the subheading SEO – Optimise for Search Engines.

If you’re using WordPress, you can easily add heading tags by highlighting the text you want to make a heading and selecting the correct tag from the drop down in the visual editor (see image below).

Step 4 – Include keywords in the body of your blog post

Make sure you include your keywords in the body of your article. If you stick to the subject matter dictated by the blog post’s title you will probably naturally do this anyway. One word of advice here, don’t repeat your keywords too many times because Google and other search engines will penalise you for it.

Step 5 – Write an awesome meta description

It’s believed that there is very little SEO benefit derived from the meta description in terms of ranking, but for increasing your click through rate (the percentage of people that click on your link after it appears in a search result) it can have an amazing effect. If you’re unsure what the meta description actually is, check out the image below.

The meta description is the piece of text that is placed below the title and the url in the search results. The meta description is used to describe the content on a particular web page.

Step 6 – Follow the rest of this guide

The steps I’ve provided you with so far are to ensure that Google can easily index your blog post and are what we call on-page SEO, on-site SEO or technical SEO. By following the rest of the tips in this guide you’ll find that you’ll be able to increase your rank further as you’ll be participating in what’s called off-page SEO.

Social Sharing – It’s Time to Tell the World

So you’ve created your blogging masterpiece and you’ve optimised it for the search engines. Now it’s time to tell the world.

If you follow these steps you’ll be well on your way to massively boosting the number of visitors to your blog.

Step 1 - Share with your networks

The first thing you should do is share your blog post with your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Google+,LinkedIn and any other social networks you’re currently using to promote your blog. This is a great way to get the first wave of traffic and social shares.

To help increase your number of social shares, when posting to your networks, ask your followers to share your blog post with their connections as well. Research has shown that you get far more social shares if you actually ask your audience to share your content.

If you don’t have a social following as of yet, use your personal profiles to get that first bit of traction. Although it may not be highly targeted, your friends are likely to want to support you and will share your content. This will start some activity on your blog and your social media accounts.

Step 2 – Join the conversation

Hashtags are amazing things and have opened up the potential for massive online global conversation in a truly profound way.

When posting your blog article to your social channels, make sure you include a hashtag. By doing this you’ll be exposing your blog post to a much bigger potential audience, it’ll be targeted as well because hashtags allow people to find content they’re looking for.

Step 3 – Social bookmarking

This is an area where I advise caution. Social bookmarking can be an incredible source of traffic for blogs but it shouldn’t be used in the same way as your other social channels.

When I say social bookmarking, I’m talking about platforms such as StumbleUpon and Reddit. If you’re thinking of going on to these platforms to only share your own material, don’t! Social bookmarking sites have vibrant communities and they’re built on the premise that people share some of the great content they come across.

If you’re going to use social bookmarking sites, become part of the community, share interesting and insightful things you find on the web. That way, when you post the occasional piece of your own content, the community will be far more open to it and likely to share it themselves.

Step 4 – Ensure your blog post is easily shareable

Make sure your blog post is easy for your audience to share. As you can see on this blog post, I have social sharing at the top and the bottom of the article. This means that people can quickly and easily share this blog post with their social networks.

By making your content easy to share you can potentially reach an enormous audience that will also be happy to share the content you put out there. If your content is exceptional, you may well see the content go viral.

Email – Don’t forget to tell your regulars

Email marketing is probably my favourite form of marketing. Having worked in e-commerce over the last few years, email has produced the best return on investment time and time again.

You’ve probably read a whole host of articles predicting the death of email, but you need to remember one very important thing. Email continues to be the preferred method of communication in business and I certainly don’t see that changing in the near future.

If you already have a subscriber list in place, that’s great, every time you produce a new blog post (as long as the content is substantial) you can fire out a quick update to drive traffic to your post. Because the people on that list have subscribed, the chances are they’ll be interested in the content and will click through. Obviously, the bigger the list, the more traffic you can expect.

If you don’t yet have a subscriber list in place, now is a great time to start. Put subscribe forms on your blog and encourage readers to sign up. You’ll see I have a couple of areas on the blog where I try to entice readers to subscribe. I’ll be writing a post in the future about how you can boost your number of subscribers so be sure to sign up for my newsletter to stay updated

Community Outreach – You’re not alone

One of the greatest things about being a blogger is that you get to be part of an active online community.

The community also provides an excellent opportunity to increase your reach and gain huge targeted traffic volumes to each and every blog post. There are a number of ways to do this including the following.

Google+ Communities - If you have a Google+ social profile, joining communities related to your blog’s niche is a great way to gain more visitors to your blog posts. By joining Google+ communities you’re able to post your latest articles onto them and potentially a huge number of people will see this content.

Triberr - Triberr is a great way to get the blogging community to help you build your traffic. Basically, Triberr works by other bloggers in a similar niche to your own sharing your content to their own audience.

Blog Commenting - Find some blog posts that are covering similar topics to your blog post and comment in the comment sections and provide a link to your content. You should be an active participant on other blogs with comments and feedback, you shouldn’t just spam comment sections with your links. Offer some value in your responses.

Forum Posting - There are forums out there for just about everything these days, and some of them are highly active areas filled with thousands of people sharing knowledge and asking for help. Find the forums that are closely related to your niche and become an active participant on them. That way, you’ll be able to drive new traffic to your blog post by linking to relevant blog posts that relate to the subject matter being discussed.

Q&A Sites - There are a number of Q&A sites out there such as Quora and Yahoo answers. Go on there and help solve problems people are having. It’s a great way of driving traffic.

Advertising – Sometimes, paid exposure can work wonders

If you have created a blog post that has a clear call to action for your audience and a way of generating subscriptions or revenue, you may want to consider advertising the post. There are so many options when it comes to paid media that you’re spoilt for choice.

Google Adwords – Paid search can help guarantee that you’re on top of Google, although you have to pay for each click, you can at least guarantee there will be clicks.

Facebook Ads - Facebook ads are good because there are a number of different options and you can target users based on a whole host of different criteria. Another added benefit is that you can also pick up a load of new followers for your Facebook page.

Twitter Ads - I’m less familiar with Twitter ads as they’re relatively new to the UK. However, I’ve heard some good things about the Twitter ad platform so you may want to explore some of the options here.

LinkedIn ads - Similar to the other social media ad platforms, LinkedIn ads allow you to really focus your targeting based on key criteria. This would certainly work better for business or finance related blogs.

There are countless options when it comes to marketing and I’ve only mentioned a few here. I will probably write a post in more detail in the future outlining many of the different options. If you do decide to use advertising to promote your blog post, I highly recommend looking towards cheaper options because you’re unlikely to see a good return in the long run.

Repeat – It was so much fun we should do it again

If your blog post is great today, chances are it’ll also be great in a month’s time. So the first thing you should consider doing is posting it out to your social networks again.

A huge portion of your social followers would’ve missed the post the first time so it certainly doesn’t hurt to repost valuable content.

I hope this blog post has been useful to you. If you have any tips you’d like to share or feedback you’d like to offer please leave a comment. I’d also be really grateful if you shared this article with your networks using the sharing buttons below.

Now that you know how to get thousands of visitors to your blog post, go out there and do it and report back.