8 Proven Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog in 2020

Currently, there are close to 250 million blogs in the internet-verse. Many of them are vying for your target audience’s attention. However, there are only a few blogs that enjoy a constant flow of traffic and engagement. If you want to make your blog among those select few, read on.

Blog marketing needs skills, persistence and patience. Of the strategies mentioned below, some will get you high traffic quickly while others will put your traffic on a slow increase. You’ll have to use a mix of both these methods to start reaping benefits from your blog.

1. Check the UI/UX of your blog

If you started a while back, chances are that your blog wasn’t fully mobile responsive. With mobile being the medium of choice for 70% of the audience in most markets, it is important to have a clean responsive design. In addition to this, readable fonts, large alluring imagery, content chunking, lead capture mechanisms are some of the basics that need to be in place. Don’t forget to check the page speed of your blog to remove any unwanted code and manage the size of the images you upload. Having these hygiene checks in place seems to be the most obvious thing to do but still many bloggers don’t pay as much attention to it due to paucity of time.

2. Get your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices in order

SEO is the slow burn way to increase traffic to your blog. The optimization you do today is likely to drive traffic in the next few years.

SEO best practices suggest that each page on a site should be optimized for one particular keyword. Blogs come in handy when you have a lateral keyword strategy. They help in introducing your product, telling a story, drawing a happy picture with testimonials and reeling in a prospect. To ensure the blog continues to draw traffic, build quality links to all the inner pages.

3. Build a marketing plan for every single blog post

This one is a difficult strategy even for seasoned bloggers. At times, most bloggers are caught between writing a new blog every week while also marketing the new one or the one before that. In most cases, the mandatory posting to social happens once, maybe twice, and then the article disappears into an obscure corner of your website.

To get out of this rut, the best way is to have a plan for each blog. Here are a few ideas on building a plan

1. Target each blog to a different niche of your base: If you blog about parenting, you can break down topics into categories like health and nutrition, academics, extracurricular activities and emotional wellbeing. A blog under each of these topics can be marketed by tying up with leading websites in the category to push traffic to your blog. Eventually, you’ll have a rich link history built to your websites.
2. Put the basics in place for every blog: Have a scheduler in place to ensure each blog is visible by different audiences across social channels.
3. Maintain a re-marketing sheet: Once a blog has run its course of initial visibility, add it to a re-marketing sheet. Use topics that are over 4 months old to occasionally re-post on social.
4. Update your seasonal posts: If you’ve created a blog on the top Diwali sweets, do some general rewriting and post it as fresh content. This helps you to recycle old content with minimal fuss.

Also Read: 10 Incredible Blogging Stats to Inspire You to Blog in 2020

4) Publish posts regularly

A little bit of procrastination and a whole lot of ‘I don’t have time’ generally leads to blogs being published with delay. Having a schedule is an interesting way to get your reader base habituated to expecting blogs from you at fixed intervals.

The best way to do this is to go all out and start a weekly or bi-monthly newsletter which includes the blogs you have published. With deadlines looming close, you will force yourself for faster closures and publishing cycles.

Start with a simple schedule like publishing a blog every Friday and sending out an email to your subscriber base on a Saturday. This gives you the entire week to be productive and close a blog post on time.

5) Connect with other bloggers

While one blogger can add value, a group of bloggers of the same niche can be an invaluable resource when it comes to brand collaborations. Grow your subscriber base so that you can hold your own when you interact with other bloggers.

Through offline events or with thoughtful comments online, you can slowly and steadily build your blogger connect to network. Eventually, cross-linking to resources can be a valuable way to drive incremental traffic.

You can also take this a notch up by guest posting on others’ blogs or allowing guest posting on yours.

6) Create rich content for your blogs

A story can have different narratives depending on the channel used for the narration. From text to video, to images to cinemagraphs to infographics, every piece of content can give a different cut to a specific user base. Aim to imagine the formats of the story before making it completely. That way, you will be able to make some changes on the go.

Also Read: Move over blogs, articles. Here are new content formats to consider

7) Promote on social

Though this one is obvious, we don’t see a lot of people doing this right. If you are writing for an international audience, you can use buffer or Hootsuite to schedule posting at times that can work well for other time zones.

Tagging your relevant target base on social is a great way to get them to repost/retweet your blog. You can also run contests that have answers hidden in your blog. You can run a Q&A session with an expert or ask your target audience for feedback and comments. The plan is to know which one you want to try for which post to see how it affects your traffic.

Also Read: Tips to increase social engagement on your blog

8) Promote selected blogs

With organic reach of posts declining with time, it is imperative that you experiment with promoted posts to expand your reach to new readers. While bidding on Google can be a little exhaustive on the pocket for competitive keywords, it can help for keywords with lesser competition. Facebook and Instagram can be good sources of traffic.

If you find this technique working for you, try an always on campaign to increase your blog’s subscriber base.

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