Want to Increase Blog Traffic? Some Fab Tips for Success

I am going to share the biggest and best secret about blogging and how to increase your traffic. Are you listening? Lean in really close and I will whisper it to you: create great content.

That’s the big secret! You may have a zillion followers and a gorgeous, high tech blog but people will not return if your content sucks. Bottom line. Provide value in what you create. When you create content that people love, they'll share it.

That being said, I’ll share with you a few things that you can do, once you have written something spectacular, that can get the word out to a larger audience.

From Jay Baer, “The same amount of effort you put into your content creation should also be put into relationship cultivation.”

Share at optimal times

Sprout Social helps you not only share at the optimal times based on your followers being online but also evenly distributes your amazing content throughout the day so you don’t annoy your followers with a huge spurt of brilliance and then lose them with silence later.

Schedule posts multiple times [especially on Twitter!]

My co-author of The Art of Social Media co-author, Guy Kawasaki has famously been preaching to repeat your tweets since 2009. [maybe even earlier!] Guy's article from Open Forum in 2009 called How to Drive Traffic with Repeated Tweets said after repeating one tweet four times – each one eight hours apart with great results, “One of the dogmas of Twitter is that you should not repeat your tweets.  This is bull shiitake, and I’ll show you how I know.

Some people who are new to Twitter or self-proclaimed gurus and experts in SEO, social media, or marketing make negative comments—this is called “ freedom of tweech. Based on these experiences, I encourage you to break all the “rules” that you’ve heard about social media and make your own. Like my friends from Alaska tell me, unless you’re the lead dogma, the view never changes.”

I found a fantastic new tool that I'm crazy about called Smarter Queue. You can add categories for your content and schedule things into them, then add slots into your schedule for the categories. For example, make a category called My Blog Content and then add all your posts.

And you can check off re-queue making your posts evergreen. It's SO EASY!

Engage — Thank people who share your posts and comment on your blog! I try to catch tweets several times throughout the day to say thanks and I also watch my mentions on Facebook and LinkedIn to say thank you.

I'm not a fan of [meaning I don't respond to the email or engage in] “influencer marketing” in the form of cold-emailing people that you have no relationship at all that have built large social media followings to share your content. Someone somewhere is teaching people the wrong way to network by giving them form email to cut and paste asking influencers to share their content.

They look like this:

I 100% advocate working on sharing your own content through social media marketing. Here's an article I wrote that talks in more detail about repurposing your content to get the most mileage from it.

If you’re a blogger or content creator of any kind, you know that it takes a good amount of your time to create content. From coming up with your idea, researching it, writing it, editing, to creating visual media – it is a long process. Make sure that you’re maximizing your hard work by spending an equal time promoting your content to your social media channels. Do the work. Tweet people, thank people, and build relationships with your blog readers.

Please do this instead of annoying people with spammy email.

Grab them with an eye catching headline!

Here are a few memorable ones:

How Not to Suck at Email Marketing

14 Bloggers Share 14 Awesome Tips For Using Google+ via Social Mouths

4 Key Criteria to Build Your Dream Blog via Problogger

Craft Your Best Blog Post Yet! by Heidi Cohen

I love Co-Schedule's Headline Tool.

Pop your idea for a blog headline in and test it out. Co-Schedule will grade your title and make suggestions to improve it.
You get the idea, right? Interesting language, a tease for the post and give the reader a reason to read it. THEN dazzle them with your article!

There you have it, some tips from me to you on blog traffic.

Action plan for increasing your blog traffic:

• Write amazing, valuable and interesting content
• Start planning out your posts so that you can share consistently
• Demand attention with a kick ass title
• Network like a bandit

What has been most effective for you in your blogging efforts? Love to hear how your getting blog traffic.