How to get more traffic on your blog

So you’ve finally started a blog and are now wondering how to get more blog traffic.

I can tell you right now the only difference between the bloggers that get to blog for a living versus those that continue to wish they could blog for a living is the ability to drive traffic to their blogs.

While driving large amounts of traffic to your blog isn’t a requirement to making money with your blog, it is very helpful. The more people you can reach the better your chances of selling your products and services.

Don’t Depend on Blind Luck

When I started my first blog back in 2003 I had no idea what I was doing. There really wasn’t such a thing as blog strategy back then. You simply wrote whatever you wanted and just kind of hoped for the best.

At least I thought.

There were some bloggers, even back then, that understood the game and were able to drive large amounts of traffic to their site.

I depended on blind luck to get me by and that is how a lot of bloggers today approach things.

They see a number of different tactics to help them drive traffic to their site and they figure that they will give each one a shot once to see what happens.

Maybe they’ll get lucky.

That is the wrong way to go about it.

Getting traffic to your blog requires a plan. One that you know you will execute and follow down to the detail.

This guide will help to show you a number of different tactics for driving more traffic to your blog and you can decide which tactics you want to use.

Why Some Blogs Get More Traffic Than Others

Before you learn about different ways to drive traffic to your blog let’s look at why some blogs are able to generate more traffic than others.

It starts with the idea of recommendations.

When you tell your friends about a movie or song, you tell them because you like it. You don’t want to give them a bad recommendation because it looks bad on you.

That’s how bloggers treat sharing links. I don’t share content with my audience that isn’t going to be worth their time.

Great Content Brings Great Links

That means if you want to get a link from me you have to write some really good content.

When people say that “Content is King” this is what they mean. To be an authority in your niche you have to prove that you provide value to people and you can’t do that if you are sending them to sites that don’t help them out.

Great content, that is promoted wisely, gets shared.

That means every single blog post you write should be a powerful one. If you are just going to write a couple paragraphs of some non-sense then you can’t expect magic to happen.

Great Content Is Easier to Promote

When you have great content on your site it becomes a lot easier to promote it. There are some bloggers that will promote any piece of content they write because that is how they function but I always like to take a step back and see if it wasn’t my content would I be just as happy promoting it.

If the answer is “no” then it is back to the drawing board.

When you email another blogger in your niche to tell them about your awesome new blog post you want to make sure that when they read it they are compelled to share it with their audience. I am not talking about some time later today or down the road, I am talking about right now.

Once great content is promoted by the right person it starts to spread quickly on its own.

Great Content Is Helpful

I run a Education blog with my bro the longest time it wasn’t receiving much traffic.

In fact, for the first 90 days, it had only received 1,000 pageviews. We thought we were writing great pieces of content and looking back at things they were great pieces of content…for us.

They weren’t helpful to our audience whatsoever.

Great content helps your audience solve a problem.

Great content is actionable.

The stuff we were writing wasn’t actionable at all.

It was more opinion driven and full of wit that nobody cared about.

Take a look at this chart:

The Orange line represents traffic that arrived at the site in October 2016. The blog received a grand total of 9,456 pageviews. Not bad, but nowhere close to great.

The Blue line represents traffic that arrived at the blog in November 2016. That month, the blog reached over 129,000 pageviews!

That’s a 1,271% increase in traffic.

And that isn’t a fluke month where a post goes viral. The site now regularly receives 300,000 pageviews a month and it’s all because we changed the type of content we were writing.

Great Content Lasts

Evergreen Content is content that lasts and only requires the occassional update.

This guide would be considered Evergreen Content.

How to get Beyonce tickets this March is not evergreen content. It only pertains to a certain time period. When you have Evergreen Content that means no matter when people show up they will find it valuable.

How frustrating is it to find the blog post that supposedly has all of the answers you need and it is out of date?

As you grow your blog, more and more people will find you through search engines. These people are looking for specific answers to their problems and you want to make sure your content helps them out.

Write Like You Love It

This might be the most important one of all.

People come to your blog to learn but they also want to be entertained. There are bloggers that are starting off creating niche websites and writing robotic reviews of products they’ve never used.

You can skate by like this or you can build an empire just by showing a little bit of personality in your writing.

Whenever you read Pat Flynn it never seems like he is writing on autopilot. His writing is engaging and make you feel like you are part of a conversation with him.

Don’t mistake this advice for following your passion.

It has nothing to do with that at all. I run a couple of blogs where I am not passionate about the subject but that doesn’t mean that I can’t make my writing entertaining and something that people want to read.

There are a lot of steps to creating a successful blog and some people take these too far by running it like a machine. In the long run, you are building a brand and that brand is built around your personality.

Show it to the world.

Great Content Is the Foundation to Getting Great Traffic

If you have a crappy foundation then you don’t have much to build on.

There are millions upon millions of blogs out there and yet only 25% of them get over 5,000 pageviews a month.

Think about that.

Only 25% of the blogs in the world get over 100 people a day to visit them. Getting a 100 people to come to your blog every single day shouldn’t be hard but it is nearly impossible if you don’t have a strong foundation of content so before you worry about traffic you need to worry about content