I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by your response to introducing the BLOGGING category here on Thirteen Thoughts. You guys seem to really like these posts, so I’ll keep them coming.
A few months a go, I started working on building up my blog traffic and I had great results. In addition to trying to connect with other bloggers I also started implementing a few simple tactics that have helped me grow my audience. Today I’ll tell you all about these simple steps to driving more traffic to your blog.
Okay, so sharing your content on twitter is a bit of an obvious step if you want to drive more traffic to your blog. While I love Pinterest and Instagram I never really got into Twitter, but with over 300 million active users, I couldn’t just ignore it. Few months a go I installed a Revive Old Post plugin and I noticed that my Twitter referrals grew significantly. Revive Old Post is basically a plugin that tweets out your posts automatically- you set it up once, and don’t have to worry about it. The plugin is also pretty easy to customize; you can choose how often you want your tweets to go out, which categories you want to omit, and you can even include hashtags to be automatically added at the end of your tweet. Ever since I’ve installed this plugin, I get more retweets and it’s really a perfect solution for someone like me (someone who doesn’t have time to constantly tweet).
I really don’t know where I’d be without Pinterest- it drives more traffic to my blog than any other social medium. I think that the key to having your content shared on Pinterest is not only a good quality content, but also a good image, one that preferably contains some text. Another great thing about Pinterest are Group Boards. There are quite a lot of Group Boards for Bloggers, where you can share your posts with other bloggers and discover theirs. PinGroupie is an awesome website where you can search for Group Boards using specific keywords. After you found a Group Board you’d like to join you will have to request an invite- this will usually mean that you have to follow the board and/or the person who created the board and either email them or leave a comment requesting an invite to join the board. I actually just created my own Group Board for Beauty and Lifestyle Bloggers and if any of you guys would like to join it, make sure to follow me on Pinterest and send me an email at paula[@]thirteenthoughts.com including your Pinterest account link. Group Boards definitely have a lot of potential and can bring tons of traffic to your blog, but it’s always important to remember not to spam and follow the board’s rules.
SEO
One of my favorite WordPress plugins is Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin basically guides you through writing an SEO-friendly post; it allows you to formulate a meta description, it analyzes the text you write and calculates how readable your posts is, it also checks for your keyword and links included in your posts, and gives you an SEO score based on all those factors. This way you know what to change and/or add in order to make your post more SEO-friendly.
LINK TO YOUR PREVIOUS CONTENT (AND THAT OF OTHERS)
Whenever you mention your previous content in a new post, make sure that you reference it with a link. This is something that will not only be appreciated by your readers, but it will also send a signal to search engines about that older content.
Linking to other blogs is also a great way to build traffic. When someone notices that their content was referenced somewhere, they will almost always want to see who mentioned them. This can often lead to building new connection and relationships in the blogging world. This is actually how I made a few blogging friends; one of my posts was mentioned on their blog, I made sure to visit them and leave a nice comment thanking for the mention, and both me and the person linking to my blog have gained a loyal reader/follower.
INCLUDE YOUR BLOG LINK IN YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
If you’ve been blogging for a while now then you most likely receive a ton of emails and this is also a good opportunity to link back to your blog.
WRITE POSTS THAT ARE AT LEAST 300 WORDS LONG
When writing a post, make sure that it’s at least 300 words long, this way it’ll be much easier for search engines to find your content. Optimizing the length of your post/article means that it should be longer than 300 words.
As I mentioned before, these are simple tactics that I’ve been following for the past couple of months and I have noticed a big difference in not only my page views, but also the number of users returning to my blog has increased by around 15%.
If I were to tell you to only try one of the above things, it’d definitely be taking advantage of Pinterest since that’s what gave me best results.