Increase Blog Traffic With These Four Free Techniques
Do you ever feel like you’re diligently working away on your blog producing the best content you possibly can but getting – at best – a meagre return for your effort? That article you slaved over for hours on end leads to a tiny pinprick of traffic in your stats but not the deluge you feel it deserves.
Sometimes the classic adage of simply producing great content so that it attracts links naturally seems like little more than a pipe dream.
Compare this to the articles that top blogs like Famous Bloggers publish. Every one receives thousands of visitors, numerous comments and all sorts of social shares and naturally acquired links from forums and other blogs. This in turn helps these articles to gently rise up the search engine rankings and helps to increase blog traffic by sending a constant stream of residual traffic to the site.
So what’s the difference between your blog and the “players” like Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina or Pat Flynn? The answer is an “audience”. If you’re producing genuinely great content – unique, original, interesting, noteworthy, sharable content – then when you attract the right audience you’re going to see that same pattern of buzz when you publish your latest post.
When it comes to blogging we talk a lot about SEO, blog commenting and social media as ways to increase blog traffic – but I’m here to tell you that you may be missing out on a significant opportunity. In fact the techniques just mentioned, whilst effective, are in many ways long-term strategies that can take considerable time to show any significant results. Consider just how long it takes to build the necessary links and the social media following you need with these techniques to see significant spikes in traffic every time you publish a new post.
The funny thing though if you want to increase blog traffic is that there are people all over the internet who want your content. They want to read top quality content and – just as importantly – to share it with others. All you need to do is to find a cost-effective way to reach these people.
An Untapped Technique To Increase Blog Traffic
But who are these people that are so keen to read your articles and help spread them to a wider audience? They are the content curators and news aggregators whose raison d’être is to be a “thought leader”. They derive authority by making the best content on the net easy to access. They are the gate keepers and people look to them for suggestions and recommendations. They are also members of passionate communities who may only rarely actually use a search engine to look for great content – though if it’s placed right in front of them they’ll lap it up and ask for more.
Even better this traffic can be far more immediate. While I’ve been experimenting with these techniques I have repeatedly managed to drive hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of visitors to my posts in a matter of days if not hours. Today I’d like to tell you exactly how to increase blog traffic every time you publish a new post – so you can go out and finally start getting the sort of traffic that your carefully crafted content deserves.
Spammers Beware: Quality Counts
The resources I’m about to give you all rely on two key concepts – firstly on genuinely top quality content and secondly on a sense of community. Real people are going to decide on whether your content is worth reading and sharing so for this concept to work you must be creating the very best content possible in your niche, and you must behave in a respectful, polite fashion if you’re going to be able to repeat this technique each time you publish a new blog post. Spammers and “thin affiliate site” owners beware – this is not a strategy for you.
Get Organized Before You Start
With this strategy organization is key. You’re going to have to do a fair degree of research and experimentation to start off with and it will take some time and effort. Tracking your results – the people and places that do increase blog traffic for you – is essential because over a period of time you’ll be able to refine this process down to a simple “cut and paste” job.
Once you’ve uncovered the sources that not only really want and enjoy your content – but can also send you a boatload of blog traffic as a result – then you can drop all the others and use this personal database as your own “content syndication network“. Every time you publish a new blog post you simply open up your spreadsheet, click each of the links in turn, submit your content and then sit back safe in the knowledge that the next flood of new visitors is about to arrive.
So keep notes on the sources you find. List their specific contact details. Record how much traffic they sent you and so on. Refining and systematizing the process is key if it’s going to be scalable and easy-to-implement.
OK, so that said, let’s get started spreading the message about your awesome new blog post and show you just how easy it can be to increase blog traffic without spending a penny…
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a content curation site used by people who want to discover the best content on a specific subject and then share it with their social media audience. As a result of this many Scoop.it users not only have a sizeable audience but are actively looking for great content like yours to share with their followers. Getting your latest blog post featured here is a great way to increase blog traffic overnight. Luckily it is simplicity itself to get your post in front of them and if you are submitting great content to a relevant user there is a good chance that your post will find itself being exposed to a whole new audience.
To make use of Scoop.it, visit the site and do a keyword search for broad phrases relating to your niche. If you’re lucky you’ll find a whole load of accounts related to your niche and the skill here is to find those users who not only have a good-sized audience but who also post on a regular basis (meaning that they are an active member and that they will be looking for new content to curate on a regular basis).
Once you’ve narrowed down your list all you need do is click on each of the users in turn and click the “suggest content” button before pasting in the permalink of your latest post. Click submit and move through the list.
Community News Aggregators
News aggregators are possibly your best friend of all when it comes to building a content syndication network. These aggregators do one thing and do it well – they help other people to find great content on a specific topic. By listing the most recent content on their sites, and often allowing visitors to “vote” on stories they attract a huge following both in terms of organic traffic from the search engines and referral traffic from social media.
Just a few great examples include:
To find similar news aggregators in your own niche try using Google to search for phrases such as “your niche + submit news” and “your niche + add news”. Try out all the sites that you find and note those that actually help to increase your blog traffic so that you can submit further content to them in the future.
Of course if you’re smart your blog will already have its own Facebook page for you to share tips, advice and useful content that will be of interest to your fans. But there are also plenty of other Facebook pages out there that target a similar group of people – and unless you’re a player many of these probably have far more fans than you do.
Doing a simple search on Facebook can quickly turn up a whole list of relevant Facebook pages, and many of these are perfectly happy to share your content with their fans. Generally speaking simply posting your link on their page is a bad idea – it’s not only considered rude but worse only a tiny fraction of their fans will likely see your article.
What tends to work better is to actually take the time to find the page owner and contact them in person. Tell them that you have an article that you think would be of interest to their audience and ask if they’re willing to post it to their page for you. In this way you have not only gained authorization but because it is published by the page owner generally far more fans will actually get to see it meaning a bigger increase in your blog traffic.
As always with our research, keep a note of those fan pages that have added your article so you can submit further posts to them in the future.
Triberr
Just like Facebook you may well have a following on Twitter and of course it goes without saying that you should share your article with them. Also consider requesting a retweet when you send it out as research has shown that actually asking for a retweet significantly increases the chances of actually getting one.
But rather like Facebook there are also all sorts of other tweeps out there with an audience similar to your own – just much larger. I have seen cases in the past of a single tweet by someone with a large, engaged audience send hundreds of visitors to one of my articles in a matter of hours. And Triberr can help you achieve that.
Triberr enables you to create a group of Twitter users all in a similar niche who then send out each other’s tweets to their followers. In this way it’s possible for all parties to reach a far larger audience than they otherwise would have done alone and increase blog traffic to each other’s sites.
So sign up for a free account at Triberr and look through their ever-growing list of tribes that you can join. Become part of the community, share their posts and when it comes to you publishing a new blog post you’ll have far more sets of eyes on your content.
* Useful link: Learn how to use Triberr.
Conclusion
If you’re creating great content for your blog then it needn’t be hard to drive traffic to your blog. Think outside the box and find ways in which you can get that latest post of yours in front of existing, passionate communities online. By taking the time to do your research initially and by gently refining your contacts over time you’ll find that you increase blog traffic more with every post you publish whilst the time spent promoting your content – as opposed to actually writing it – goes down considerably.
Now it’s your turn – leave us a comment below and let us know what free strategies you use to get rapid traffic to your blog…
Image © N-Media-Images, Sergey Furtaev – Fotolia.com
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