10 Clever Strategies To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

When I launched my blog months ago, I had no idea what I was doing. So I did what everyone else does. I was very desperate for the answer to the question of how to increase traffic to your blog.

Read a bunch of articles and watched hundreds of videos on how to increase traffic to your blog. And pretty much everything that I read or watched said the exact same thing- The key to growing a blog is to publish high-quality content on a consistent basis. So that’s what I did.

I published two blog posts every week for months. But guess what? It didn’t work! Again I did some digging. And everyone said the same thing. Didn’t work again! So now I had to somehow get this thought out of my head.

I realized that gone were the days when all you had to do was write content, stuff some keywords, and see how magically Google ranked it on the first page within a matter of days.

I knew then that no one would come and read my post if I just sat and waited for them to. So I found out how important it is to promote your content.

I decided to gear down my publishing speed to one post per week and then spend the rest of the week promoting the heck out of it. And it worked!

So in this article, I’m going to share some promotional strategies that can potentially increase traffic to your blog.

Important: I do not mean to say that organic search traffic is a myth. Definitely not! Organic search traffic will be your best friend in the long term. But the fact that it takes a considerable amount of time to get consistent traffic from organic search made me write this article for all the beginner bloggers out there.

If you want proven strategies to increase traffic to your blog, you will love this article. So stay tuned.

Disclosure: Some links in this article are my affiliate links. If you buy any product through any of these links, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Such a commission helps me to stay motivated and produce more such content. Thanks in advance if you buy anything from my affiliate links.

Let’s start things off without further ado.

1. Use guest post bonuses

Guest posting is a great way to get traffic and backlinks to your blog. There’s only one problem. It’s really hard to get people from your guest post to your website.

In fact, one industry study found that an average guest post brings in only 50 visitors. Not worth your time and effort.

So what’s the solution? Guest post bonuses.

With a guest post bonus, you don’t just add a link to your website at the end of the post, but you provide your readers with a special bonus that makes them want to visit your website.

Here’s an example:

This simple strategy brought 471 visitors in 1 month to Brian Dean’s Backlinko blog. it is almost 10x the traffic that you’d usually get from a guest post.

2. Make friends with other bloggers

If you are a part of the blogging community, your chances of success are higher.

To be specific, cross-promote content to reach a larger audience. Try to work with others in your field that have a similar profession to you.

If all goes well, you might share their target audience. However, the strategy must be wholly value-driven and professional.

Here’s one good way you can do this. Try creating a post about top bloggers in a particular niche and then mention each blogger. You will get results in your favor. Also, do not hesitate to reach out to those bloggers personally, telling them about mentioning them. Some of them might return the favor.

Another way is to read the blogs of other bloggers and value the knowledge they provide. The easiest way to do this is on Twitter, where you can instantly mention someone and leave a comment.

After you do this, the other blogger will get a little familiar with your name and may browse your profile and click on the blog that is linked to it. There is a good probability that they may repay the favor by sharing some of your content.

I had done the same on Quora. There was a person whose answers I regularly followed on Quora. I shared one of his answers in a Quora space and reached out to him informing him of the same. He reciprocated by sharing one of my answers in his own Quora space.

This has helped me increase blog traffic in the past few months.

3. Leave helpful comments on other blogs

Rather than seeing other bloggers as your competitors, try getting involved in the community. This way, you can improve your online visibility.

I did it a lot, especially when I was starting out. And I still do it.

I’d leave comments that added to the discussion, or sometimes I’d just leave supportive comments for bloggers that I wanted to build relationships with.

This helps you get on other people’s radar screens without looking like a spammer (who just leaves comments for building low-quality backlinks). No one likes a spammer.

In fact, these comments can lead to invites to write guest posts. You may catch the interest of other readers or the website owner themselves. They might then decide to check out your blog.

4. Publish content backed by data

When writing blog posts about strategies, try to support them with data. The reason is, content backed by solid data tends to be shared more. The more your content is shared, the more traffic you can get.

For example, I have a blog post “Top 10 On-page SEO Techniques (Backed By data)“. In this article, I have taken the help of Ahrefs’ study on the correlation between search rankings and on-page SEO techniques.

Of course, this will be harder than simply pulling out a list post. Moreover, most of our pockets don’t allow for extensive research or study as they can require people, resources, time, and a lot of effort.

So what you can do is surf the internet, and read blog posts that have already conducted such studies. Do not just copy and paste data from them. Gather data from different sources and club them as supporting materials for your blog posts. And don’t forget to credit them with a link.

You can use Statista. It is a website that publishes statistics related to a plethora of topics. This website is meant for people to take up their published stats and share them with their audience.

OR if you have deep pockets, you can even conduct a study on your own.

5. Promote your content on LinkedIn

Good old LinkedIn now has close to 850 million users and 1.6 billion monthly visits. I wish I had that sort of traffic on my blog (LOL).

You can increase traffic to your blog with LinkedIn just by publishing your old blog content there.

The first thing you need to do is connect with people within your space on LinkedIn. For example, if you’re an affiliate marketer, then connect with other bloggers or affiliate marketers. They can be your potential customers as well as can promote your content to other people who are following them.

What you wanna do next is post your content on LinkedIn. Take your blog content, only put the first few paragraphs of it, and provide your followers with a link (to your blog) to continue reading the whole post.

Neil Patel has 30,000 connections on LinkedIn (which is the max you can have). With this trick, he is getting thousands of visitors to his blog per day from LinkedIn.

6. Cross-spread your audience

Cross-spreading your audience means making them connect with you on a different platform through your blog posts or even email marketing.

Let me explain how this works with an example.

In one of my blog posts, I have written about choosing a traffic source for affiliate marketing. There, I explained Quora as a source of traffic. What I did was after that piece of content was over, I put a button to check out my Quora profile (see below).

This way I was able to get a good number of followers on my Quora profile. The advantage is that when people follow me on Quora, every time I post new content on Quora, they are led back to my website (as I put my blog links in my Quora content).

Talking of which, make sure to follow me on Quora for the best responses to a variety of questions related to blogging.

You can even do this with your mailing list. Whenever someone signs up for your email list, you send them a welcome email wherein you can, apart from other things, put a link to your social media profiles or any other digital assets that you may have.

This technique is highly beneficial if you want to increase traffic to your blog.

7. Create unique and attractive visuals like infographics

Back in the day, Neil Patel had a company called Kissmetrics, and eventually, he redirected the domain to neilpatel.com including all the content. Within a two-year period, he was able to generate 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique referring domains, all from 47 infographics.

Sounds crazy, right?

So here’s how you can increase traffic to your blog through infographics.

First, go to any keyword research tool like Ubersuggest and search for your keyword. Let’s say affiliate marketing. Then look for the content ideas report. This will show you all the blog posts that have a ton of social shares, search traffic, and backlinks based on keywords and popularity.

Go to all these posts and look for the ones that are data-driven. Once you find such posts, go to those pages.

The next step is to go to a designing software like Canva and create an infographic with the data available in the posts. Make it a very visual, easy-to-understand format. That way people can skim it, and get the information.

Make sure you cite your source, tell people where you got the data from, mention the original source, and link out to them. Yes, you can’t just jack their content. And of course, add some value-added information from your side that they didn’t cover.

Typically, when you do this, people will want to share it and will want to link to it because it’s more valuable than text-based content.

Who wants to read text when they can see everything in a beautiful image?

Look below at this beautiful infographic about the running speed of a Cheetah. It’s a very common topic but won’t you want to share it in this format?

8. Blog post announcement newsletters

It’s no secret that an email newsletter is by far the best way to promote your new content and increase blog traffic. I regret not starting an email list sooner.

Capture your reader’s emails through various available plugins if you are using WordPress.

I personally use GetResponse for getting people to sign up for my email newsletter.

You don’t even have to worry about designing your emails with fancy graphics and visuals. Study shows that simple blog post announcement newsletters work the best.

Just a quick intro and a link to the post will do the work. Focus on the message rather than on graphics and visuals.

I use GetResponse for managing my email marketing campaigns. It is a powerful tool that doesn’t only offer email marketing services, but a complete package of services for your marketing needs.

You can use the free version to test it. It works absolutely fine for me.

9. Update old blog content

Three years ago, Brian Dean started a huge project for his Backlinko blog. He updated every single post that he ever published. It wasn’t easy. But that project helped boost Backlinko’s overall traffic by 25.71% compared to the previous year.

On the surface, 25% more traffic might not sound like a lot, but that 25% increase equals 410,332 more visitors every year, which is a LOT!

This may not be an option for beginners as they generally do not have many posts on their blogs.

With that, let’s dive into the steps.

First, go to the last page of your blog feed all the way back to your very first post. Then update and improve that post. You will find that many older posts are in desperate need of an update. They can get so out of date that actually a lot of content doesn’t even make any sense anymore.

Things you can do to update the old posts

• Replace old visuals and images

• Replace the strategies that you explained with newer and more effective ones.

• Update any old data that you gathered from other websites or blogs. You don’t want your audience to be misguided.

• Check to see if links to other websites that you used are now broken.

• Update the facts and numbers that you used.

• Update your SEO titles with the current year. Example: “10 Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales In 2022″ should be changed to “10 Ways To Increase Affiliate Sales In 2023”, provided that you actually update the content in relation to 2023. Do not just modify the titles without modifying the content.

Rinse and repeat this process for as many posts as you can. Even if it is one post, no problem. Every little bit helps. If it’s 10, even better.

If you have a lot of posts, still do it! In the end, it will be worth it. You will find how magically this can increase traffic to your blog.

10. Write case studies

People always look for proof before trusting any piece of information. Case studies help you prove to your audience. It is one of the best ways to increase blog traffic.

Suppose you are writing a product review, simply writing about the pros and cons, pricing plans, performance, and customer support will not bear much fruit. Instead, if you were to write a review based on your personal experience with the product, people are going to like it far more.

Case studies also tend to get shared. Not just product reviews, almost every piece of information that you put out there if written with a personal touch, will work wonders for you.

Case studies are also a popular form of content for improving your conversions and sales.

Clever Strategies To Increase Traffic To Your Blog: Final Thoughts

SEO and organic traffic will be your best friends in the long run, but to kickstart a blog, you need to promote the heck out of it.

With so many blog promotion tactics, you may not be able to use them all at once. Try some of them and see which ones bring results.

Now I want to turn it over to you, what strategy from this article are you going to use first to increase traffic to your blog? Are you going to make friends with other bloggers or try out a post-announcement newsletter?

Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

Also, share the strategies that you use to increase traffic to your blog.

If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with your friends and the people you think might benefit from it.

Wish you all the best.