A blog is one of the best ways to generate traffic and leads for your business. But growing your blog can be challenging, especially if you are starting from scratch. The good news is that there are plenty of free and low-cost ways to drive more traffic to your blog in 2021. The key is to make your blog easy to find.
1. Understand Your Audience
Every business should have a clearly defined target audience. However, there are things you might not know or understand about your audience. Knowing what your audience wants can help you drive more traffic to your blog.
If you’re just starting out, you might not know much about your audience. But don’t get discouraged. You can learn a lot by looking at what other people are writing about. Start by seeing what your competitors are doing.
For example, if you sell a particular type of product, find out what people are writing about that product. Take notes of the type of content they’re using and what they’re writing about. Then, use this information to discover what your audience needs. Once you’ve established what your audience is interested in, you can create content to satisfy their needs. For example, if you’re selling soap, you’ll probably find that people are interested in learning about the ingredients that go into soap. You can offer blog posts that explain how the ingredients in soap are made, the history of soap, how to use soap, and more.
By offering a variety of content, you’ll be sure to meet the needs of your audience. In addition to creating original content, you can also add your readers’ comments to your blog’s pages, which will show your readers that you care about what they read. This fosters brand loyalty and builds trust with your readers. There’s also something to be said for old-fashioned communication. Send an email out to your readers, letting them know when you have a new post.
Include a link to the post, along with a short explanation of why people should visit your blog. By doing this, you’ll drive more traffic to your blog.
2. Conduct Intensive Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in driving more traffic to your blog. Keyword research, or keyphrase research, is the process of identifying important words and phrases that are used by your target audience when searching online. For example, someone searching for “dog training” might be looking for information on training a dog, buying a dog, or buying dog training supplies. Having the right keywords on your blog will significantly increase your blog’s chances of being found on the web and increasing traffic to your blog.
Keywords are the first and most important part of content optimization. Finding the right keywords to optimize for requires a significant amount of research. They are also the foundation of any SEO strategy. It’s impossible to rank for no keywords. Even for a tiny blog, the right keywords generate rankings in search engines and drive visits to your website.
Choosing the right keywords for your blog post doesn’t have to be an overwhelming process. However, you’ll want to put some work into keyword research before you write a single word. You can read more about Keyword Research.
3. Create A Content Plan
Bloggers know that content is king. Always has been, always will be. So when it comes to increasing website traffic in 2021, creating great content should be the first step. But there’s more to it than that. To get the best results, you have got to do it right. That’s where a content plan comes in.
Content marketing is one of the more time-tested ways of driving traffic to your blog. But if you’re not careful, it can backfire. One of the fastest ways to increase your blog’s traffic is to focus on creating and promoting long-form content that’s useful, actionable and relevant to your target audience. But publishing one piece of content — or even 10 — may not be enough.
A content plan lets you define your blog’s content objectives, schedule posts in advance, track their progress, measure their effectiveness and optimize for the future. This guide will show you how to set up a content plan, so your blog can start driving more traffic in 2021.
4. Write Your Content
Writing quality content is easier said than done. It requires research, creativity, and, at times, some serious elbow grease. But with the right strategy, you can finesse your blogging efforts, write quality content that your audience loves, and generate the leads you need to grow your business.
If you simply don’t have the time or resources to write your own content, then you can outsource it to a trusted third party too. You can simply indicate the topic and the specific requirements for your article, and the Ness Marketing Team team will match you to a suitable, industry-specific writer.
In the competitive world of SEO, only the best content will get you ahead. It’s better to spend more time on one article that will rank well than to publish five articles that won’t.
5. Promote Your Published Posts
The most elusive part of blogging is traffic. If you publish a post that’s good enough, you should get a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Why? Because creating great content is hard. Most bloggers don’t have the time or energy to work on their writing. So, rather than spend time improving their writing, they turn their focus elsewhere.
When a visitor arrives at your blog, he or she should be able to find information quickly and easily. Should it take him or her more than a minute to find what they’re looking for? And if they can’t find it, they’ll leave! If your site is already drawing traffic, you need to turn that traffic into leads and sales. You need to promote your posts.
You’ve already done the hard work of creating great content. Now, you need to turn that content into sales.
And one of the best ways to do that is by promoting it. Whether you’re selling your own product or an affiliate product, promoting your posts can lead to more sales. But how do you promote your posts? You can start by sharing them on social media. That’s easy. But you can also turn your blog into a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is an offer — an eBook, a checklist, a cheat sheet — that a visitor can download in exchange for their email address. Using your blog as a lead magnet is a great way to get more email addresses. And that can help you promote your posts.