Creating a stunning website is only half the task of starting a website. The other part of the job is getting traffic to your website regularly. By the way, if you have not yet checked out my article on how to start a blog, you can do so here. Easy steps to start a successful blog.
In this article, I will be taking you through ten blog traffic sources to consider. These are sources that I have practically acquired traffic. If it has worked for me, I believe that it will work for you too.
Word of Mouth
This is the easiest and cheapest way of getting your blog out there especially to people who are closest to you including family and friends. This can be a nice starting point especially if you are running low on marketing budget as the word will quickly spread within your circle and friends. This traffic might be big or small depending on your circle of friends and family.
Facebook has the potential to drive a massive amount of traffic to your website if used correctly. Facebook helps you create a community around your blog and also enables you to easily share new stuff with your fans. Additionally, Facebook provides an option for paid adverts where you can target a specific group of people that would be interested in your blog. If you have a Facebook page for your blog, that will be an added advantage as you can set it to automatically share new blog posts as you create and post them.
Just like Facebook, Twitter enables you to create an interactive community around your blog. By sharing links to new blog posts, you will be able to drive traffic from twitter to your website. However, you should be careful about sharing links on social media. Overdoing it might chase away potential fans as they might find the links spammy. Twitter too can be set to auto-share your new posts. This feature is advantageous as it saves you time that you would otherwise use to share your new posts.
Instagram is also another social media platform where you can create a community for your blog. However, Instagram doesn’t allow sharing links on the platform but you can provide a link on the bios data that directs people to your blog. This can really help big time especially if your blog is graphical in nature, e.g. a photographer’s blog. As well, if your blog sells a product, you can share images of the product on Instagram and have the link on the bios to redirect people to a landing page of the product’s offer.
WhatsApp Contacts
Do not underestimate the power of your phone contacts. WhatsApp can be a nice place to generate traffic, especially for a small blog. It is a nice starting point to get the word out there about your blog. Through WhatsApp groups and WhatsApp statuses, one can generate a decent amount of traffic and even potential clients.
SEO
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of making a website visible to search engines and make it rank at the top of search results by increasing the quality and quantity of the content of the website. By ranking at the top of search results, you will get massive numbers of traffic depending on the keyword that your blog ranks for. Other factors that affect SEO include the design of the blog and loading speed. For effective SEO, one might need to hire an SEO expert, a service that I can also provide at a reasonable cost.
SEM
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and it is closely related to SEO. The difference is that in SEM, you pay to be listed at the top of search results while in SEO, you structure your content so that you can rank high on search results. With SEM, you will be charged for each visitor that visit your blog through the ad. The charges vary depending on the keyword. The more frequent a keyword is searched, the more it attracts a higher per click rate.
Quora
Quora is a question and answer platform where anyone can ask a question and anyone can provide answers to the asked questions. You can easily generate traffic from Quora by answering questions on the platform and leaving a link that points back to your site. By so doing, people who would like to know more about you or your answer will click on the link and land on your blog.
Email marketing
Email marketing is considered high-quality traffic to your blog. Remember these are people who willingly subscribed to your email list and this means they are interested in whatever your blog is about. MailChimp is a good starting point to create a mailing list. They offer a free account of up to 2500 emails and unlimited autoresponders.
Backlinks
These are links that you create from other sites redirecting traffic to your own blog. There several ways of creating backlinks. The most common method is through guest blogging where you write a blog post for another website and leave a link that leads people to your website.
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