It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown the OnlineLivingBlog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we've observed.

Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

Who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. 

Publish as frequently as possible

The more frequently you post, the more traffic you get because the search engines are indexing your content more frequently. Of course your content has to be compelling as well, but that goes without saying, right?

Pay attention to the headlines (blog post titles)

Using numbers (see title of this blog post!) usually generates good traffic. Titles with “how to” also attract a lot of traffic.

Share More Than Once

This first tip comes from Fahim Ahsan, who suggests in a post on KissMads that companies aren’t sharing their blog content nearly as much as they ought to. Many of us have the mentality of “share once and forget”. We publish something on our blog and distribute it across all our social media channels once. But what about all those people who missed that initial communication?

A much better solution is to share each blog post multiple times, depending on the platform, in a timely fashion. For example, you might tweet, Facebook share and Google+ you article as soon as you hit publish. Then a day later you might want to tweet it again. Perhaps the following week it’s time for another Google+ share, and so on.

Make Your Blog's Content SEO-Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems.

Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.

Note: Don't let bad press or poor experiences with spammers (spam is not SEO) taint the amazing power and valuable contributions SEO can make to your blog's traffic and overall success. 20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible; embrace it and thousands of visitors seeking exactly what you've posted will be the reward.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Got your high commercial intent keyword bases covered? Then it’s time to target long-tail keywords, too. Long-tail keywords account for a majority of web searches, meaning that if you’re not targeting them as part of your paid search or SEO efforts, you’re missing out.

Link Internally

The strength of your link profile isn’t solely determined by how many sites link back to you – it can also be affected by your internal linking structure. When creating and publishing content, be sure to keep an eye out for opportunities for internal links. This not only helps with SEO, but also results in a better, more useful experience for the user – the cornerstone of increasing traffic to your website.

Creative Ways to Drive Traffic Blog with Facebook

When you’re sharing content from your blog on a regular basis, it can be easy to slip into a habit of crafting all posts in the exact same manner.

Play around with wording posts in different ways and see which resonates most with your audience.

You can experiment with utilizing simple, direct statements that leave the reader wanting to learn more about what you’ve introduced, or you can provide a bit more detail in your posts to highlight the main takeaways of your content.

Use Different Types of Questions on Social media Sharing

A common tactic employed by bloggers and brands alike is to ask questions. But, what kind of questions should you ask? There are a variety of ways to position questions to grab your readers’ attention.
Another option is to essentially poll your audience – ask their feedback on something to get their wheels turning, then provide solutions in the blog post you’re sharing.

Try Advertise Marketing

This one is so obvious, we’re going to look at it first. Paid search, social media advertising and display advertising are all excellent ways of attracting visitors, building your brand and getting your site in front of people. Adjust your paid strategies to suit your goals – do you just want more traffic, or are you looking to increase conversions, too? Each paid channel has its pros and cons, so think carefully about your objectives before you reach for your credit card.

If you’re hoping that more traffic to your site will also result in more sales, you’ll need to target high commercial intent keywords as part of your paid search strategies. Yes, competition for these search terms can be fierce (and expensive), but the payoffs can be worth it.

Post Content to LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become much more than a means of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, as well as increase your profile within your industry – especially if you have a moderate to large following.

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

The days when internet browsing was done exclusively on desktop PCs are long gone. Today, more people than ever before are using mobile devices to access the web, and if you force your visitors to pinch and scroll their way around your site, you’re basically telling them to go elsewhere. Ensure that your website is accessible and comfortably viewable across a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.

Add Graphics, Photos and Illustrations (with link-back licensing)

If you're someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like Flickr or Niice to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.

When using images, I highly recommend creating a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits you as the content creator. For example, you could have a consistent notice under your images indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post. You can also post that as a sidebar link, include it in your terms of use, or note it however you think will get the most adoption.

Some people will use your images without linking back, which sucks.

Submit your blog to directories

While it’s debatable how much traffic you’ll get by having your blog in directories, it can’t hurt to be listed. Most definitely I would recommend you add your blog to Technorati, the largest blog directory on the web, and Alltop.com, a popular directory with the best of the best organized by topic.

Make a Google profile

You can’t ignore Google. Set up your profile on Google and include links to your blogs and websites. Whenever someone does a search on your name, a link to your profile will be featured at the bottom of the first page of search results. You can include pictures, links to your blog(s), products, website, and social networks.

Use Your Email Connections (and Signature) to Promote Your Blog

As a blogger, you're likely to be sending a lot of email out to others who use the web and have the power to help spread your work. Make sure you're not ignoring email as a channel, one-to-one though it may be. When given an opportunity in a conversation that's relevant, feel free to bring up your blog, a specific post or a topic you've written about. I find myself using blogging as a way to scalably answer questions - if I receive the same question many times, I'll try to make a blog post that answers it so I can simply link to that in the future.

Drive traffic using YouTube

There’s truly only one strategy for effectively accomplishing this traffic-generation goal: a compelling call to action.
Each of your videos must tell your viewer exactly what to do (e.g., “go to my website”), how to do it (e.g., “click the link below”) and most importantly, why to do it (e.g., “get my free report on 7 Weight-Loss Secrets”).
Why should your audience leave YouTube and visit your website? The more compelling the offer, the more you can expect to convert video viewers into website visitors.

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