You do not have to be a genius to craft a simple blog, but you have to know some advanced stuff on how to create a popular blog with tons of traffic. One of Sunshine Digital Marketing Agency’s former projects involved building a blog that now boasts hundreds of new visitors a week. There are some time-tired techniques devoted to a good lead generation, and taken into the account the fact that out company has gathered some rich experience in the area of blog-building and garnered a lot of knowledge and skills how to quickly increase blog traffic, so we thought it would be proper to share it by creating the article. This article can of use to all kinds of folks – ordinary people with no commercial interests, individuals who have mostly money in mind, and big and small companies with business blogs. Not all of the methods will be the best bets for individual cases, but at least a few of these must be smoothly working in turning an unpopular blog into influential in its industry or professional circle.
#1 – Define clearly who your readers are and what they might like to read and share
When thinking about who you’re creating this blog for, take into an account that human trait and habit of sharing the useful stuff with other people. Some people will typically engage in spreading the articles you write, but certain groups of people, article titles, writing styles and content types as a rule of thumb produce more quality results than the rest on the internet. For instance, fascinating and clear infographics that captures your attention ( like this one), great tutorials and amazing collection of web design themes are all adjusted for special interests of different folks (beard-obsessed girls and boys, web programmers, and space geeks or web designers).
#2 – Get involved in the neighborhoods where your readers hang out
The odds are you have come here with some homework done and done some research on virtual places where conversations and blogs are being dedicated to your area of expertise (and if you still have no such list, it is recommended to get one by googling it or outsource the research part to Sunshine Agency). There is a great online tool like Google’s Display Planner for you.
#3 – Include infographics, images and comics (without infringing copy rights)
If your company’s employees or you yourself are masters of creating nice visuals, take beautiful photos, draw comics or cute doodles in Microsoft Paint, you should incorporate those skills to your website. By adding and using your own visuals (or using an external website like Flickr or Niice to include your pictures with copy rights on that website), you generate an additional traffic path for your website via Image Search, and often greatly help to the interaction and entertainment of your blog audience.
When including visuals, it is hugely recommended to develop a simple method for other people to spread them on their own platforms without infringing your copy rights and with license, but in such a way that is advantageous for you as the visuals’ owner. For instance, one might provide some text under your pictures pointing out that copying is allowed only if those who decide for it, track or refer back to this particular article. Another option is to include that as a link or mention it in your terms of use.
A certain percentage of bastards bloggers will copy your hard-worked visuals to their posts without any returning favor in the form of a referral, which is bad. Nevertheless, you can track them down by applying the Image Search of “similar images.” Do not be afraid to get in touch with them, after all, it is they who stole your property, and ask if they will be so nice as to provide a referral. More-often-than-not, they not only return the favor, but become an influential business partner or new buddy, too!
#4 – Try keyword research before creating your articles
It is not a secret that a major factor of appearing at the top of SERPs is relying on the words and sentences your potential readers are in fact put as search queries. There is a free tool that you can use – Google Keyword Planner.
We also advice you Keywordtool.io, which creates the lists of keywords from Google’s Suggest feature. When you’re developing the ideas for a new article, keyword research is a great fit for the title and headline of the article. If you’re not sure how to produce one, Sunshine Agency has a free consultation for you. Sunshine Agency SEO team can also produce a keyword research or search engine optimization for your blog.
To voluntarily link back third-party blogs can prove to be more of value. The wisdom phrase “give and ye shall receive,” as nothing better illustrated the case. Other blog masters might receive Google Alerts or spot you in the list of their inbound track-backs to determine where the traffic comes from and what the buzz is about. Linking out can produce returning favor referrals, business or personal communication and fresh new network of people you link to.
#5 – Continue to provide a new content on a regular basis
You have to make sure that you’re interacting with the virtual audience on the weekly basis. It is very similar to the real world. Just imagine meeting your friends or family every weekend or if you are lucky every day and repeating the same anecdote over and over again. The odds are you would not be welcomed or invited very often to the circles of friends or family. People would first politely mention that you have already told the story several times, if that would not work they would just disappear. If the last thing that you want is people running away from you, you have to constantly work on maintaining relationships with targeted audience. They can give you the basic idea what they’re looking for and what they like reading, which will make it easier you keep your website engaging and enlightening for them.
It is not always necessary to produce a completely original blog posts. Clever rewriting can yield you very results. To find the articles that are enjoying the popularity in your professional sector, employ free ready solutions such as BuzzSumo that relies on the interaction statistics. To learn more about using this approach, check out a free consulation on the subject.
#6 – Keep an eye on social sharing communities like Reddit + StumbleUpon
The popular social networking sites aren’t the only kind of platform that leverage the power to produce quality leads to a website. Social sharing platforms like Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Care2 (for nonprofits and causes), GoodReads (books), Ravelry (knitting), Newsvine (news/politics) and a lot more (Wikipedia provides a good, though not all-including list here).
#7 – Develop a good design for your blog
The impact that a clean, user-friendly, professional design has on readers’ perception is doubtless enormous. When people interact with a blog, there are a lot of subtle things they start notice: the speed of loading, the font size, the image size, etc. This all should be considered when you develop or upgrade a website blog. If you need a designer to help upgrade the quality of your blog, Sunshine Agency team of web designers can take it upon themselves and produce an amazing blog or website design.
#8 – Add a signature in email template to actively promote your blog
As a professional or a company’s representative, you must be sending dozens or hundreds of emails every day to other people and can be interested to learn better about what you do. Make sure you’re not ignoring email as a channel, one-to-one though it may be. When an opportunity of bringing your blog naturally arises in an email communication, you can briefly mention your blog, a particular post or a topic you’ve written about. Another option is to make a template solution in the form of an automatic signature.
#9 – Ask directly your audience what they want
Nobody knows your target audience preferences and dos and don’ts better than they themselves. Create simple, but professional questionnaires to learn them better and add them to the blog. There are easy and free tools for that: SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, etc.
#10 – Get involved into a hot discussion
If you’re looking for places to spot these “hot discussions,” Alltop, Topsy, Techmeme (in the tech world) and their sister websites MediaGazer, Memeorandum and WeSmirch, as well as PopURLs can all be extremely useful.
If nothing works, hire professionals with a rich experience and proofs of success
When looking for a content-management or SEO company, besides the prices of the services, you’ll need to consider whether you trust and like the people you’d be working with, whether they’re local and available for offline meetings if that’s your wish, and whether they have done projects in your industry before and know precisely how and what needs to be done without additional researching. Sunshine Agency content specialists can tailor your content to meet the interests and wishes of the reading audience. The team of web designers can make it more beautiful to look at and SEO team will optimize it so that it will come at the top of Google search. Overall effect of the above-mentioned will be amazing!
