7 Basic Tips & Tools to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog or Website

“How to get more traffic on my blog?”, “What is the best way to grow more traffic from organic search?”, “How to drive more traffic to a new blog?” are some of the most frequently asked questions from bloggers.

The answer is: there is no one single best way and no magic formula for generating traffic. It’s a combination of SEO, marketing and social media strategies, that will drive more traffic to your blog or website, and help you to grow a loyal community.

There are a lot of elaborate tactics that can have a huge impact on your site traffic. But there are also a couple of basic things you can do to improve your SEO as well as your marketing and social media efforts. And you don’t need to be an expert for this.

Here are 7 basic tips & tools to grow your traffic

1. Pick the right topic to create excellent content that will drive more traffic and engagement on your site

The better you know your audience, the better you can create content that will match their interests and search terms. But there are also several tools that will help you looking for top performing content. The most important thing is to ensure that the topics you choose fit with your content strategy and are focused on helping your target audience.

• Take a look at your previous posts and look out for posts that received a lot of comments to find questions or aspects of interest you can follow up.
• Research what others have written on your topic and pick up a specific aspect that has not been covered. By doing this, you will find many more ideas for your future posts.
• Look out for topics that get much engagement on social media.
• Listen to your customers and look for questions and business challenges they are faced with.
• Audit your social media followers for comments and also look at discussions in social communities.
• Look for frequently asked questions and challenges that come up to find gaps in coverage. Is there anything you can add to your posts, that will make your content stand out?
• Provide tips, strategies, how to articles or entertaining content for your specific audience and topic. Adding value for the readers will make your posts memorable.
• Make sure that you research thoroughly about the subject you are writing so that your work may be relevant and up-to-date.
• Create content, that will make your readers remember you as a useful resource for valuable information on your topic.

Here are some tools to use for content research that will help you to analyze top performing content for your keywords and topics. For example:

• Easy Blog Ideas – The WordPress plugin will help you to analyze and find top performing topics directly on your WordPress dashboard.
• BuzzSumo – Enter a keyword and the tool will show you a list of articles which are generating the most social shares.
• Google Trends – The Google tool will show you a graph on how your keywords are trending over time.

2. Include keywords in your content to get more matches from organic search

3. Maximize the readability of your posts

• Write short sections with less than 300 words and paragraphs with less than 150 words.
• Use strong headings and subheadings.
• Bullet points and lists to make your posts easy to skim and scan.
• Check your headlines and copy with the Hemmingway App.
• Try the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to help you with basic SEO and check your posts for focus keywords, meta tags and descriptions, and readability for the search engines as well as for your target readers.

4. Use visuals for more attention and engagement

• Illustrate your blog posts with photos, infographics, and videos. You don’t need to be a professional designer to create professional looking visuals.
• Use tools like Canva to create unique infographics and share pics or Moovly to create animated videos easily.

5. Engage with your readers, followers, and influencers

To make the most of your visitors, encourage your readers to stay on your site and get them into action.

• Interlink your posts to keep readers on your site and guide them to related posts on your site. You can use tools like Related Posts to display related posts automatically on the bottom of each of your posts.
• Make it easy for your blog visitors to follow and share your posts on social media. Place social media follow buttons in your header, footer and on your contact page. Place social media share buttons at the top and button on each post and also on your images, or use floating bars by using tools like Super Socializer.
• Add strong Call-To-Actions (CTAs) like “please follow” and “please share” to encourage your readers to follow and share your posts on social media.
• Encourage your readers to comment on your posts and share their opinion by asking questions. Ask them for feedback and comments on your blog post as well as on your social media posts. Always follow up on feedback, and answer questions and react to comments in time. You can integrate social comments on your site by using tools like WP Discuz or Disqus to connect your site comments to social media.
• Look out for similar topics and discussions on other platforms and add your opinion. Link back to your post, if your post adds value to the current discussion.
• Mention influencers in your posts and let them know you’ve mentioned them or linked to their posts and link back to your post.

6. Leverage email- and newsletter marketing to drive more traffic from loyal subscribers

In order to turn your website visitors into loyal blog readers and subscribers, grab their email address to hook them to your blog. By offering a blog subscription, all subscribers will be automatically informed whenever you publish a new post. With a newsletter, you can send news to your subscribers, whenever you have important news or stories to tell. Email subscriptions will encourage your readers to come back to your blog. Or, offer push notification for your site to let your visitors know about your blog or news updates.

Tool Tips:

• Try the EmailSubscribers and Newsletters plugin for list building and email marketing to turn your website visitors into blog and newsletter subscribers.
• And try the Icegram plugin to create popups, a welcome bar and other opt-in forms for lead generation.
• Try OneSignal for an easy to implement push notification and email tool.

7. Promote your blog posts on social media to drive more traffic from social platforms

• Share your content on Twitter, Facebook, but also think of Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr, and also on LinkedIn, if your content is business-related.
• Also, share your content on relevant Facebook and LinkedIn Groups or Reddit Subreddits.
• Share your content as Google Posts on your Google My Business listing.
• Share your content on Social Bookmark communities such as Diigo, Delicious or Digg.
• Re-publish and syndicate your content on platforms like Medium, Tumblr, Bloglovin’, Quora, and LinkedIn Pulse.
• Share and cross-promote your content at different times and days across social networks and customize your comments with personal comments, hashtags or handles for each channel. Use social media automation for scheduling and consistency.