Are you looking for ways to drive more traffic to your blog posts for free? Well, traffic is the reward of a good work on a blog. If you need more traffic, be ready to do more work. You don’t work only to impress search engines, you also need to impress and engage your site visitors. In fact, you can only get quality traffic if your site visitors are satisfied with the value they get from your blog. Social media, especially Facebook and Pinterest are free, powerful traffic tools for bloggers, especially getting new blog readers. But if you don’t know how to use them, thy may end up hurting your site.
SEO is a cool way to optimize your blog and its contents for search engines. But content engagement goes beyond that. If you get huge traffic from search engines and create poor contents that are not engaging, you are just increasing your site’s bounce rate. Visitors will disappear after after spending few minutes on their landing page. But when a visitor lands on a blog with engaging contents, they will spend hours without knowing or feeling bored. This is because they are getting what they have been looking for. And the reward is that they will feel relaxed to learn more, going from a page to another, and thereby increasing the total page views of the blog and reducing its bounce rate.
I will share in this article some pretty cool ways to generate more traffic to any blog and how improve the blog engagement.
How to Generate more Free Traffic to Your Blog Posts
Facebook is a Powerful Traffic Tool
Whenever social media is mentioned, the first one we remember is Facebook. With billions of active users on the platform, it means that if properly utilized, you can get new audience who are interested in your blogging niche. There many ways to drive traffic to your blog from Facebook.
The first option is to share your posts on relevant groups. You need to search on Facebook for groups on your blog niche. There are many of them, But the problem with searching for groups on Facebook is that you will only see open and closed groups. You will not see the secret groups. The secret groups have more active members that are dedicated. To find these secret Facebook groups, search on search engines. You will see blog posts with links to various Facebook groups, both open, closed and secret.
You can share your articles more than once a day, but give enough space. I will advise you not to share more than three times a day. You can space it out; morning, afternoon and evening. If you share too often, Facebook might ban your URL or suspend it. Also try sharing your articles on Facebook once you publish it, so that it will get good initial traffic impression.
Another option is to create your own group with your site name and add your friends. Make it an open group so that people can easily find it on search and also see the contents you share, even before joining your group.
The best way to get new target audience from Facebook is to run ads. Choose one or two articles from your bog that are well written and optimized. Make sure you choose to show the ads to only countries where you have more audience. For example, if you write on African fashion, then choose African countries as your target audience. You can narrow your audience down depending on the type of article you wrote. If you are sponsoring an article on ladies fashion, then specify only ladies as your target audience.
Check:
- 15 Ways to Boost your Business with Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn
- 7 Tips to Help You Create Engaging Social Media Posts
Use Reddit to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Blog
Are you Redditor? What was your impression the first time visited Reddit? I personally was scared and confused. But the site is technically simple. You don’t need to be scared, just play by the rules and watch your blog traffic triple within a very short period.
Reddit is a huge collection of forums where people share links to different media. The engagement of the platform is amazing. Try checking the domain in Alexa, it has bounce rate less than 25%. You can submit original contribution in form of text posts or self posts. You can only submit a content with a link to your blog when you have submitted text posts with positive votes. Votes (both up votes and down votes) are called Karma in Reddit. Up votes increase your profile credibility, while down votes crash it.
To make the best out of Reddit, target traffic from specific subreddits in your niche. A subreddit is a community inside Reddit where a particular interest is discussed. It could be games, sports, fitness, SEO, business, fashion, etc. To find any subreddit, simply go to https://www.reddit.com/subreddits and use the search box.
When you create a new account and join new subreddits, you need to participate actively. First contribute to the subreddit without adding your site links, else your account will be flagged once you are reported. This is one of the costly mistake many beginners make. Write detailed articles on any topic you wish to contribute. That is the easiest way to gain trust faster in any subreddit. This also applies to other platforms, not only reddit. You need to do this up to a month. Just know that it is hard to submit an article that will not have down votes, but put in your best to make the down votes a little percentage of your total karma.
After contributing loyally and your account has gained enough trust, you can now write another article and attach a link to your site. You can either paste the link directly or use an anchor text. Check out some high ranking articles in that subreddit and see the one that works better. You can also try out the two methods with different articles and compare the results.
The best time you can freely add links to your blog and nobody will mind is when you host Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview. Only do this when you have become popular in a subreddit. You can do it on a subreddit or in a special subreddit for AMA at https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/. Other Redditors ask you questions and you answer them. Add relevant links to drive your points home.
To survive in Reddit, you need patience, humility and creativity. This reddit guide will surely walk you through.
See:
- 5 Types of Blog Contents that Rank High and Drive Huge Traffic
- Blog SEO: How to Optimize your Posts to Rank #1 on Search Engines
Utilize Pinterest
Pinterest is a powerful visual discovery engine that helps people find images easily and save them as pins. The site can help you drive more traffic to your blog for free. All you need to do is to create a Pinterest business account and set it up. You also need to create a board where you will save your images and the once you discovered around the web. Other people will be able to see your board and its contents if your make it public, Then once you publish an article, you save the pictures as pins in your boards. To make the process much easier, install the Pinterest Save Button extension in your browser so that all the images become pin-able. You can create different boards for the different categories of posts you write. For example, if your blog about game and tech, create different boards for your games pins and your tech pins. This will help your pins to be more visible.
Another way to increase the visibility of pins from your posts is to optimize your blog images. You can do this by adding alt tags and descriptions to your blog images so that search engines and Pinterest discovery engine will know what they are all about and display them in search results when related items are searched by other people.
To make your boards and pins more visible, you need to follow different popular board groups in your blog niche, so that other users will discover your boards and also follow you. You can also create a group board and add contributors. Here are some popular Pinterest board groups you can follow.
Share your Ideas on Quora
Quora.com is the biggest social networking site that uses questions and answers as a primary means of transmission of ideas. They have a very high domain authority. Just try asking a question on Google. You will notice that Quora will always appear in the first page of the search results. Create an account with them and specify the areas you have special interest or knowledge. For example, if you blog about business, specify that you have special interest and knowledge in Start up business ideas, entrepreneurship, etc. With time, you can create your own Quora space, where you will share your ideas and attract more followers.
Once you create and setup your account by adding your credentials like working place and work experience, you will be notified when users ask questions pertaining to your areas of interest. Answer some of the questions with detailed information. You can occasionally add a link to your related posts. But be careful when doing so because your account could be suspended or even banned if they notice that your main interest is to get traffic from them.
Another way to ensure your answers are indexed and ranked faster is to search for a question you have already shared its solution on your blog. Click on the Quora answers that ranked high. Then try adding your own solution. Your answer will only get more visibility if readers find it useful and up vote it. So make sure you give a detailed solution. Then add a link to your related blog post. As your answer gets more up votes, its visibility will increase and this means that the probability of readers clicking on your link and visiting your blog will be high.
Utilize Mix
Mix is the next surviving platform created by the founder of StubleUpon to replace it. You can use this platform to reach new readers for your blog and also improve your blog posts engagement. You just need to signup with them, setup your profile and share your contents. To make your blog get more visible, follow other bloggers in your niche so that more people will discover and follow you.
The platform is not as big as Facebook. But once you master how Mix works, it will help you grow your blog audience and engagement.
Check:
- Blogging vs. Vlogging: What Should You Know and Go for
- 25 Best Free Small SEO Tools for Bloggers and How to Use them
Other Ways to Grow your Blog Traffic and Improve your Blog Post Engagements
Make Sure your Blog Content Answers all your Readers’ Questions
You can only create such contents when you carried out proper keyword research to know what people search often about the topic you are writing on. Find out the gap between what readers are looking for and the information already available in some top ranking blogs. Use your articles to fill that gap. That is the easiest way to make search engines notice and rank your posts faster.
Utilize free keyword research tools like Keyword.io, Google keyword planner and SemRush. If you blog on WordPress platform, consider installing SemRush and Yoast plugins. They will help you write an optimized content.
Give your Reasons to Visit your Blog Again
Would you ever return to a website where you never found solution to your problem on the first visit? No one does that! That is why first impression matters a lot. Make your articles very easy to read, with useful ideas so that your audience will find reasons to bookmark your site and visit again.
Make your Site User-friendly
How friendly is your site? Can your readers easily navigate from one page to another? Do they find what they need easily? How long does it take your site pages to load? These are some of the questions that will help you know if your site is user-friendly or not.
Your blog theme has a lot to contribute on the experience your readers have on your blog. If your blog theme is light in weight and SEO optimized, with nice design and structure, your readers will enjoy your blog.
Another tip to help you improve the user-friendliness of your blog is to make sure your search box is handy. You can put your blog search box in different location, like navigation bar, side bar or even before and after blog content. Encourage your readers to search for any information they are looking for in your blog.
Your navigation bar and sitemap can also help. Add links to the most important article categories in your navigation bar. This is to ensure that users can easily find the link and click on them to find what they need. Sitemap helps them see all the important links on your blog like all your article tags, categories and your site pages. Generate a sitemap for your blog and add them in your blog footer or header.
Check:
- 9 Best Sites to Buy Affordable SEO Optimized WordPress Themes
- 9 Business Mistakes Young Entrepreneurs Make & How to Correct them
Give your Articles a Catchy Title and Engaging Introduction
The easiest way to get new readers’ attention when you share your articles is by giving your articles an attractive title. This will make the reader eager to know more about the topic. Once the reader clicks on your post link and lands on the article, the first five lines can keep or bore the reader away. Also search engines pay more attention to your post’s introduction when indexing and crawling and crawling your site pages. That is why you need to ensure your post introduction is well written.
The best way to write an enticing introduction is to give the readers a brief description of the topic and then tell the them the benefits they will enjoy from the article and its content. As an SEO tip, make sure you add your main keyword in your articles’ introduction.
Have an Active Email Marketing Contact List
There are many benefits of building an active email contact list for your blog. Your posts get views almost immediately you click the publish button. Also these subscribers have a high level of trust in your blog, that was why they submitted their email addresses.
But also know that the total number of your active email subscribers reduce monthly. This has nothing to do with the total number of subscribers. Active subscribers are those who actually see your blog notification and open the mail. Remember that most people create new emails and abandon their old email addresses. So in order to balance the equation, make sure new active subscribers come in to take the place of the dormant ones.
To easily grow and maintain email subscription list, use the services of some popular email subscription companies like AWeber. GetResponse, MailChimp, etc.
See: 12 Tips to Help You Build an Efficient Email Marketing Contact List
Publish new Contents Regularly
This is the best way to engage your blog newsletter subscribers. Publish interesting articles regularly so that they will get notified and re-visit your blog. This act also gives your subscribers the impression that your blog has the most current information.
Apart from publishing new articles, you can update some of your old articles and then send them notification to see what’s new. This the strategy I use sometimes on my blog. I use OneSignal Push Notification plugin. When editing the article you can setup the plugin to notify your subscribers when you update a particular article.
See:
- 15 Essential Free WordPress Plugins for Top Security and SEO
- How to Optimize your Blog and Videos for Fast Google AdSense Approval
Respond Quickly to your Blog Comments
Share your Posts on Social Media with Hashtags
Join Bloggers Groups on Facebook
Facebook groups can help improve your post engagement. My first blog comments always come from members of various Facebook groups I joined. Search for relevant bloggers groups on Facebook and join them. As I always say, first create a good impression by sharing helpful tips without adding links to your blog. If you have SEO knowledge, share it for free to help other bloggers.
After you have gained enough reputation, you can now start reaping the fruit of your labour. Once you publish a new article, summarize the content of that blog post in a few sentences and encourage other members of the groups to read your posts and drop comments. In return, you do the same for them.
Conclusion
That’s it! Always know that nothing great comes so quick. You need to apply these tips I revealed to help you drive free traffic to your blog. You must not apply all, concentrate on a particular search engine or two. Or you try out Facebook and Reddit traffic tips. Work on a particular platform at a time.
If you want to appreciate me for these tips I revealed in this article, share this article with your social media friends. Subscribe to out blog via email to get notified for our coming tutorials. Enjoy!
