This will be the first in a continuing series of articles on effective ways of increasing traffic to your blog or website. This can be an extremely frustrating topic for bloggers since there is so much content already online regarding this subject. However, you would probably agree with me that much of the existing how-to guides and articles are spammy self-promotional pieces that are clearly trying to navigate you toward a purchase and honestly aren’t much value for those of us with a genuine interest in the subject. That’s why I have decided to write about the many tips and tricks that I have discovered through years of web development and blogging as well as linking to the sources that I find most helpful in my personal quest to learn more. So here we go!
Produce Unique Content
We all know that content is king and must be compelling to attract and retain an audience. But sometimes we get caught up with words and blogging that we neglect the niche facets of content. Consider a small sample list.
- Infographics – Make unique list based infographics for user reference
- Competitions / Raffles – Have small raffle prizes and contests
- Webinars – Host an informational webinar on your subject
- Polls – Create a small poll to gain valuable user opinions
- Vlogs – Small videos for Facebook and YouTube
- Product Reviews – Review a popular product in your niche. (Maybe even post a review on Amazon?)
- Memes – Becoming much more popular of late, lighten the mood with humor. Now some of this will feel cheesy especially with more serious or news related blogs and sites but it merely reflects the way society is moving. If you can generate a meme that pulls in 100 readers, was it worth it?
How to do it. Admittedly most of us won’t be experts in creating this type of content and that’s okay! We can have outsourcers do all the work while we spend time creating our articles. As an example for my blogs, I love producing infographics. They pull in loads of traffic from social media and Google image searches. And I don’t even have to produce them myself.
Using sites like Fiverr, I can get a 10 point infographic created for $10 total! Just do a search on Fiverr and find someone to write up your data points (Or you can do it yourself) Then find someone on the marketplace (shown below) to make an infographic and provide them your data points. Fiverr has tons of gigs that you can pay $5 for and get some real authentic unique alternative content. If your interest in more ideas for content here is a list of 101 types of digital content that you can use as a reference.
Link Building
Yeah, I know what you are thinking, Duh! I know backlinks are important for indexing in Google, but it’s very difficult to get good backlinks and i prefer spending my time creating content. But there are some good ways of building quality backlinks that drive traffic to your site. Consider:
- Guest Posting – This works surprisingly well, Just ask around the authority blogs in your niche and ask them about Guest posting for them. You can also use Google. Search for “Guest Blogger”, “Write for us” etc. Also works for podcasts!
- Videos – Yes they help with Backlinks too. Post on social media and your site. Make sure to link back. Also, try and incorporate your name into the content for added emphasis.
- Use Images and Meta Tags! Never ever forget to add quality meta tags! These can help you rank in Google image search for terms that are difficult to reach on normal search
- Interviews – again find an authority figure in your niche and interview them. You can even offer to pay. Make sure the interviewer and the questions you ask are interesting to the audience.
For more information on current link building strategies take a look at this site For more technical link building try this one.
PBNs
Another often mentioned tactic in link building is PBNs. Private Blog Networks) have become increasingly more and more popular through the years. This strategy involves buying expired domain names (or links from people who own these domains) that have link juice and building out content on them to link to your main blog or website.
Let’s just be clear on this, it’s technically against Google policy as you are not supposed to be able to pay for page rank. And this can lead to you getting penalized in results so be extra careful when going down this road. The crazy thing is PBNs actually do work really well which is why Google hates them.
Think about it for a second, everyone knows Google search engine loves strong backlinks (Especially .edu and .govs) so strong domains with SEO weight can prop up a site to a much higher position than it really deserves. Sound familiar? That’s right, it sounds like Google’s Adwords program (now Google Ads) So Google’s organic search service and SEO actually compete with their own paid program. Everyone on page 1 of search results has no need to pay for ads. This can be risky though so carefully weigh the options. Here’s a more in-depth explanation of the pros and cons if you’re interested.
Follow up: Again this is more of an overview of topics that we will dig into a bit deeper through follow up posts later on down the line. Stay tuned for more!
