You write a very awesome blog post by keeping all blog post writing strategies in mind.

You hit that publish button.

It’s live.

Now what?

Crickets.

:slowclaps:

That mojo you had before hitting that publish button is gone, because no one is heeding attention to the article you just wrote.

Your content is gone, and stacked below 3 million other blog posts published everyday on the internet.

How can you get your voice heard in the world of digital insanity?

Don’t fret about it.

I’m going to introduce some of the most effective and proven blog traffic generation strategies.

This post is gonna be very long about ~10,000 words, but rest assured I’ll try my best to organize the content and keep you engaging.

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SECTION 1

Places to Promote Blog Posts for Traffic

Listen.

No matter how good your blog posts are, if you fail to promote them properly on promotional channels, it fails to get the traffic it deserves.

How to get blog traffic from Facebook?

Facebook is undeniably the largest social media website out there. Your business can’t afford to overlook Facebook.

Promoting blog posts on Facebook

You can consider promoting your blog posts on your timeline, FB groups (read the promotional rules), FB pages, and also chatbots.

Whenever, a great epic article is going live on BloggingX – I’ll never miss creating a pre-publish buzz around the article.

It’ll do five things:

1. Get me instant traffic once my articles go live
2. Gets me more comments – as I ask for them while notifying them
3. It’ll speed up the indexation of my newly published content
4. It’ll further push me to make the post epic
5. My audience will be my accountability partners

Once the blog post goes live, I will notify the above commenters and also share it on my timeline with attractive text and headline (created for Facebook) using the Yoast plugin.

Apart from this, I also do share my post in my Facebook Group, and also Facebook page.

Tips to keep in mind before posting in Facebook

• Create headline especially for Facebook. You can make use of SEO plugins like Yoast for this as mentioned above in the headlines section of the article.
• You can use different featured images for your various Facebook posts, it’ll break the pattern and gives you more traffic. BuzzFeed does this very well, they swap in and out new featured images and split test them. You can implement this on WordPress by following Waseem’s guide.
• Your Facebook posts should create some sense of curiosity in them, then only they’ll click through it.

I’m also actively building my chatbot subscribers.

So, once the post is live I will also inform my chatbot subscribers regarding it. So far the open rate with FB chatbots are really great.

This is the kind of traffic I’m getting from Facebook.

As you can see, the traffic is quite engaging with low bounce rate and good session duration.

If you’re putting all your eggs in email marketing, it’s time to also add Facebook chatbot marketing to your arsenal.

Tips for saving money on Facebook ads

• Always make use of flex targeting (if you are not running retargeting ads)
• Start ad with a low budget, say like $5 per day.
• Always create 4-5 variations of the ad and pick the winner once enough data is collected.
• Always have a retargeting pixel on your site.
• If the pixel has enough visits, run a lookalike ad it costs you less.
• The ad should be excellently crafted keeping copywriting strategies in mind.
• Be patient, Facebook needs some time to optimize your ad for right audience and lower your cost.

As of writing this blog post, I’ve not spent any substantial money on FB ads for BloggingX posts. So, can’t talk about Facebook ads for blog content promotion.

But I’ve run some ads for the posts, targeting my audience in India, and got CPC of like ₹5 and CTR of 4%.

The ad I ran was in Q4, it was costly.

Gaming the Facebook algorithm

Facebook serves your posts to people whom it would like to serve, you seem to have little or no control over whom to serve the posts for.

Seems familiar huh?

Here are some of the tips for gaming the Facebook algorithm, that you will regret not reading.

Make every post unique: If you post the same content to multiple Facebook channels like pages, groups, timelines then the reach for your post will be decreased. And you also decrease the chances of your post being shown to a diverse audience – as the text will be the same.

Recency: The aim of newsfeed is to serve news (read it again). If the stuff you post on Facebook is not recent and fresh, your reach will be less. So, try to somehow connect your post with entities or people related to recent issues including keywords like – maybe the Trump, Christmas (during the season), so on.

Play by the Zuck’s motto: “Never miss an update from friends and family” this is the motto Facebook stands by. Try to craft your post as if it’s an update.

I crafted the description of my video as if it’s an update, rather than saying “Watch now – How to blah blah blah”. Now, you gotcha!

Include the keywords in your Facebook post that tricks Facebook that it’s an important announcement or an update.

Ever wondered why posts containing keywords like got a new car, engaged, married, so on gets more reach? It’s due to their personal nature.

Story-telling: It’s a great way to naturally include personal touch in your Facebook post and make Facebook believe that it’s important to your friends.

A story like this garner more reach and attention. Try to implement story-telling frequently in your Facebook post, and tell me what it did to your reach.

According to an awesome article by Alaura at ArtPlusMarketing, you need to move over from dopamine-centric marketing to oxytocin-centric marketing. In simple words, we need to value interaction, network/tribe-building, meaningful connections, over attention grabbing – this is possible with storytelling.

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How to get blog traffic from Twitter?

Twitter is a great platform. You certainly can’t ignore Twitter as a platform, when you’re going to a multichannel traffic acquisition route.

The first tip that came to my mind is including click to tweet buttons on your blog posts.

You can generate such content boxes on your site using page builders like Thrive Architect or Click to Tweet tool.

These boxes enable your visitors to share the blog post they’re reading with their Twitter followers.

Another tip is to use very attractive visuals in your Twitter tweets.

Majority of the Twitter users are very visual-centric people, so creating visual content for Twitter is very important. If you already have a very great looking featured image for your blog posts like mine, then you are ready to go.

You can also consider adding attention-grabbing texts to your featured images solely for using them in Twitter.

You need to also add relevant hashtags to all of your tweets.

You can use tools like Hashtagify to find the popular tags in your niche and add it to your swipe file.

These hashtags help Twitter algorithm to understand your content better and serve it to the right audience.

Do you know that there’s a thing called Twitter Analytics?

It’s very essential to use this tool, to track, test, and refine your Twitter marketing efforts.

This tool gives you an overview of your Twitter performance, reach, and engagement.

With this data, you’ll get clear idea about what are the commonalities with your highly reached, engaged, and clicked tweets. Thus you can further refine your tweeting strategy to get more traffic to your blog.

You also can consider publishing your videos on Twitter too, and track whether people are viewing them fully.

Tweet no more than 3 times a day.

A study by SocialBakers, analyzed 11,000 tweets from top brands and came up with the conclusion that 3 tweets a day is the ideal count and that’s where brands see huge engagement.

How to get blog traffic from Quora?

Quora gives you long-term traffic when compared to social media traffic.

How?

Everytime your answer on a question receives an upvote, the answer will be visible to all the followers of that upvoter. It again results in a great stream of traffic to your site.

How to write Quora answers? Me and also many top marketers repurpose their blog content as Quora answers. It works well.

According to Quora, copying and pasting content on their platform is plagiarism. But, you can get away with it as you’ll be repurposing your own blog content.

On the side note, you need to obviously tweak the text a little bit so that it caters the Quora audience, add in a great introduction, formatting, images, and also short paragraphs.

How to get more upvotes on Quora?

For getting serious traffic from Quora, you obviously need more upvotes on your answers.

Look.

Below is the traffic I got from Quora in the last 7 days for my new blog.

That’s decent traffic.

Isn’t it?

The reason for the above traffic is the number of upvotes I received on my Quora answers.

Let’s find it out, exactly how I did it step-by-step.

The below section is advanced and maybe not for you unless you have at least 5 answers on Quora.

Finding the right questions: You need to find the questions that have more followers, and fewer answers – preferably in the ratio of 5:1 or 7:1 depending upon the niche you’re in.

You can also consider answering the questions with a lack of quality answers.

Here you can make use of tools like FindBetterQuestions to scrape the Quora questions and answers and look to answer questions that have lots of views, followers, but few quality answers.

Here I can find the questions that have high Followers/Answers ratio and also have good page views.

This tool does your job very easier to find questions to answer that will actually drive traffic. Again, it’s the demand and supply rule. You need to supply your quality answers where the demand is there but there’s no quality supply.

The hook: You have a few seconds to hook the readers in for reading your answer. Readers decide whether to read your answer or not by reading the introduction.

Just observe the above answer. What can you infer?

• I started my answer with the question
• I started my answer with a statement that’s relatable (the site that pays you some money for ad clicks) and build rapport with the readers.
• I formatted my answer (especially the introduction) using short paragraphs, bold, italics, and heck even CAPS.

These things you need to keep in mind, the introduction is to get the attention of the readers and build rapport with them so that they continue reading your answer and hopefully upvote it.

Add custom bios: Do you know what you can add custom bios for every topic you answer in?

The bios should contain the below two elements:

• Social validation
• Credibility

Answers posted by deemed credible people get more upvotes.

Neat formatting: Your answers need to have ultra-short paragraphs, cliffhangers, blockquotes, bold, italics, lists, and images. You need to remember that you are dealing with people who have very short attention spans.

If you neatly structurize your answers, they’ll be read and upvoted.

Story-telling: You need to build trust with the readers by showing transparency and authenticity in your answers.

You can see in the above answer, I immediately incorporated story-telling with authenticity. And also, I added an image to evoke emotions that hook readers in.

Story telling is the best way to engage readers.

According to a post published by Henry at IgniteMyCompany,  “Storytelling increases engagement by giving your business or personal brand a more emotional, personal, and ultimately human side”.

Storytelling works everywhere, whether it be Facebook, blogs, Quora, etc.

Replicate what’s working well: Before answering the question, just do a quick research of the existing questions on that topic that have highly upvoted answers.

Just notice, what made those answers popular. What emotions they evoked? Happiness, sadness, fear, failure? How did they trigger emotions? Stories, images, narration?

Now, replicate the same in your new answers.

Be precise: Quora readers love precise answers. Don’t take storytelling or the hook offboard. Stay relevant to the topic you’re writing on.

Relevance is very important. Cut the blabber.

Cite research papers: What’s the downside of community-driven sites? Lack of authenticity.

It you add authenticity to your answers by including links to relevant statistics, research papers, and backing up your statements – your answers will be trusted and it’ll garner more upvotes and eyeballs.

Topic angling: If you are an expert in a niche where there is no enough followed topics and high competition, try to find some highly followed topics slightly off the topic you’re blogging in.

There find the questions which you can angle back to your niche in the answer. By this way, your answer gets more upvotes and views.

You need to be extra careful about this strategy and stay relevant and unbiased throughout your answer. It’s a very subtle art. Read the full answer here.

Use images: Images grab more right eyeballs, as it speaks out the context of your answer straight-away in a glance.

It also makes answers more understandable for skimmers, so that more people understand your answer and upvote it. I personally include plenty of screenshots, statistical images, and also metaphorical images in my images.

How to get traffic from LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is also a great source of traffic. Although the audience base of LinkedIn is less, they are of high quality.

It’s a professional social network, and not meant only for recruiters and job seekers.

In 2017, LinkedIn made major changes to its algorithm. Earlier it used to show your updates to all the people in your network. But now, your posts will be checked for quality by a machine learning algorithm even before serving it to your connections.

Here are the stages your content goes through when you post:

1. Content filtering: Whatever you post on LinkedIn will be categorized into one of the following – spam, low-quality, clear. It filters out posts with promotional words like a discount, offer, deal, etc.
2. Testing phase: Once your content is categorized by robots, it’ll be sent to a selected number of connections – whom robots think might be interested in. It’ll not be sent to all of them.
3. Content scoring: In this phase, your content will be scored based on the engagement (likes, comments, shares) by those selected people robot sent it to.
4. Real people assessment: If you start to get really good engagement, your content will be passed onto the real people – content moderators at LinkedIn. They’ll manually assess the quality of the content and if it’s good enough the content will be also sent to people outside your network.

Below is the image that summarizes the entire process.

It’s clear that LinkedIn craves more for the job, career, education, growth-related news/articles instead of gossips, gifs, and promotional stuff.

You can also leverage the LinkedIn Publisher tool to create content, and it’ll end up on LinkedIn Pulse, and also on the newsfeed. You need to also pay attention to at what time of the day most of your connections will be active as the Publisher posts will be shown to them based on their time.

LinkedIn Pulse has a very huge audience much like that of Medium or Quora platforms. Here are some of the tips for you to drive traffic with LinkedIn Pulse.

• Post articles shorter than 1000 words. In fact, 70% of the Pulse’s featured articles are under 1000 words.
• You can repurpose your blog content as Pulse articles, but make sure you add a canonical link to the original source to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Before publishing the article, make sure you categorize it under any of the categories ranging from career, jobs, self-improvement, and others.
• Consider driving more traffic to your posts, the more views your posts get, there are more chances that they’ll get featured on the homepage.

How to get blog traffic from Medium?

Many people ask me, should I be blogging in Medium platform instead of in self-hosted platform.

Here are the advantages of Medium as a platform.

1. Medium has a very good audience-base. You can easily market your products and services to those audience and moreover building traffic is super-easy if you manage consistent content.
2. Medium blog posts tend to rank well in Google for popular keywords.
3. You can repurpose your blog content on Medium.

Don’t move your entire content marketing game to Medium. All you need to do is leverage Medium to drive traffic to your site.

Ben Hardy from the popular GoinsWriter is the man, when it comes to Medium leverage. In order to grow his audience base, he republished what he published on his blog also on Medium.

Here is the list of articles he published.

As his Medium articles went viral, he added the call to action in his articles.

Guess what?

He grew his email subscriber base from 0 to 20,000 in just 6 months!

This is a classic example of how to leverage the massive audience-base that Medium has and piggyback it to your site.

While republishing blog articles on Medium, you should not forget to add the canonical tag to your articles.

In case if you are importing the article via the Medium’s importer, it’ll be added automatically. You can check it using the Inspect element functionality of your browser.

Ryan McCready published a case study where they analyzed 10,000+ data points to find out what makes an article on Medium viral.

Here are some of the tips from the study:

1. Write articles for middle schoolers
2. Have 12–15 words a sentence it has 20% more recommends
3. Easy to read sentences have 43% more recommends
4. Articles with 6-7 minutes read time get 20 – 40% more recommends
5. Power words in the headline lead to 21% more recommends
6. Tuesdays and Saturdays are the best time to post and increase recommends by 33%
7. Using a simple call to action at the end of the article leads to more recommends

If you’re serious about leveraging Medium as a platform for blog traffic generation, I highly recommend you reading the entire study by Ryan!

How to get blog traffic from niche forums?

Niche Forums are a great way to drive highly-targeted traffic back to your site if used in the right way.

You can make use of the above search query to find the forum discussions related to your keywords. It’s niche + inurl:forum

The main mistake I see bloggers do is straightaway after joining the forums they begin promoting.

That’s a wrong way to do it.

You need to provide value to the forum audience with your mini-blog post like threads, answer to other members’ questions, and genuinely sparkle a conversation.

Try to include case studies, content in the form of bullet forms, and neatly format the thread content – the same formatting principles I explained for Quora traffic.

You can promote your blog posts whenever relevant or in the form of signatures.

The fact is that most of the forum engines push posts with fresh replies to the top in the homepage. So, if there are more replies to your threads, don’t reply to all the comments all at once. Instead of this, reply to a set of comments in a block every hour or so. Make sure that your replies are of high quality.

Don’t overdo this, as this thread bumping practice is often considered a sneaky tactic.

How to get traffic from Reddit?

1.?5B traffic.

According to SimilarWeb, that’s the monthly traffic of Reddit.

That’s a lot of traffic.

Reddit is the #1 discussion site on the internet.

In 2018 alone, Reddit got 153 million posts, 2 billion comments, and 27 billion votes. That’s wow!

It’s a male dominant platform filled with people aged between 18-34.

I will explain you how you can tap into this huge network for driving blog traffic.

Once you sign up for Reddit, you’ll be assigned a karma score to start with. The strength and authenticity of your account are measured by the number of karma scores you have.

You can boost your karma scores by:

• Receiving more upvotes on your posts (post karma)
• Receiving more upvotes on your links (link karma)

First, to begin, you need to join the relevant subreddits according to your niche.

You need to aim joining Subreddits with a good number of subscribers and also active online users. The latter number gives you an exact idea of whether a subreddit is dormant or not.

In order to determine what kind of posts get more engagement sort the results by “top” and select “of all time”. Now browse the results, so that you’ll get an idea about the kind of posts people like in the subreddit.

Now, you need to start sharing great content that for sure gets more upvotes and karma for your profile.

When creating a post, you need to pay great attention to the title. Because Reddit users can only see the title of the article when browsing.

Title = Curiosity + Emotion

Just analyze what kind of headlines get more engagement.

Make sure that your title will be in “title case”, it demands more attention.

Most of the subreddits will be ok with you promoting your blog posts occasionally (independently or in a linked post), once you have enough karma.

It’s all about the timings: You need to share the content when most of the subreddit users are online to get more upvotes, karma, and eventually traffic.

Or else, your post may end up stacked below fresh posts.

SimilarWeb data tells us that most of the Reddit users are from US, Canada, and UK. So, it makes sense for you to consider the demographics of the Reddit users while determining the best time to post on Reddit.

If you have enough resources on your end, you can track the number of active sub-redditors every hour or so, map down a graph and craft your content publishing strategy accordingly.

In 2017, Reddit launched its own video player.

You know what?

According to reports, “Reddit hits 1 billion video views per month a year after launching its own video player”. You can repurpose your YouTube videos to post them on Reddit and get upvotes.

Do this first with your most popular and loved videos.

You can also consider hosting an AMA (Ask me anything) on Reddit. With this, you’ll certainly get ample opportunities to promote your blog posts if they are epic.

For that first, you need to have a very good karma points in your account.

You need to schedule your Reddit AMA beforehand using social media, friends, promoted posts on Reddit homepage, and others. The goal is to get as many people as possible to attend your live AMA.

For more inspiration, read some of these Reddit AMA stories of both successes and failures.

How to get traffic from Slideshare?

Do you know that over 80% of SlideShare’s 70 million visitors come from Google organic search?

That’s a lot of targeted traffic.

People like Ana Hoffman from TrafficGenerationCafe, managed to grow from 0 to 243,000 Views in 30 Days, wow that’s a lot.

After reading a lot of case studies, here are some of the Slideshare traffic generation I can give you.

If you know how to properly write a blog post, you already know the importance of having a blog post outline. You can use that same outline to create a presentation.

If you have your blog post outline in the form of bullets, creating slides out of your bullet lists is very easy as it seems. It’s a little known trick that few people use when repurposing their content.

After creating a presentation out of your blog posts, it’s time for you to upload it to SlideShare.

After uploading, it’ll generate a preview of your slide. Now, you need to enter in the title, description, category, privacy (public), tags to your slides.

As most of the SlideShare’s traffic is organic, it’s very important to include properly researched keywords in the title, description, and the tags to the slides.

You can make use of tools like AnswerThePublic, UberSuggest, in combination of KeywordsEverywhere to come up with the keywords to target in your SlideShare presentation.

Apart from the title and the description, you need to also use keywords inside the slides as SlideShare automatically generates transcript out of your slides and it’s indexable by Google.

In the above screenshot, I’ve pulled some of the SEO related keywords that SlideShare is ranking for on Google using SEMrush.

Most of the keywords that SlideShare is ranking for contains words like:

• Presentation
• Report
• PPT
• Blueprint
• So on.

You can target this kind of keywords in your presentation title and description.

And also, another thing to note is that presentations with a good number of views ends up on the homepage, featured page, or discovery section of SlideShare. So, it’s recommended you to also embed the presentations in your blog posts.

How to get blog traffic from YouTube?

In YouTube, it’s not only about making people see your video description and click on them.

You can repurpose your blog content as videos and publish them on YouTube.

Personally I’m doing this on my YouTube channel. After publishing the video on YouTube, I’ll embed it on my blog posts – thus it helps in increasing the average page visit duration on my site.

You may be asking me, “Akshay, how to drive traffic from YouTube to my site?”.

Well, listen.

If you are serious about driving traffic from YouTube to your blog, you need to consider having your own personalized URL shortening domain with TLD of .ly, .it, .cc, .co, etc.

I have a custom domain name at akshay.it. I shorten my long URLs using Rebrandly. I prefer to use Rebrandly over Bitly due to limitations imposed by Bitly.

When I have shortened links like this, it’ll be very easy for me to include the link right in the video itself other than including in the pinned comment and the video description. In this way, people likely enter the URL manually rather than clicking as it’s memorable.

To persuade people to go to my link, you can also consider offering an irresistible freebie or a lead magnet. Those freebies maybe PDFs, mind-maps, checklists, infographics, eBooks, course, audio, so on.

Before this, you need to keep these top 5 YouTube SEO tips in mind to drive traffic to your videos.

1. Include the target keyword right in the beginning of the video title – than in the middle
2. Video watch time is the #1 ranking factor in YouTube, hook the people to watch your video till the end.
3. Other than including the keyword in the description and tags, speak out the keyword you’re willing to rank in the video – Google can make out of the content inside the video (using speech recognition) and rank it.
4. Include tags that your competitor similar videos have targeted, in your video tags, by this your video will appear in the related video section of the people who are watching your competitor’s videos. You can determine competitor tags by making use of tools like TubeBuddy for this or scan the “page source” of their video page.
5. Spend some time crafting great click-worthy thumbnails for your videos for boosting YouTube CTR.

How to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog?

Pinterest is a visual social network where you can pin and also discover great images – especially in the art, crafts, food, travel, architecture, photography, and all other niches.

According to a study, in American adults, 45% of women and only 17% of men use Pinterest.

If you are in a niche where the majority of your audience are woman, you can’t afford to ignore Pinterest as your promotional channel.

The first thing you need to do is, convert your Pinterest profile to a business account.

This gives you access to many features like Analytics and also Pinterest Ads.

As a marketer, analytics is quite essential for you, if you are treating Pinterest as one of the major social media marketing channels for your blog.

In order to start using Pinterest, you need to head over to the board’s section and create a board. I suggest you create multiple boards with the names of categories of your blog.

In the Board description, make sure you include the keywords for which your board needs to be discovered on Pinterest. Also, choose a valid category.

You can also add collaborators if you want some of your friends and colleagues to also pin awesome images to the board.

You can also consider joining other popular boards as a collaborator.

While pinning the images inside the boards, make sure you include the URL of the relevant blog post content in the website section of the pin.

Pinning content regularly, and growing a follower-base from scratch is a very challenging task.

Folks at Obstacle, leveraged the power of group boards to drive 17,000 page views in one week. That’s a lot.

They made a great job in finding group boards that are worth joining. They put forward great value in those boards, and eventually, it helped them piggyback the traffic.

You can make use of tools like PinGroupie, to find group boards that are worth joining.

This tool lets you find the popular group with dozens of collaborators and tons of followers.

Most of the boards with a good number of collaborators have instructions on how you can join the group.

If for any reason the instructions are not present, you can leave a comment on any of their pins mentioning the admin or contact them by finding their website.

Make sure that there’s a healthy ratio when it comes to self-promotion and also promoting other awesome content around the web.

Email outreach for blog traffic

Once you publish a great post on your blog, you should not forget to outreach the people who’d likely be interested in your content.

You need to outreach people who:

1. Shared similar content in the past
2. Shared your content in the past
3. Regularly shares your competitor content
4. Have linked to similar content in the past
5. Who regularly share awesome content on social media

For this, you need to make use of the tool called BuzzSumo.

This will return all the influencers who have shared content related to “Paleo”.

Now, you can straightaway follow them, save them, or view others links they’ve shared.

When you publish a post that you think they likely be interested in, you can find their email address using tools like Hunter, and outreach them using the below template.

Hi {{John}}, how you doing?

I was browsing today across Twitter and noticed that you regularly share some awesome stuff! I got to know that you are very interested in {{content marketing}} stuff.

Actually, I recently published a great blog post on {{content marketing}}, which I thought you would be interested in.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Your name~

You can observe that in the above blog post, I’m not explicitly asking for a share or a backlink. But the template works quite great, as it is short and to-the-point.

When you have 10 influencers who share your content and say every share gives you 25 pageviews, it’ll be a total of 250 pageviews for your brand new blog post.

That’s decent traffic, considering the effort involved in outreaching.

Which of these channels to focus on?

There are so many channels to focus on.

How to focus on?

First, you need to determine, what platforms do the target audience of your blog use the most.

Are you in a career or employment niche? Don’t miss LinkedIn. Are you a foodie or a craftie? Don’t miss Pinterest.

So you need to first determine your ideal audience persona, and know where they hang out.

After that, come up with at least 3 channels to promote your content in. After getting some traffic, head over to your Google Analytics dashboard and go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

Here I sorted the bounce rate column in ascending order so that traffic source with good engagement on my blog appears first.

By this, you can conclude which traffic generation channel you need to focus on.

Before coming up with a conclusion, you need to have decent traffic from various sources to analyze.

SECTION 2

Content strategy to boost blog traffic

Content is the lifeline of a blog.

Do you agree?

You can’t expect readers to come and read your blog posts if you have a poor content strategy.

It’s very essential for you to read the below blog post first before reading this blog. Because, before learning the art of blog post writing, you can’t expect getting good traffic.

You can’t expect the heat before putting the wood.

So, read the post below and then resume reading this post.

Akshay strongly recommends: How to Write Great Blog Posts That People Drool Over?

So I assume that you’ll read the above post, and skipping some strategies I feel are redundant.

Study the science of virality

The principles of virality are not only for sites like BuzzFeed or ViralNova. It very much applies to every niche.

Back in 2014, BuzzSumo analyzed the commonalities between the highly shared 100 million posts on social media.

Here are the things that highly-shared content had.

• Invoked laughter and humor
• Tapped the narcissistic side – people shared them to appear smart
• People shared the content to define themselves to others
• Reaffirmed the message they always wanted to convey

Another thing, that is very important to look is what do these viral posts contain.

1. List or listicles
2. Images and infographics
3. Not too text heavy (depending on the audience)

These are the two most effective formats of content when it comes to virality. Your every blog post, should contain more list items and also data-rich images.

Christin Scholz and Elisa Baek at UPenn, were the first to publish a scientific study on what exactly happens in the human brain that makes them to share articles on social media. They measured the brain activity of the people as they went through the headlines.

Here is the key takeaway from the research.

“People are interested in reading or sharing content that connects to their own experiences, or to their sense of who they are or who they want to be,” she says. “They share things that might improve their relationships, make them look smart or empathic or cast them in a positive light.”

As going through the paper, I concluded like this – “People share the content on social media based on how they like the world around them to view them.”

For more digging, this post by Neil is a good start.

Use Magnetic headlines to boost your traffic

A great headline is the starting point of your blog post. If your blog headline is mediocre, people just don’t bother to read further.

The headline is the deciding factor whether they need to enter the blog post or not.

The headline should build rapport and cause emotions (like curiosity, love, fear) in the minds of the audience. Because emotions cause people to take action.

You can also research for more ideas, getting some inspiration from BuzzFeed. The team at BuzzFeed spend lots of money and resources to come up with really-good headlines to attract traffic to their sites.

Just site-search in Google for any viral sites like BuzzFeed with your niche keyword appended to it. You’ll instantly get lots of headline inspiration.

It’s not only BuzzFeed. You can search up for ViralNova, Upworthy, CollegeHumor, what not?

I agree that sometimes using these types of headlines may not be suitable for SEO, as sometimes it may be a challenging task to keep both keyword optimization and attractiveness in mind.

Nope.

You need to consider having a different title for social media sites. You can do this easily by using Yoast or any other SEO plugins for WordPress.

The title you add here, will be only visible when you share on Facebook. It won’t interfere with your SEO.

And, you know what? The Google SERP title character count limit is 60, but for Facebook it’s 150 characters (as of writing this post). That’s 2.5x more!

In that BuzzSumo study I linked above, it has been concluded that headlines with 80 – 100 characters get more engagement on Facebook, which your SEO title just won’t cut it.

So, by not crafting headline specially for social media promotion, you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

Use Social Lockers

If you are using WordPress for blogging, you have many plugins like Social Locker that allow you to implement social locker functionality on your site.

The free version of the above plugin will be more than enough. Nevertheless, I have the premium version of the plugin as it gives me more customization and allows me to add more actions to the locker – like FB share, YouTube Subscribe, Email subscribe, Zapier integration, so on.

What’s social locker?

Ah, let me include a screenshot below.

The content placed inside the locker will only be unlocked when visitors share your blog post.

If the free giveaway is very tempting, expect your social shares to shoot up.

This plugin in particular that I linked to above, contains very great features, sign-in locker, and also Zapier integration!

If you are clever enough to use this plugin, you can easily generate thousands of social shares for your every blog post.

In the above example, I created a PDF version of my blog post and offered it for people who share my content on social media.

You can make use of tools like Designrr (I use it) or free tools like PrintFriendly to create PDF version of your blog instantly.

Now you need to upload the PDF to your site.

Include the download link between the social locker shortcodes. And that’s it.

Update old blog posts

There’s no rule that only new blog posts should get good social shares.

You need to periodically update the old blog posts for freshness, repackage it with fresh images, title, and promote it on social media.

Updating the old blog posts also carries many SEO advantages, so you’ll get additional Google traffic.

After updating your blog posts, make sure that the last modified date is displayed.

Because, it helps Google to display the last updated data in SERPs over the initial publish date attracting you great traffic and boosting rankings.

While updating the old blog posts, make sure enough new information is added in your post in order for Google to consider changing the date in SERPs.

If you want the updated blog post to be moved to your blog’s homepage, you can modify the publish date.

Only do this, if the blog post update is massive and new eyeballs find it really fresh.

If you feel like you need to merge the blog posts, to make it one epic resource you can do that too.

Repurpose blog content

If you learn the art of repurposing the content, you master the game of traffic generation.

You need to learn to repurpose the content published on your blog into various formats – like presentations, podcasts, videos, etc.

1. Repurpose blog post content as Quora answers
2. Repurpose blog post content as YouTube videos
3. Embed those videos in your blog content
4. Repurpose those YouTube videos to Quora answers, Instagram, IGTV, and FB page.
5. Repurpose snippets of blog content as FB group posts
6. Repurpose parts of the blog post as Medium and LinkedIn Pulse posts and don’t forget to add canonical tags
7. Extract audio out of your video content and create podcast episodes
8. Embed those podcast episodes on your blog
9. Convert your blog post outline to presentations and upload them on Slideshare.
10. Convert your presentations to infographics.
11. Convert your blog posts to ebooks
12. Print and sell those eBooks as real books

With this, you serve the audience who are more visual (prefer videos and infographics) who are auditory (who prefer podcasts), who are bookworms, who are Quora addicts, so on.

This is very important to widen your horizon and reach more people who prefer unconventional mediums to consume content.

In 2015, Buffer conducted an experiment called “The No New Content Challenge”.

According to the challenge they are not allowed to publish any new article on their blog for four weeks straight.

Instead of publishing new blog posts, they would update them, republish to Medium, turn them into ebooks, slideshares, email courses.

Results?

4% increase in organic traffic, upto 200,000 views on Slideshare, and a Medium post made it to the top 20 of the day by garnering 2,888 views.

Bryan Harris from VideoFruit, made $10,000 in 24 hours by leveraging the power of content repurposing.

Here are the things he did.

1. He made a list of most popular blog posts on this site
2. Made a list of most engaged content using BuzzSumo
3. Analyzed the common elements of each post to find topic overlap
4. List out some product ideas
5. Pick one topic idea and test it
6. Create a product outline
7. Pick a group to test the idea
8. Get the feedback from the test group
9. Determine if the product would be success
10. Launch the product and promote it using email marketing AR sequence

There are many people who are doing this.

SECTION 3

How to boost traffic using SEO?

There are some of the lesser-known SEO tactics that you can leverage to boost your traffic greatly.

In this section, you’ll discover some of the SEO strategies that are quick-wins for you in terms of traffic.

Use LSI keywords

I’ve already said this a dozen of times in my blog, but yet people fail to implement it.

LSI keywords are also called semantic keywords. These are the related keywords to the main keyword that you are targeting in your blog post.

After finalizing the keyword you need to target in your article, you need to also search for the related keywords to the main keyword to include in your articles.

Suppose you’re writing an article on – “Paleo diet for weight loss”, you need to plug it in Google and search for the related keywords section.

Apart from this, you can also use Google suggest by putting cursor in the middle of the keyword to let Google fill it for you.

You can also copy the URL of the top ranking page, and plug it in SEMrush.

You can see that SEMrush will return all the keywords that the URL is ranking for on Google.

Now make a list of all these LSI or related keywords that you can target in your article.

Go to your blog post, and insert these LSI keywords wherever possible to eventually rank for these related keywords too.

Must avail: 15-days trial access to the SEMrush Pro plan

Google Search Console – Quick-wins for SEO

Another strategy is to use Google search console to find out the keywords that you are actually ranking for, but not getting clicks.

Go to the “Performance” section of your Google search console account.

There you need to sort the number of impressions on your keywords by descending order.

As you can see here, my blog is appearing tons of times for the keywords surrounding “blog tagline examples”, but it’s not garnering clicks as it’s not ranking higher for the “examples” aspect.

So, it means that I may need to go ahead to my blog post and add in the keywords surrounding “blog tagline examples”, to make my blog post rank higher and get more clicks in Google search results page.

Like this, you can identify quick-wins when it comes to rankings and SEO traffic using Google Search Console.

Include keywords in the table of content

If you are publishing in-depth blog posts, say 2000+ words on your blog posts, you need to include the table of content on your blog posts.

For the table of content to help you effectively when it comes to SEO, you need to have LSI keywords included in the subheadings of your article.

The table of content helps you get to “Jump to” section for your blog posts in SERPs.

While creating your blog post outline, you need to consider including related keywords in your subheadings as well.

Generally, the keywords that you target in the subheadings of your blog posts are more long tail version of the main keyword – I call them as sub-keywords that cover subtopics.

With this strategy you attract more organic traffic to the inner sections of your posts, which you wouldn’t have attracted otherwise.

In simple words, with the table of content in place, Google treats each section of your article as separate articles! How cool is that?

If you want to read more about this, resource here by Platonik helps.

Execute content pruning – Really, delete!

No matter how well you publish on your blog, there are still fluffy articles on your blog that returns no value to your readers.

Yes.

I’m suggesting you to delete some blog posts to boost traffic.

When you have too many pages on your blog post that are not driving traffic to you, that are duplicate content, that can be merged to one epic post, it’s called index bloat.

With this bloat in place, Google sees your website as of overall low-quality and also visitors. It hurts the user interaction signals like bounce rate and average page visit time.

There’s a concept called crawl budget, it refers to the pages Google decides to crawl on your site on every visit.

So, if you have lots of unwanted pages of your site, Google will not effectively crawl the pages that matter to you the most.

You need to do something called “Content Pruning”.

“QuickBooks deleted 40% of their blog posts to nearly double their organic traffic” – Jimmy Dale from Animalz reported

They deleted more than 2,000 blog posts on QuickBooks, the traffic was up 20% within a few weeks and 44% eventually and also increased in signups.

This is not the only example.

It’s been proved again and again that content pruning works great to boost traffic.

So, how to determine what pages to delete for crawl budget optimization?

Before doing the deletion process, you need to first do a content audit.

For this, you need to look into your Analytics data. Go to Behavior > Site content > All pages.

Apply the date filter as “Last 30 days”.

Here I need to add an advanced search filter to only show blog posts which have received less than 15 page views in the last 30 days.

Again, this number differs depending upon the niche you’re in.

Now I can make a list of all the blog posts that fall under this criteria.

Now, I head over to any Bulk URL checker tool like that of Ahrefs. There enter in all the URLs, to check whether they have backlinks.

• You need to avoid deleting posts with backlinks pointing to them.
• Can you consider merging the content of two blog posts? Do it, and redirect the additional one.
• If these blog posts have room for improvement, make sure you revamp the content, add in some images, sprinkle some LSI keywords, and trickle some traffic. Watch if they climb up in rankings.
• No room for improvement? End them in trash, and redirect it to most relevant blog post.

It may be very difficult to hit that trash button, provided you spent so much time and money in creating the content. But, don’t be emotional. Be rational.

Content is not worth it if it is doing more harm to you than good. Wrapping up

What about you?

Don’t get overwhelmed by reading this giant guide.

I would urge you to implement the strategies I discussed one-by-one and track the results.

What traffic strategies worked great for you?

Let me know in the comments section.