How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog Posts: 10 Essential Blog Traffic Tips

D o you want to get more traffic to your blog? You're in good company!

Over the decade (a bit longer than a decade actually) that I’ve been blogging, I’ve tried taking advantage of every source of traffic in the book. During this process, I’ve curated a list of blog traffic tips I’m very excited to share with you today.

So, in this post, I’m going to be sharing the strategies and actionable tips you can use to grow your website traffic via:

• SEO,
• Email marketing,
• Building a community,
• Social media platforms like Facebook,
• And more 😉

So, let’s get started!

Quick List of Blog Traffic Tips

1. Use Keyword Research to Identify the Right Topics For Blog Posts

If you’re blogging just for fun, it’s fine to write about whatever you want.

But if you’re serious about getting organic traffic to your blog, the first and foremost thing you need to focus on is keyword research.

What is keyword research?

Simply put, it means finding the words that people are using to search Google and other search engines. If you identify those search terms (likely using a blog topic research tool), also called keywords, then you’ll know exactly the topics that you should be writing about on your blog. Then when you use those keywords in your content, your blog posts will be more likely to show up in the search results.

Keyword research lays the foundation for your blog so you can attract the right audience who are interested in what you’re offering on your blog.

Without keyword research, you’ll fail to convert your traffic into email subscribers and customers. That’s because you won’t be writing about the topics your target audience is searching for, and even if you do, they won’t be able to find it on Google.

With keyword research, you can target the right keywords and optimize your content accordingly. This helps Google algorithms understand what it’s all about. Which will boost your chances of your articles popping up in response to a search.

How do you do keyword research? One way is to start with a blog post idea and then brainstorm different ways people might search for that topic in Google.

Then, start searching for that topic yourself. Make a note of the titles that appear in search results, and the suggested searches at the bottom of the page.

This will give you a good idea of what other people are searching for and how they’re phrasing it.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, check out this guide on how to do keyword research for beginners.

2. Create High-Quality Pillar Pages

Once you have a good idea of the topics people are searching for, the next thing you need to do is to create a series of pillar articles.

Pillar articles are longer blog posts on more general topics related to your blog niche. Pillar articles can be thousands of words long. They tend to be “evergreen”, meaning they’re not quickly outdated, and they bring in a lot of traffic even after months – if not years – of creating them.

Pillar articles help you…

• Bring in a rush of new readers, social shares, and links back to your blog.
• Bring in more readers over time, even if your content is buried in your archives.
• Bring in search traffic because so many other sites eventually link to them.

So how do you create pillar articles the right way so they continue to drive traffic to your site for years to come?

Here are a few steps to get you started:

• Content ideas: Create a list of pillar article ideas you want to publish on your blog. These should be more high-level topics that you can write an in-depth post about.
• Research: Read what others are writing on the topic and consider how you can create content that’s even more high-quality and helpful for readers.
• Editorial calendar: Build an editorial calendar and add these ideas to the calendar. Make sure to give yourself enough time to write longer articles.
• Stick to the plan: Choose a publishing schedule and stick to it, no matter what. Check out our tips to write faster to help you stay on track!

This strategy can take time, but it’s a great way to build your audience and reputation. Plus, you’ll see your traffic continue to grow over time.

3. Apply Basic On Page SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of best practices that help make your site more search engine-friendly. The better your site is optimized for SEO, the more traffic to your website you will get as it helps search engines understand your site content.

And while SEO and even SEO tools, can seem complicated, they don’t have to be.

You can easily optimize your blog posts and apply SEO best practices to all of your web pages using a plugin like All in One SEO. And in turn, increase blog traffic.

When you create a new blog page or post in WordPress, All in One SEO will give you a TruSEO score that tells you how well your content is optimized. It also gives you an actionable checklist you can use to improve and unlock maximum traffic.

Plus, there are other powerful features like automatic meta description, meta tags, smart XML sitemaps, WooCommerce SEO, and much more.

There’s also a free version that includes all of the basic SEO features you need for your website (check out AIOSEO vs Yoast).

To learn more about both the free and paid versions, check out our detailed review of All in One SEO.

4. Create a Viral Giveaway

Want a tip that will work to get massive traffic NOW?

Running a giveaway is a great strategy to skyrocket your traffic and email list. A viral giveaway works like wildfire because it piggybacks on word-of-mouth advertising to help you increase traffic and signups to your newsletter.

Joshua Earl, a freelance writer, has managed to grow his email list by 3,418% in just 11 days by running a viral giveaway.

So, how does a viral giveaway work?

• Set up a contest/giveaway on your blog with a plugin such as RafflePress, which is the best giveaway plugin available.
• Announce a price for your audience to encourage participation.
• Encourage readers to share the giveaway to earn entries.
• Promote your blog giveaway everywhere on the web.

For more details, see this step-by-step guide on how to run a viral giveaway.

5. Build an Email List For Email Marketing

Did you know that, on average, 70% of your website visitors will only stop by your blog once and never return?

That’s why building an email list is so important. An engaged email list can help you drive repeat visits to your site.

When you build an email list, you can build a connection with your visitors by sending them valuable content over time.

Repeat visitors are more likely to convert into customers than first-time visitors. In fact, studies show that it takes 3-4 visits to your website for potential customers to actually think of doing business with you.

That means driving repeat visits will also help you gain your subscribers’ loyalty, which will turn them into customers.

Using opt-in forms from OptinMonster, like this fullscreen popup that appears once exit intent has been triggered, is the best way to get blog visitors onto your email list:

Blogger Jennifer Roberge also used this technique to increase her email signups by 159%!

See our guide on how to get more email subscribers for more tips and tricks.

6. Start Guest Blogging To Get More Traffic

Guest blogging (also called guest posting) is when you write an article to publish on someone else’s blog.

It’s been a popular way to:

• Build brand exposure,
• Expand your reach,
• Build authority in your niche via links,
• And, of course, it is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.

Though it’s been around for a while, guest blogging isn’t dead!

It’s still a great strategy for demonstrating your expertise and potentially driving massive referral traffic to your blog.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll probably know some of the top blogs in your niche that accept guest posts. But don’t limit yourself by only writing guest articles for a few blogs you already know.

Instead, Google should be used effectively to find potential blogs that accept guest articles.

Below are a few sure-fire methods I follow to find them:

• Search your topic + “write for us”, “contribute”, or “submit a guest post” to find on-topic blogs that accept guest posts.
• Install Mozbar on your browser. It’s a free tool to weed out irrelevant blogs from the results.
• Visit each blog that you think is worth posting an article for, and then send them a guest posting proposal.

For example, here’s how I’d use Google to find potential blogs for guest posts.

I’m using the inurl search operator to narrow down my results. (Check out this Google search operator guide for more advanced searching tips.)

Using the Mozbar extension, I avoid any blog that has a Moz DA (Domain Authority) of less than 40. This way I can ignore less authoritative blogs and save my time writing for more influential blogs with more traffic.

7. Use Email Outreach to Ask for Links

Email outreach is another great strategy to drive an insane amount of traffic to blogs and websites.

Basically, you write great link-worthy blog content, make it even better, and reach out to the right people for backlinks.

Brian Dean calls this strategy the skyscraper technique.

This strategy of getting backlinks from all around the web has helped him double his organic traffic in just 14 days.

Since we’ve already covered how to write pillar articles in this post, let’s take a deeper look at reaching out to the right people.

This outreach strategy is helpful for any other purposes, including guest blogging, where you’re supposed to send emails to different editors. The better your outreach process is, the more time you can save, and of course, the better your results.

Blog Traffic Tip: How to Use an Email Productivity Tool for Outreach

An email marketing productivity tool like Streak, which I use and recommend, will let you track how often emails are opened and what links recipients click on your emails.

Streak is a free Gmail and Chrome add-on to track your email activities and improve productivity.

With its Snippets, you can use a library of frequently written emails, so you don’t have to write them from scratch.

The most important feature of this app is its CRM. It lets you integrate a CRM into your Gmail inbox so you can see what happens to each email you send.

With Streak, you don’t need to create a separate spreadsheet or a pipeline to track the progress of all your emails since they are integrated into your inbox.

For example, take a look at the email pipeline I created for my guest blogging campaigns.

By simply looking at the CRM, you can instantly figure out to whom you need to send a follow-up to get a response.

8. Add Browser Push Notifications

Since its inception, mobile apps have used push notifications to increase user engagement. Now, the same technology is available in browsers and publications.

With push notifications, you alert your regular readers about a recent blog post or any updates you want them to know. The key point is that you can notify your user’s browser even if they’re not present on your website.

PushEngage is a great app that lets you send push notifications to your subscribers.  

The best part is that PushEngage has a free plan that lets you send 120 notifications/month to up to 2500 subscribers.

To learn more about PushEngage, check out our list of the best push notification software.

9. Regularly Update Your Articles

Pillar articles are indeed evergreen content, but if you want to keep all of your articles fresh, you’ll need to constantly update them.

The freshness of the content is also a ranking factor in Google, so you need to keep it updated. Otherwise, your competitor’s article would rank higher on Google, dropping your position on the search results and organic traffic.

I use and recommend SEMrush to keep an eye on the position of my preferred keywords on Google.

You can upload all the keywords you want to rank for using their Position Tracking report. This helps you figure out which article needs an update.

You can also tag the keywords based on priority so you can see the position of your keywords on the search results page. If you see a significant drop in certain keywords, you can improve your article.

After a few days of updating your article, you can view the stats and see if the recent update has affected your ranking.

10. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign To Boost Website Traffic

If you’re willing to spend some money to increase your blog traffic, Facebook ads are a great way to do it.

Trying to promote your blog post on social media like Facebook by sharing a link won’t do much.

If you share your blog posts on your Facebook page and have been for a while, you might have noticed that the number of Page followers doesn’t always equate to the reach of your posts.

Awesome Motive founder Syed Balkhi has noted that the Facebook organic reach problem has a Domino effect.

If you have one bad post, then it will impact the reach of your next post.

Now since fewer people see your next post, there will be an even lower number of interactions which creates a negative chain reaction. Before you know it, your page’s organic reach vanishes.

Similarly, if one of your posts does really well, your next post will have a better chance of succeeding due to increased visibility.

How would you tackle the Domino effect and continue driving huge traffic to your blog from Facebook? Advertising.

By advertising on Facebook, Syed Balkhi has found an improvement in the organic reach of the WPBeginner Page and an increase in traffic by 332%.

If you want to boost your own traffic with Facebook ads, follow these tips:

• Only share posts that you believe would interest your followers.
• Like any other social network, rich media, such as photos and videos, get more attention on Facebook than other content types.
• Constantly review the engagement using Page Insights to know what works best with your audience.

For more details, check out OptinMonster’s guide to Facebook ads.

Blog Traffic Tips In Closing

I hope these tactics will help you boost your blog traffic.

Do you have any traffic tips you’ve applied to your blog and seen a big difference? Leave a comment and let me know. I’d be interested to chat about this one.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to check out our guide on SEO for bloggers to drive more traffic to your blog.