Whether you are running a business that is looking to increase site traffic through new content ( content strategy); or you want to start a personal blog to begin your career as a professional blogger, you need traffic and views from those who are interested in what you are writing and blogging about. Here is a simple how to article on how to get more traffic to your blog.
How to drive more traffic and views to your blog:
Starting a new blog, or reviving a failing blog can be difficult. The work involved is time-consuming and usually frustrating with a lack of results, especially when you are doing your best writing content you think your targeted audience would find beneficial or interesting... if you could help them find that content you are writing. Write it and they will come is not a factual statement. It is wishful thinking. I truly believe that creating content is the easier part of the equation of increasing your blog's audience. Promoting and marketing is where it gets tough and where real success can be found.
After the writing is finished, the work begins in earnest: promoting your blog and your new content. Not only do you have get the word out to your current audience, you are better served getting the word out and promoting your blog to other influencers who may not be aware of your blog. But how do you do that? I am going to share that information with you and the steps you need to follow for all your future blog writing and promotion. Get ready to learn how you can increase your blog traffic every month with some simple steps. I said simple, not easy.
There will be lots of work involved and some failure. I wish every blog post could be successful, but there will be more misses than hits, but those few hits are what can carry your blog to 1,000 visits per month, then 5,000 visits per month and more than 10,000 visits. After that you are only limited by your time and resources.
So, you hope or expect online users who need to know what you are writing about will eventually find your wise words. Of course you are providing the best content out there, but you won't get traffic just from writing good content. You won't get traffic from writing great content...not without telling other people about it. You need to promote that content. And, no, telling your Mom, friends or significant other that you wrote a killer blog post is not promoting it, and you certainly aren't not promoting your blog to the right people if that is all you are doing.
I'm going to show you what I have done with other bloggers that helped them increase their traffic in just a few months. Sometimes it was a slow build to more visits, and sometimes it happened almost overnight, after a tipping point was reached But in either case, there was substantial marketing on our part to promote their blog to other bloggers who become influencers for our customers...without being paid to do so.
There is a term you may have heard of called "the skyscraper technique" which simply means, creating the ultimate piece of content that soars above other similar content to your topic. That usually means more words, better research, more thorough topic discussions, better imagery and better writing. Hubspot wrote an article about this strategy back in December 2015 so this idea isn't new.
Another site called Backlinko created this technique and has a excellent skyscraper content article about how they used this strategy successfully. And guess what, it is still valid and still works. Think about that! In the Internet world of online marketing, 2015 is practically a life-time away in respect to changes in strategy and marketing techniques. Yet, this idea of skyscraper content has stood the test of Internet-time.
You can click the link to Backlinko to read more details, but as I wrote, you need to write content that is above and beyond everything you find on that topic. Your research and writing time should increase to generate this, but your work will be rewarded when you begin promoting your skyscraper content.
The Points to Remember When Using the Skyscraper Technique:- Research and uncover opportunities.
- Build a list of potential distribution partners.
- Create better content.
- Promote to your audience.
- Reach out to the right people.
- Stay current.
The focus of this article is to give you the high level instructions you need to follow to increase visitor traffic. Remember, you are always going to have competition, no matter what your business or subject matter targets. You have to create better content. Other blogs that you identify as industry leaders are already getting traffic because their content is good. You need to be better. Find what your competition is writing about that is giving them their views.
Some ideas on how you can make better content. Once you find the article you wish to target and write a better article about, here are some things to consider:
- Make it longer. More words usually mean better ranking, more shares and more backlinks.
- Better Design. The message should better, but visually you should also be providing a more visually interesting blog post.
- Update the Content. Make sure you are using the most updated research, stats, images, screenshots and information available.
- Details, Details, Details. The devil is in the details. Get granular, be specific and give as much information as possible, so the reader can emulate what you have described.
There are a few tools online to help research and uncover what your competition is writing on their blogs, but here are the ones I use and recommend.
SEMRush
- They provide research to show you your competitor's best ranking keywords. They show you competitors you may not know about and how they are ranking organically. They provide a modest backlink checking tool (although I list better backlink tools further down in this article). The real power is viewing the competition's landing pages in the search engine results pages (SERP) for all their keyword rankings. Get a quick understanding of competitors' keyword rankings, both in desktop and mobile search.New ideas for content can easily be used and expanded upon for your skyscraper content.
Ubersuggest / KeywordTool.io
Ubersuggest, a tool that has been a long-time mainstay for marketers was taken over by Neil Patel and made more user-friendly. It also allows you to enter a competitor URL and provide many helpful analtyics such as what is popular, which pages receive the most traffic. This helps you decide what you should write about, just like SEMRush. There is an alternative to Ubersuggest that I haven't tried, but the site claims they have more keywords. You can find the alternative at https://keywordtool.io/ubersuggest-alternative.
Another screenshot from Ubersuggest showing Keyword Overview data.
After you decide upon your topic, you are ready to start your research and writing. I know I keep emphasizing this issue, but it is important, you must write something better, something worthy of being mentioned on social media, something that demands a backlink. Yes, demands a link and demands your audience's attention. Get writing and then when you are finished, it is time for finding people online to help with promoting your blog post.
When you wrote your amazingly thorough and well-researched article you must have cited sources, right? If you no external links or sources then you may wish to add a few to help support the validity of what you have written. It also allows you the opportunity to send those sources and email and thank them for providing information for your research, stats, opinions or whatever.
When you email them be sure to tell them that you have enjoyed their work and you like it so much you have provided a link to them in your more recent blog post. Ask them to take a look. Ask them to read it. Ask them to share it if they feel so inclined. Do NOT ask them to link back to you. Nobody likes that; keep it polite and direct.
Hopefully you have a few sources you can contact, and with any luck you will get them to share your content. The fact that you linked to them helps them prove their worth and why wouldn't they want to at least share that with their audience. Now you potentially have a few social shares from influencers. The first trickle of traffic should start coming from these early promotions.
You have contacted your sources and that's great as those people are more likely to help since you referenced them, but now we need to expand our reach. That means we will be contacting people unsolicited and without the benefit of providing them a link from our article. Our success rate will drop, but we are now targeting dozens and possibly hundreds or people to promote the content. How do we do this and why on Earth would they want to help promote your blog post? Well, there are helpful tools that are going to provide the answer to both questions of how and why.
Buzzsumo
I am excited to introduce you to BuzzSumo. This tool can help you by showing what content is performing best by entering a URL or a topic. They use social queues and shares to provide popular posts. And it assists you in finding influencers who have shared similar content to yours and may be more likely to share your content, Remember, your content it is much better than what they previously share. You got that, right? Your content needs to better (Skyscraper Content) so it gives them a reason to share your new content.
For example, you sell healthy dog treats and are writing about it on your blog. Do a search in their Content Analyzer for "healthy dog treats." You are then given results showing the most shared blog posts about healthy dog treats and how many times those articles were shared on social media. Fantastic. On the downside, Buzzsumo only shows the sharers on Twitter. So, if no one shared on twitter you won't see anyone to connect with. Buzzsumo does provide a section for finding influencers by topic, so you have more options. You can also save influencers for future promotions.
From this screen you can view backlinks to the articles and view the people who shared it. You can enter the domain of your competitor and see their shared content and find who shared that content and contact them directly. A very concise letter telling them you saw they shared an article (list the name of the article) from the site (list the name of the site) and the let them know you have a similar yet much better article when that they also might like to share and give them your link.
If you do this, you will see potentially more shares, more traffic and more authority being sent to your site. Send to as many people as you can. Be sure they have an interest by checking their history of sharing.
NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach has a similar approach to Buzzsumo, but is a little more sophisticated and more intuitive. Their big advantage is they can help with Instagram influencers and Twitter influencers, where Buzzsumo doesn't track that social platform at this time, only Twitter. So, they have more play in the Food, DIY, Fashion and Travel areas with their Instagram connection. They can also help with email marketing directly in their app.
In their own words, "Where BuzzSumo falls short, NinjaOutreach delivers with a cached lead database, live content of finding leads (add any real-time results that you need), Instagram search, and the option to crawl for contact info."
Building Backlinks
While finding influencers is important, maybe the most important influencers to Google is the number and quality of backlinks your article generates. BuzzSumo and NinjaOutreach can help with this indirectly through social sharing, but more robust tools are available for finding backlinks. If you find sites that link to the article you decided to apply the skyscraper technique towards, you can contact those sites and ask for a link. Or invite them to see your article and let them decide if they also wish to provide a link to your article as well. But you need to find those sites first, and there are tools that can help. Ahrefs and Majestic are two of the best for backlink research.
Both sites allow you to see links from your competition's url and you can find backlinks to specific blog posts and pages as well.
Ahrefs
has the fastest backlink crawler in the industry and has an index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion links). Enter your competitor's domain and see all their backlinks. Usually there is a large percentage of backlinks that your website or blog can also acquire that are similar to your competition such as industry directions, resource pages and hub spots. Some of competitor backlinks will not work for your site, but doing your due diligence to check and see if your blog might benefit is an important use of your time and marketing efforts.
Majestic
Majestic provides similar backlink data, but in a slightly different format. Both tools are helpful and should be considered for finding competitor backlinks. They rank the authority differently, but you should also verify by manually reviewing the backlinks and the websites to be sure they meet the eye test of a quality site, such as have they been update recently, are the posts of genuine quality, and so on.
Email Collection
MailChimp & MailerLite
Okay, now you have some traffic from your first article that you have promoted. These people will visit and then...well, who knows? They may never come back and that is often the case, unless you have a way to collect their email addresses. There are many tools you can use for this and if you are using WordPress for your blog (and you should be) you can use a plugin to make it easier to install. MailChimp is one resource, but as you collect more email addresses they are going to become more and more expensive. Starting out, it is free, but costs can get high quickly one you have over 2,000 email addresses. You can see their pricing chart for more information.
I also recommend a much less expensive version for when you hit those higher numbers, MailerLite. Here is one of many reviews comparing the these two useful email collection tools. Both have WordPress plugins.
These tools provide a form for visitors to fill out and that will send them email when you release your next skyscraper content blog post. Or you can manually send a an email if you prefer. I recommend using the popup option to increase your signups by three-fold over the normal form option. The popup has options so you can control when the popup happens and how often it shows up for visitors who haven't signed up yet. This is crucial to increasing traffic. This feature will help develop your core group of visitors. They can recommend you to others through social sharing or forward you email and so on. Everything builds on itself, each month, each article, allowing more traffic and views for your blog.
Push Notifications
This may be new to some of you, but a Push Notification is that popup you see on many sites that ask you if you would like updates sent to you for the latest news. You can say No Thanks/Block or Allow. If you allow, then you are sent pushes that popup on your screen alerting you the website/blog has posted new content. It bypasses the complications of email and spam blocking and provides a notification on your desktop monitor or your mobile device.
PushCrew & iZooto
There are many companies who can help with this, and two of the most trusted are and . Both are free for up to 2,000 and 2,500 subscribers respectively. And both have decent reviews. I use iZooto, but both appear to be great option for collecting subscribers and sending your push notifications in order to increase your traffic and blog views.
You have done a lot of work researching your competition, deciding what topic is best to write about, creating your skyscraper content, emailing your sources, finding influencers and emailing them and finally collecting email addresses and requesting push subscribers....don't let all that effort go to waste. Your first go-round may not be a huge success, but you are learning and you have something to build on. It is time to start again and repeat the process of researching, writing and promoting. Try your best to do this this once per week, twice a week is optimum, but I realize may not be realistic with your other responsibilities, either at your current job or due to life circumstances. Even if you can only muster one post per month, stick to it.
But you should repeat this whole process as often as you can and your traffic will grow each week. Eventually it will start taking bigger leaps as you introduce you site to more people and more influencers. There is one important thing to remember here and do not let this be an excuse to do nothing, but if you really can't put out one piece of crazy-good content each week, it is better to create less often and focus on the quality. Two mediocre blog posts does not equal one stellar blog post.
Your articles will be shared more and more and social buzz will follow you in your industry. You need to give it time and follow these steps. Do not skip a in your schedule unless you absolutely must and if you do, the next blog post should be that much better.
Summary: How To Increase Your Blog Traffic Step by Step
Just in case the above content is confusing or maybe it falls into the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) category, let me break it down as simply as I can with this bulleted list. So, to recap...and you can use any tool, app, or method you like to achieve these steps towards more views and more traffic for your blog.
- Find a relevant blog post with content that has many backlinks and social shares.
- Write and create a blog post that is better; much, much better. Think the best.
- Find everyone who has shared or linked to that original piece of content and ask those people politely to take a look at your new and superior content. This hopefully garners you social shares and links.
- Begin your research for the next skyscraper article and repeat the process.
- Watch your blog traffic increase each month.
If you have any thoughts or additions to this article on increasing blog traffic, please list them in the comments. Thank you for reading and if you are interested in getting help with your content strategy for your blog or business, please contact Big Oak, we would be happy to help you with any online marketing needs you may have from Google Ads, to SEO to Content Creation.
You can call us at 1-804-741-6776 or email us at [email protected]. Thank you for reading this article and visiting our online marketing blog.
