5 Tried & Tested Ways To Increase Your Blog Traffic

Blog traffic is something we always want to increase.

If you are wanting to boost your blog traffic, there are a few different things that you can do. Increasing your blog traffic is something you should always be striving to do whether it is because you simply love writing and want to see those numbers go up or whether you need the higher traffic to secure better paid work.

As a freelance writer, you will often find me writing content for websites and even other bloggers and I always bear my own tips in mind when creating their content as well as mine. So what tips do I suggest?

Make sure your posts are optimised

People say to optimise your content for search engines but you should also be optimising for your readers. Keywords are perfect for search engine optimisation so research the best keywords for your content and be sure to use them throughout your content, alt tag your photos and include in the meta data (among other things) to boost your rankings. If you truly know your audience, however, then you will know exactly what they want so write the content they want to see.

Guest blog for other sites

I used to be really good at this when I first started out, writing guest posts for other bloggers to cover periods of time where they needed to be away from their sites or simply when they were looking for input on a particular topic. I am not so good at doing it now but it is a great way of increasing your traffic. You are being introduced to a whole new audience through the guest post and hopefully enough of them will like your content and click through. I once guest posted for a large US blogger.

I’ve also hosted guest posts before too – in fact, Emma guest posted on my lifestyle site a few years ago. She recently mentioned that very guest post in her new eBook and I gained traffic myself from that!

Make sure the content you are creating is something people will want to host on their blog however – here are some great tips on how to write a good article.

Participate in crowdsourcing

You will often find people asking other’s opinions to include in a blog post or they are looking for particular crafts or recipes for a certain holiday or festivity. An example of this would be this Christmas recipe round up I put together for a blog I write for. As you can see, I have included different delicious recipes from a selection of amazing bloggers, included photos of the recipes and linked back to their content.

These are great ways to build your traffic as they are often very timely. Leave a quote or a post you want to share and you may just be included and see some click throughs.

Create evergreen content

Have you ever heard of the term evergreen content? This is content that is perfect for all year round. It isn’t seasonal, it isn’t based on a current news story which will be forgotten about by next week. It is content that people will always be looking for and these get traffic all year round. I have a couple on my lifestyle site which still see traffic years later including this post about potty training a toddler. People often say a niche site works best for creating evergreen content but I find that my lifestyle site means I have the opportunity to create even more evergreen content than I would be able to if I was tied down to a niche.

Talk about stuff you know – a food blogger may talk about their dishes, made using meat from an online butcher such as Swaledale.

Create a product or service

I haven’t yet got round to creating a product but there are some people who already do it brilliantly – Emma who I mentioned before has some fantastic products and Jenni and Joseph who run the company I host with, Lyrical Host, have some fantastic products and resources too – many of which I get for free due to paying for their hosting {affiliate link} but which those who aren’t customers can purchase and utilise as well, such as their Speed Boost course {affiliate link}.

I offer services, such as the ones I offer on this very site. People love products, resources and services as it means getting people to help them do stuff they couldn’t do on their own or don’t have the time to do which make them great traffic pushers.

These are my top five tried and tested ways to increase your blog traffic. Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Jenny has some great tips to explode your blog traffic!