4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

by Daniel in 188 Comments — Updated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Have you hit a page views ceiling on your website?  That’s fairly common among people with newer blogs.  You get everything set up, you fill your site with content, you add to it on a regular basis and at first you grow…to about a hundred or so page views per day.

And then, things seem to stall.  You get stuck at the “around a hundred page views per day” mark and struggle to grow much beyond that.

If that’s the problem you’re facing, you’re in luck!  You’re in luck because a) it means you’ve done the basics right, and b) your site is more-or less working, just on a smallish scale.

That means it’s time to enter a new phase of traffic growth and that requires a very different strategy than what you’ve been doing to this point.  Here’s a quick overview and a list of strategies you can employ, starting today, to take your page views to the next level.

Spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1-2 hour per day)

Killer Posts are generally time consuming to write, so don’t be surprised if you struggle to generate one per week.  If you do, shoot for one every other week.  The point is, you want to add a big, meaty post like that to your blog at regular intervals.

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Killer Posts are generally time consuming to write, so don’t be surprised if you struggle to generate one per week.  If you do, shoot for one every other week.  The point is, you want to add a big, meaty post like that to your blog at regular intervals. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work .

So what makes a killer post?

Well, as you might expect, they take numerous forms, including:

  • Compiled lists of high value resources for people in your niche (“Ten free art programs that will take your digital art to the next level” – or similar)
  • Detailed tutorials – This assumes you have a certain level of expertise in your niche and can teach others to do something they may be struggling with.
  • Solve a problem in your niche – Again, this assumes you’re an expert in your niche (and you should be!). Think back to one of the problems you encountered early on and explain how you solved it.  Or, identify a common problem that others are having in the niche and demonstrate how to solve it.  Either approach lands you in the same place.

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my social media account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

To execute #2 successfully, you’ve got to understand your market.  That means, you’ve got to know at least a little something bout demographics.

Who are the people most interested in your niche?  Are they predominantly male or female?  How old?  Do they tend to be single, married, or an even mix of the two?  What are their preferred social media channels?

Some of this, you can find out just by exploring the corners of the internet related to your niche.  Where do you look for content about your niche?  Odds are, that’s where most others who are interested in the topic are looking too, and that’s the social media channel you want to embrace.

Build a presence for yourself there, both by sharing your own content, but also by liking, commenting on, and sharing the content of others who have a strong presence in your niche.  Form a kind of “virtual posse” with 5-8 of these people and become an active presence, both on their websites and on their social media channels.

When you write one of your “Killer posts,” share it with them.  If they agree that it’s high value, you’ll start getting backlinks from them, and you’ll be able to increasingly tap into their followers.  That’s when you start seeing really rapid, next-level growth.

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

  • commenting on other blogs in your niche,
  • linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
  • interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Your blog is your blog, but if that’s all you’re doing, you’re missing huge potential traffic streams.  Your killer blog posts make a great starting point for a video script.  You can essentially record yourself talking about the same topic and upload the video to YouTube or other video sharing repository.

This gets your content in front of a different set of eyes and plays into the fact that different people learn and use the web in different ways.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

  • letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
  • letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
  • getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
  • getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
  • posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles.

In addition to your periodic “killer posts,” you should be regularly adding lesser content to your site.  This is no less well written, but these smaller posts are much more narrowly targeted.  If your killer post is the steak, these are the potatoes and side salad that go with it.  You need both for a good, well-rounded meal.

“The Basics” also includes making sure you’re hitting all of the basic SEO Best Practices, including the little details like good interior linking, image tags and the like.  Never lose sight of these details!

There are, of course, plenty of other things you can do to take your pageviews to the next level, but even if all you do is execute these four things on a regular basis, you’ll find your pageview count growing at a steady clip!

For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

  • a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
  • a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
  • a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
  • a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

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188 thoughts on “4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic”

  1. If I link to posts on another blog, and I mean an authority blog in the same topic with high pr, does google likes it and increase my ranking? I know that links pointing to our own blog are the best to focus on but maybe outgoing links counts too.

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  2. Good article! It’s always interesting in learning how to write a good killer article. If there are any resources about this, kindly share with us as well..Thanks!

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  3. Great Article…….
    I m blogging since 2008 but i don’t get that much traffic that i should deserve in 2 years only 10 to 15 visits daily i have also applied some SEO techniques but still no result.

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  4. Great job Daniel. I wanted to thank you for this excellent read!! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it. I have you bookmarked your site to check out the latest stuff you post. Its easy with social media to get high traffic.

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  5. I have a formula which I always use when I write a new article which is write a new page, social bookmark at Digg and Reddit, post link on Twitter and then write a new post explaining that I have a new article which you can find here (insert page).
    The other main point is write the blog post as though it were something you would want to read. If it doesn’t read well to you then the chances are that it will appear the same to others so you should scrap it and start again.

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  6. Thank for this article. I have the same though with you. Want to have more visitor for your site, the important thing is writing more useful content on your site. And every day you have to keep updating new content. It’s easier to say but hard to do, much hard working to get more traffic.

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  7. Actually how frequent we should post to a site in every day. I kinda thinking of this lately. My site is not getting enough visitors. If i post like once in every three days, my visitors becoming less. Any idea on this? Thanks for the great post though.

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  8. Thank you for this post. My site is still relatively new and I find it takes me longer than 30 mins to write the daily posts. Having said that, traffic is already picking up, so what you are saying in your post does work.

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  9. Until now I am remaining to struggle for creating such kind of pillar article. I have realized the crucial of it.

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  10. Really effective steps, i think without killer articles the blog cant be remembered by the visitors. Killer articles have very long term effect.

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  11. Nice post and an interesting concept about killer articles.Promotion and social networking should be the priority of every newbie blogger as traffic is the main revenue source for any blog.I have recently started a blog and I’m focussing on large scale promotion,both offline and online.

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  12. Thank you so much for posting this. This was exactly what I needed to increase my blog traffick and followers. Will be bookmarking this. Thanks.. socraticpunk.tumblr.com

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  13. Thank you for taking the time to help. The balanced approach toward content — killer and regular — makes sense.

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  14. Great ideas! Killer articles can take some time but when you have tons of people linking back to your article it is all worth it. Promotion is definitely something that you need to be doing everyday.

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  15. You know this is just the kind of post that’s gold to us bloggers. Concise, to the point, high use information. Four simple steps to elevating a blog to more and more eyes.

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  16. I have to agree. A “Killer Article” will keep people attached and coming back for more. I try to vary the articles in my blog from inspirational to educational. I think this helps keep my readers interested and wanting more. Now, I do not think using this tactic will work for everyone, but it has worked for me thus far. I think that as a Content Article Writer, showing my visitors that there is a real person behind the words makes my work much more valuable.

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  17. Yes absolutely content is king in terms of SEO. Blog will do miracles for you if content is king. Killer post is awesome concept.

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  18. Great Article, The first one, “killer article” is hard specially if you don’t like to write, networking is in my opinion really good because if you find a great blogger he/she can promote your website or blog and you get many visitors, Thanks for the article

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  19. Looks like, Daniel, you’ve written here some timeless and viral post
    Even now these, say, killer tips work.

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  20. Great Advice! I almost forget these things, every now and then. May I add that one must be very careful with keywords used, specially for SEO purposes. At the end of the day, Quality is KING on the web and by writing quality content, you get more readers who’ll love what you write.

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  21. Thanks you very much sharing this powerful advice on getting tons of traffic to any site you have. I will apply this technique one of my blog or business site.

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  22. Thanks Daniel. This i think is your killer article and everyone including myself is very much helped by this killer article.

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  23. Thank you. This is great tip. The most attractive thing on the tip is to have a fix duration of time when blogging. In this case, I think perseverance is important. It’s also quite difficult to pick up a habit of posting to blog routinely.

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  24. Thank you Daniel. I love your articles so much, I have been reading them for a long time. Worst part of me is I don’t interact. Good lesson though. Thanks, again.

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  25. This is the first of many “increase blog traffic” articles that I’ve read that doesn’t leave me with my heart pumping, my brow sweating and the desire to run away from all future blogging. Thank you!

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  26. I’m not sure that article marketing cuts it anymore. I think that there are more time friendly ways to market your web business than writing articles and also, unless you have a killer author bio that will compel people to click on your links then your article could be futile, whether that is 20 words or 2000 words.

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  27. Hi You have mentioned in your post “Killer Articles”, This is wonderful idea and i have to keep things in mind while Blogging.

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  28. I agree with Jason, you have to have very good time management skills. If you don’t you can spend plenty of hours and not get much accomplished.

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  29. I like this post and I think every new blogger should see this! Time management is a huge issue because it is so easy to get sidetracked and lose focus. The way you have laid it out and easily understandable is great!

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  30. I’m trying to get 10 visters a day to my new blog now.I now mainly use article marketing and comment on other blogs to promote my blog.From now on,I will try the “killer article” tips and use article marketing to promote the “killer article”.I hope it will work.

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  31. Hey, I like the idea of the “killer article.” Already, I’ve managed to do this on my blog without actually be conscious of it.

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  32. Some people are asking how long it takes to write a killer article. bear in mind that it does not have to be about an hour or two of writing. if you are superman who can write very high quality article in 30 minutes, then that’s it. Do not pressure yourself in writing a quality article in 1 hour.

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  33. Thanks a lot for the post,i was checking all over internet to find a solution to get a solution to increase my blog traffic.I have recommended readers in my blog to read this post of yours,keep rocking

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  34. I like the structure that your article provides. As with any business, time management is the key. In most cases, the amount of time spent on a product (article) will only improve the end result.

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  35. Wow! I really need these tips. I want to increase my site’s traffic to the next target of 1,000 unique visitors daily. Right now, I’m just getting half of it.

    Reply

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