4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

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.