I want more traffic!
That is probably one of the more common goals (or wants) that we have for our blogs. But we often fall short of achieving this goal because we don’t have a solid strategy for getting there. Some strategies are short-lived and should be given minimal effort on your part.
But others can have results that last! These are the ones you want to put more of your energy towards!
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How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
Are you currently seeing organic traffic to your site? Chances are, most of your traffic is coming from sharing among other bloggers – and possibly from Pinterest.
As you hear other bloggers boasting of super-high traffic stats, it can easily cause you to begin doing all sorts of random things to help boost your own traffic. But this can easily take over your life and produce very few results.
In order to productively and effectively increase traffic to your blog, you need to have a solid plan that involves multiple approaches. It is also important that you understand how to manage your time in effecting these strategies.
These strategies will set the stage for traffic to KEEP coming to your site. And, more importantly, the traffic will be the right traffic – people who are truly interested in what you have to offer!
Know Your Audience
If you want to increase traffic to your blog, it is important that you are writing content to meet the needs of a particular audience. The more focused your content is, the better Google is able to index your content for search results.
If you aren’t sure how to narrow your target audience, be sure to take my free mini-course: Defining Your Ministry Audience.
Write Content Optimized for SEO
The best (and longest-lasting) way to get traffic to your blog is to learn and implement SEO. SEO is the foundation for how content is search for and found on Google (and other search engines).
Once you know who your audience is, you can drive more traffic to your site by optimizing your blog posts for SEO. This means that you are writing about things they are actually searching Google (and other search engines) for. If they aren’t searching for it, they will not find you!
The great thing about SEO is that it is long-lasting and it builds upon itself. In other words, with good SEO, your organic traffic will multiply from month to month and keep on growing. It is almost a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing.
Write MORE Content
If you are trying to increase traffic to your blog, write more content!
Seriously! Of course, make sure the content is optimized for SEO, but the more content you put out there, it makes sense that more people will visit your site.
I’m not saying you need to publish every single day – but, at a minimum, you should be publishing once per week. If you have the ability to write and publish more often, then please do!
Another way to get more content without putting too much stress on yourself is to seek guest posts. Just make sure that you give them guidelines on how to write SEO-optimized content. You should also give them specific content to write about so it stays in line with your overall SEO.
Update Older Content for Better SEO
Writing new content isn’t the only way to increase traffic to your blog. Chances are that when you first started blogging, you didn’t know or understand all the SEO stuff. That means you have a great opportunity to cash in on the content you’ve already written.
By updating older posts to be more optimized for SEO, you will begin seeing an increase in organic traffic from them!
Keep in mind that not every post is salvageable for SEO and that is totally fine. Just focus on the posts that you can easily tweak for SEO and work on them.
Build and Nourish an Email List
Regardless of whether you are monetizing your blog, having an engaged email list is important. Not only does it help you really build a relationship with readers, but it helps increase the traffic to your blog.
Every week you should be sending your readers an email that includes the links to your most recent blog posts.
But it isn’t just about sending out an email chocked full of links! This comes back to knowing your target audience and getting THEM to sign up for your email list.
Then you can write emails that truly connects with them which will make them more likely to want to open and read your emails!
Collaborate with Other Bloggers in Your Niche
While you are still waiting for SEO to take effect on your own site, you can increase traffic to your blog by partnering up with other bloggers in your niche. This can take a variety of forms:
- asking them to link to a really great resource page on your site
- asking them to link to a freebie landing page on your site
- collaborating to do a FB live event
- guest posting for them (which usually enables you to include a link back to your site
And if you have a downloadable E-book that includes links to some of your actual blog content (see next section), let other bloggers share it with their audience! Even if you created it specifically as a freebie on your site to get subscribers, enabling other bloggers to share it will generate traffic to you (which might lead to more subscribers).
Create a Free Course, E-Book, or Printable
Last, but not least – a creative and effective way to increase traffic to your blog is to create free stuff that links back to your blog posts!
Creating free E-books, courses, or other types of printables can consistently drive traffic to your Christian blog.
If you have taken any of my blogging tips courses, you will find many links to blog content that expands on the topics in a particular lesson. Instead of me having to re-write the tips, I simply send them over to read what I’ve already published on the subject. I also do this for my checklists and some other printables that I offer. (I do this for all of my free and paid courses/products).
Chances are, you may already have the content on your site that you could put into a mini Devotional. If not, come up with an idea for a Devotional or other book and write the chapters as blog posts. In the E-book, you can simply provide an intro and then link to the post.
Pinterest isn’t just for your blog posts! Most bloggers miss out on a huge traffic opportunity because they only create and share pins for actual blog posts.
If you have resource pages that are open (not password-protected for your subscribers), make sure you create plenty of pinnable images for them and flood Pinterest regularly with them!
The same for your free Courses, E-books, and Printables!
More Traffic = More People Being Reached for Christ!
There are plenty of other strategies you may have heard for getting more traffic to your site (social media, etc) and you can definitely include those in your plan.
But – the ones I’ve listed here are going to give you a much bigger return as far as generating more traffic (for the time you spend doing them).
At the end of the day, more content (optimized for SEO) will continue to generate traffic to your site naturally. The other things mentioned are great, but they do require a bit more effort and tending to.
Just work on creating an actual PLAN that includes each of these, with more focus on the SEO part you’ll be quite surprised at the results!
Be sure to also hop over and join us in the Kingdom Bloggers Facebook group where we have weekly live training and discussions on all things Christian Blogging!
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