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.
Here are 8 ways to increase traffic to your blog this year.
This post may contain affiliate links. You can read my full affiliate disclosure here.
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.
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.
Write Content Optimized for SEO
If you want to increase traffic to your blog, learn and implement SEO!
Once you know who your audience is, you can drive more traffic to your site by optimizing your blog posts for SEO. When your content is focused around a particular keyword phrase, Google is better able to index it and show it in search results. The more SEO-optimized content you have, the more traffic you will see from Google.
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.
If you do have some extra time, a writing challenge might be a great idea! You can read about the Blogtober Challenge we did in the Kingdom Bloggers community. Even if you can’t write every single day for a month, you can do smaller (maybe week-long) writing challenges to simply boost the content (and traffic). Just make sure you keep them optimized for 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 and 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.
In addition to your regular email subscriber list that you physically have to send out emails to, you can use push notifications. This enables readers to get a notification in their browser when they get online (instead of having to remember to go check their email).
I use PushEngage for my push notifications and notice that I get quite a bit of traffic from it, in addition to the traffic generated from the email by itself.
Create New Images for Pinterest
Pinterest is another great way to increase traffic to your blog. For newer Christian bloggers who haven’t yet figured out SEO (or SEO hasn’t taken effect yet), Pinterest is great for generating a LOT of daily traffic.
There is quite a bit to learn about using Pinterest as a Christian blogger, but if you want it to continue sending more and more traffic, you’ll want to regularly add new images for your older content.
Each week I’ll sit down and make new images for a handful of older posts. These new images won’t actually be on the website but will be uploaded directly to Pinterest and linked to the post. I try to add one new image daily (during the week) which significantly increases the traffic back to my site.
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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