Several new bloggers in blogging industry are struggling to get more traffic to their quality blogs. Most of them end-up with writing very high quality blog posts and following some fake methods to get traffic to their blog.
Building a blog is lot easier than getting high quality/targeted and good number of readers to your blog. Many new bloggers asked me to guide them get more traffic to their blog. So I have decided to write a complete guide on “How to Get 38,503 Visitors to Your Blog in a Month“.
This guide includes my experiences with many websites, I owned since last 17 years. I was finally able to get good traffic to my blogs. Especially, a newly created blog which has been started a year before.
1. Raw Traffic vs Targeted Traffic
What if you get millions of visitors per day on your blog! Good?
Nah!!!
Merely getting tons of traffic is not a good idea since it will suck bandwidth of your server and yield really smaller number of conversions.
You should really struggle for prospects instead of visitors. Imaging if you have 100 visitors per day and most of them were looking for the contents, you published.
This will bring more results than a 5,000 visitors per day which include people who were not actually searching for your contents.
Benefits of Getting Prospects Instead of Visitors
There are lot of benefits to consider prospects over visitors. I personally struggle for really high quality visitors/readers to my blog instead of acquiring raw traffic. Here is a list of the benefits of pursuing high quality readers of your blog.
- If you have smaller numbers but highly targeted visitors to your blog, it will yield more conversions than merely getting cold traffic from social media or other sources.
- Your ROI (return on investment) will be high.
- You won’t pay twice for visitors who never responded to your subscriptions or products. Raw traffic not only cost you while acquisition, it also bills you to keep upgrading your web hosting packages or your server.
- You are able to focus on answering each of your blog reader. Hence, you can build good relationship with your readers as well.
- Targeted visitors are more likely to spend money on your offerings than the cold traffic.
- They will possibly share and recommend your blog to others.
- Bounce rate is drastically decreased.
- Your email subscription button is pushed more than when you have raw traffic.
2. Optimizing your Blog for Tons of Traffic
What if you get lot of traffic to your blog and your server gets down?
No Way!
You can never afford this situation. I will recommend you to optimize your blog overall to handle tons of traffic, you may get in near future. Your server hardware and bandwidth should be sufficient for good number of visitors per day.
There are lot to do more than optimizing your server for web traffic. MunchWeb has found that 75% visitors will not re-browse your visitors if you have low PageSpeed.
Here are the things to consider optimize when you are ready to get more traffic to your blog.
- Choose a server with good hardware specifications. This includes internet speed, server type, caching system, RAM, CPU, Bandwidth and Infrastructure.
- Install some WordPress cache plugin to increase PageSpeed of your blog.
- Use simple but elegant WordPress template. Blogs with really awesome buy congested design will never allow your blog visitors to focus on the contents, you published.
- Optimize your blog for mobile devices as well. According to www.bgr.com mobile internet usages surpasses desktop usages. So never miss a good reader, who wants to read your blog using any mobile device.
3. Getting Free Traffic from Other Websites
Its not a secret anymore to leverage other websites to send numerous visitors to your blog. Do you know the practical methods to get referral traffic from other websites, you do not own?
NO?
Okay, I know that several people have heard of getting good referral traffic but practically they are unable to get huge traffic. Let me tell you about my secret weapon to use when I need urgent traffic.
My Secret Methods to Get Referral Traffic
After release of Google Panda in February, 2011. Several websites of mine were affected and seized to acquire traffic from search engines. This was a nightmare for me as well as million bloggers, who were practicing old SEO techniques.
All of us were separately struggling to get our traffic back. I struggled to bring my websites from Google Panda penalty. Therefore, it was taking a long and I was loosing lot of money.
I decided to focus on getting referral traffic from other websites which I don’t own. It includes several social websites as well as web 2.0 websites. Here is how, I was able to bring several thousand human visitors to my penalized blogs.
Traffic from Video Sharing Websites
This is now my favorite way of getting traffic to my blogs. I started video channels on almost all popular video sharing websites. I started creating a video and sharing on all my video sharing channels.
This activity went one and in couple months, I started noticing significant amount of visitors coming from my videos shared on those video sharing websites. At that time, I was able to publish 12 videos to my video channels.
I went ahead and published more videos on my channels. My diagonal traffic line starting transforming its position to vertical for a bit. I used this technique with several blogs in next 6 years and was able to double and quadruple traffic of some of my blogs.
Consider the following things to increase number of visitors from your videos.
- Use SEO friendly title to your videos.
- Use proper video description of your videos and put a link back to your blog.
- Choosing good tags for your videos can improve your video views.
- Annotations can make you get more CTR to your blog link.
- Share the video on all popular social media profiles. Your video will get noticed soon and start getting organic views.
Traffic from Forum Sites in your Niche
Forum sites are good way to get traffic to your blog. You can always try this method to bring traffic instantly to your blog. When I talk instantly, it means I assume you already have signed up on different forums in your niche.
If you have not yet joined any forum related to your niche, you can search and find different forums on the internet to join.
Try searching the following keyword templates to find forums related to what you want.
“Your Keyword” + “forum”
“Your Keyword” + “board”
“Your Keyword” + “powered by SMF”
“Your Keyword” + “powered byMyBB”
“Your Keyword” + “powered by vBulletin”
These keywords will let you find different forums and you can shortlist the forums list with these criteria.
- Forum with topics related to your niche.
- Forums with lot of forum topics and users.
- Forums where user activity is good and you can find recently posted forum posts to check.
Once you have a decent list of niche forums according to your needs, start signing up to all of them one-by-one. Once you complete the sign-up process, complete your user profile with a link back to your blog in signatures area.
Read forum posted by other users and interact with them with a no-spam policy. If you have some questions to get answer from the forum users, you can post your questions as well. I would recommend you to not exceed 1 question/forum/day. I was able to acquire hundreds of visitors from different forums in my niche with this method.
Try to answer questions posted by others. This action will make your avatar like a mentor and people will start following your posts and react to your forum signatures link as well.
Traffic from Q&A Websites
Lot of people search for answers to their questions on the internet. Several people even publish questions in their minds which they have not found a proper answer.
The Question & Answer websites are so much famous since last 5 years. Do you ever tried to post your question on one of the Q&A website?
Yes?
Then you may know that some popular Q&A websites have lot of traffic on their website. If you publish a question on one of those websites, you will notice several hundred people will view your question or answer in a day.
So why don’t you use these Q&A websites to get more traffic to your blog?
Correct?
But you may need to know, how!
Here is the method to get more traffic to your blog posts.
- Sign-up on quora.com and reddit.com.
- Search posts related to your niche.
- Try “upvoting” them initially unless, few people have noticed you.
- Start searching questions related to your niche and answer those questions. If appropriate, you can link to your blog post related to their answer.
- You can always ask them politely to visit your website at the end of your answer.
4. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is necessary to invite traffic from search engines. This method will let you optimize your blog for search engines and it will pull tons of organic traffic from different search engines like google, bing, yahoo, and Baidu, etc.
There is a lot to do with SEO when you need free traffic, therefore I will cover primary methods to optimize your blog. If you need to go further, you can read the following guide on Search Engine Optimization.
There are majorly two types of search engine optimizations. The first one is called On-Page SEO. The second one is called Off-Page SEO.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
If you fine-tune your blog pages configure it using best SEO practices, its called On-Page SEO. If your website/blog is configured properly, it will start pulling a good amount of traffic from search engines.
Here are the steps to consider, while you optimize your blog for search engines.
1. Writing a Catchy Post Title Which Includes Your Keywords
Blog post titles contribute a major role in attracting search engine traffic. Successful bloggers put a handsome amount of time to think and write attractive blog post titles. Here is a comprehensive guide to write a good blog post title.
2. Write a Good Post Meta Description
Post meta description is a text snippet that is shown in the search engine results page under the title of your page. This snippet is used as an ad space. So you should precisely use this space to write a selling and attractive blog post description.
3. Use SEO Friendly Permalinks
Permalinks are surely important in On-Page optimization. Your blog permalink structure should be SEO friendly as well as including keywords in the permalink.
I have published a guide about configuring SEO friendly permalink structure. This guide will let you read and configure a permalink on your blog, which is loved by search engines.
4. Your Headers Structure and Text
Headers in a blog post really matter to search engines more than other things in the content area. Headers tell search engines to classify your blog post according to the keywords in headers.
You should carefully write your H1, H2 and H3 tags in your blog post. Make sure to include your keywords in the headers. For best results, you can use small modifiers along with your keywords in your headers.
5. Write High-Quality Blog Post Contents
Blog post content normally called (article) is one of the important most parts of the On-Page SEO. You should never compromise on the quality of the blog post. When we talk about quality, it includes the following things in a good blog post.
- Use Your Keyword in First 100 Words. using your keyword in the first 100 words in your blog post is really much important. Search engines find this keyword at the beginning of the blog post and in the middle of the blog post and consider your rank good in SERP.
- Long Article. It’s proven that long articles perform well in search engines and pull more traffic than small articles. Here is a complete research result available.
- Use LSI Keywords. Instead of repeating your main keyword in the blog post, you can use synonyms to let search engines better know about your content topic. LSI keywords can be shown when you start typing your search term in google and it auto-populates some search terms options below the search bar.
- Use High Quality Images. Images in your blog post send quality signals to search engines. This quality signal convinces search engines to rank your website better for a given keyword.
- Put ALT Tags to Images. Alternative or ALT tags in images, let search engines know about images used in your blog post. Hence, better ranking in image search results.
- Internal Links. using 2-3 links to your blog posts is good for backlink juice flow. It helps you rank your other blog posts as well as sending a strong relevancy signal to search engines.
- Outbound-Links. Outbound links in your blog post also send quality and relevancy signals to search engines. I generously link to appropriate other blog posts to my blogs where needed. You can even see a few links in this post, refer you to other blogs. When you refer to other authority blogs in your blog post, search engines think that you are writing for users, not search engines. And it surely helps your blog readers to read on the topic, where others have written in details and you are missing.
- Use Videos. using videos in your blog posts is another quality signal and it let’s search engines find you helpful for your blog readers. In short, when your readers find you really helpful, your On-Page SEO is done.
6. Boost Site Load Speed
Site Load Speed or sometimes referred to as PageSpeed is now included in the ranking factors of all major search engines. Boosting PageSpeed helps you rank your blog better in SERP. I would recommend WP Super Charge plugin to beginners so they can optimize PageSpeed with a single click. If you are an advanced user, I would refer to Humming Bird Plugin.
7. Use Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing buttons help readers of your blog to share your blog posts across the social networks. Social network sharing is also good for search engine ranking.
Off-Page Optimization
This method contributes more search engine rankings than Off-Page optimization. Consider if you have very good and strong relations in your social network, other people will consider you as a good and authoritative person. Therefore if you have relations with bad people in society, you will be considered a bad person though.
Off-Page optimization works on a similar method. If your website or blog has backlinks from other websites on the internet it’s considered as an authority signal.
Furthermore, if your backlinks come from good an authority websites, your blog or website will be considered an authority too. Here is a good guide to build quality backlinks to your blog.
If you want to start building good backlinks for your blog for SEO ranking, you need to build a variety of backlinks ranging from the social sphere to content marketing.
- Social Sharing. Sharing your blogs to social networks is considered a good backlink strategy. I will recommend you to share your new blog posts to all major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, google plus, etc.
- Social Bookmarking Sites are good to get social backlinks. You can share your blog posts to multiple social bookmarking websites like Digg, delicious, reddit and StumbleUpon.
- Blog Comments are good places to build backlinks for your blog. It has lower impact value in search engine ranking, therefore you should not ignore it.
- Forum Signatures allow you to build backlinks as well. If you are active in your niche relevant forums, you can put a link to your blog in your forum signature area.
- Content Marketing is the most effective method in backlinking process. If you write blog posts for other blog posts and send them to request to publish your blog post as a guest blogger, it will get you a good opportunity to put a backlink to your blog inside that guest blog post.
- Video Sharing is considered a good method to attract traffic as well as leaving a good impression on search engines to rank your blog. You can put a link to the video description section, whenever you publish a new video on video-sharing website.
- Article Directories are also good places to write article and publish on article directories. This method will allow you to put a backlink to your website inside the article or sometime in the author bio section.
- Image Sharing Websites give you another opportunity to get a backlink from the images shared on the image sharing website. Here is a list of image sharing websites for you to take advantage.
5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Traffic
PPC traffic really work like a quick traffic switch for your websites or blog. If you have budget to spend on Pay Per Click ads, I would suggest you to go for it. PPC ads has four basic types.
- Your ad displays in search results on google.com, bing.com or other search engines.
- Your ad is displayed inside the video on YouTube.com and DailyMotion.com
- Your Ad is shown on network websites of the company, which provides you PPC ads. For example, lot of sites use google adsense. Your ad can be shown on their websites using Google Adwords.
- Your ad on social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter.
It always depends on your needs and you can choose the right PPC platform for you. Here is a brief detail about using PPC and different PPC providers.
Google Adwords (Popular Most PPC Company)
Google adwords is the world’s #1 PPC company to date. They allow you to quickly create a PPC campaign for your website/blog, set a daily budget, per click rate and start pulling paid traffic to your blog in minutes.
Google Adwords charges you on each click on your advert shown in google search results. You can even select each keyword and its cost per click rate while creating your advert.
- You can sign up for Google Adwords Here
- Once, you have completed your profile details, attach your credit card to your Adwords account.
- Create a new campaign and create your adverts.
- Search keywords using a built-in Keyword Planner Tool.
- Add your favorite keywords to your ad set.
- Submit your advert for approval.
- Once the advert is approved, you will start getting highly targeted traffic to your blog.
If you have chosen bing.com as your PPC company, you can follow the steps as shown above for Google Adwords. both websites work mostly same.
YouTube Ad Inside User Videos
YouTube is another PPC provider and can push you lot of visitors per day. If you want to display your advert inside videos on YouTube, you can also use Google Adwords to display your advert on YouTube as well. Google Adwords will charge you on each click on your ad displayed inside YouTube videos.
PPC Traffic from Facebook
You can also use FaceBook ads for your blog to bring more traffic to your website or blog. FaceBook even shares demographic data to you when you create an advert. You can target your audience on basis of the following crieter.
- Target your audience by their age range.
- Target using their location.
- Target your audience on gender basis.
- Target using user’s interest shown on their FaceBook Profile
Actually, there is much more which can let you specify your target audience before you run your advert. I personally like FaceBook ads lot more than other methods. You can refer to the following URL to learn more about creating a facebook ad. The same type of ads can be created on Twitter as well.
Other PPC Advertising Companies
Apart from the popular PPC companies listed above, there are several other PPC media buying companies which allow you to acquire paid traffic for a rate of cost per click. Here is a brief list of other popular PPC companies.
Social Media Traffic
Social media is free traffic sources for you if you know to utilize them properly. Since, almost all the users on the internet are engaged on one or multiple social media websites available online. You can reach thousands of people on social media websites.
There are several bloggers, who have setup their social media campaigns efficiently and drive tons of high quality traffic to their blogs daily. Do you want to drive this free traffic to your website as well?
Yes?
Ok, let’s start it with some popular social media websites and engage people and drive targeted traffic to your website.
Getting Traffic from Facebook Pages
Facebook pages are good way to keep your fans engaged with your contents posted to your Facebook page. These pages work like micro-blogging platforms but you can even publish long stories there as well.
You can follow the exact steps listed below to start creating Your Facebook page and market your content.
- Create Facebook page for your blog.
- Once you have completed your Facebook page, you can create and upload your Avatar and Cover photo. It is necessary for branding.
- Put all other details like website address, phone number and other necessary details to make it look professional.
- Publish your blog posts on your page to make it attractive for people to like your Facebook page.
- You can also publish stories related to your niche even these stories are not published on your blog. This may increase the interest of user who likes your page.
- Always try to use high quality and attractive images in your posts.
- Share your Facebook page with your friends and also integrate Facebook like box on your blog.
- If you want to establish a good fan base quickly, you can use Facebook ads to promote your pages for likes.
- Once you good number of fans, who liked your page, now you can always engage them on your page and share attractive and intriguing posts which attract more clicks to your blog.
Getting Traffic from Twitter
Twitter is another free source to drive more traffic to your blog. All you have to do is very simple and listed in the following steps.
- Sign-up on Twitter.com
- Complete your profile and use appropriate images to brand your twitter profile.
- Start posting your blog posts to your twitter profile.
- Start searching and finding twitter profiles of influencers in your niche and follow them. Few will follow you back.
- Once you have good number of followers available on your profile, you will notice that your twitter posts will bring good amount of referral traffic to your blog.
Getting Traffic Using Email Marketing
In online marketing communities a term is well known as follows “Where there is a list, there is money“. This means if you have built an email list of your blog subscribers, you can always make use of the list and bring back the old traffic to your website.
People, who subscribes to you email list are actually ready to receive promotional emails from you. A good and targeted list, surely yields more ROI. Here is the method to build an email list.
- Create free account on http://mailchimp.com .
- Install Contact form 7 plugin for WordPress to create subscription forms.
- Install “Contact Form 7 MailChimp Extension” to connect your forms with mailchimp account.
- Connect your mailchimp account to your forms as per instructions given in plugin dashboard.
- Publish your form on widget area or a page.
- Create a Email Magnet (normally a free report or e-book, which is used give free to your blog readers in lieu of their subscription).
- Now, everything is setup and your blog will start getting email subscriptions.
Send Newsletters to Your Blog Subscribers
When you have good number of subscribers in your email list, its right time to send them newsletter. I personally send them latest blog posts and some good tips and tricks in my niche.
You will start receiving response from your emails sent to subscribers.
Final Words
There are lot of free sources to get huge traffic to your blog. There methods are good but it take some time to establish a good user base for your blog. Promoting your blog on social media channels, search engines, email newsletters and on video sharing websites, can bring tons of high quality and free traffic to your blog.
If you want to switch to ultimate traffic, you can use PPC media buying websites to bring really high quality and targeted traffic to your blog in mins.