If you want to grow your blog traffic fast, there are a few best practices and tips you should follow to increase your chances of success.
Having built and grown multiple blogs of my own, I know how frustrating it can be when you’re just starting out to put so much time and effort into your blog, only to receive a few pageviews each month. In fact, growing a blog can be so difficult that many new bloggers actually give up before they ever find success.
But, if you do it right, blogging can be fun, rewarding, and quite lucrative.
With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to get more traffic and grow your blog fast.
1. Write Helpful, Evergreen Content
It may seem obvious, but the best way to grow your blog traffic is to write helpful content that people want to read.
Content that gets clicks and shares is usually purposeful. It helps people solve a problem, and it’s evergreen, meaning it will continue to be relevant for more than just a short season.
Also, blog post length is an important factor to keep in mind. All of your blog posts should be a minimum of 1,500 words in length if you want to have a shot of winning the #1 spot on a Google search results page.
That said, be sure to keep your posts engaging and easy-to-read. In other words, don’t pack your posts with unnecessary fluff just to hit a certain word count.
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2. Answer Questions In Your Niche
One of the most difficult things about blogging is knowing what to write about. When in doubt, don’t just write about random topics. Successful bloggers write content that answers specific questions their niche.
The best source of topic ideas is your existing audience. If you don’t have an audience yet, it’s time to start searching for questions being asked of other bloggers in your niche.
There are several ways to discover what these questions are. Here are some ideas for where you can start looking:
- Ask your audience directly – If you have an email list or a social following, ask your audience what questions they have about your topic or what they struggle with the most when it comes to your niche.
- Look at other bloggers’ comments sections – You may not have an audience yet, but chances are, someone in your niche does! Scope out the comments sections on their blog posts to see what questions their readers have.
- Search on Google or Pinterest. Some general topic searches will give you a better idea about what other users are typing into their search boxes. Also, make sure to look at the bottom of each search results page on Google. The “Related Searches” section can be a gold mine for blog topics.
3. Learn How To Structure Blog Posts For SEO
To grow your blog traffic, your posts need to be visible in search engines. And, if you want your blog posts to show up in search results, you need to make sure to structure them properly.
There’s a lot to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) that won’t be covered in this post, however, here are a few basic tips for structuring your blog posts.
- Include the focus keyword for each post in the title. For example, if you decided to write a blog post focused on the keyword “electric lawn mowers”, you could title it “The 5 Best Electric Lawn Mowers For Homeowners With A Big Yard.”
- Include the focus keyword in the first sentence of each post. To continue with our lawn mower example, your first sentence could be, “These days, electric lawn mowers are becoming more and more popular.”
- Break your posts into sub-sections. There’s nothing worse than a blog post that’s just one long block of text. If possible, aim to break your blog posts into sections no longer than 200 – 250 words.
- Properly structure (and nest) your article headings. For every article, there should only be one H1, and it should be the title of your article. From there, at minimum, all your remaining subheadings should be H2s. However, if you want to really step up your game, you should nest your subheadings in a way that lets search engines know how each piece of content relates to one another. For example, in your lawn mower article you might have the subheading, “EGO Power+ 56Volt” structured as an H2. However, within that subsection, you might have an H3 that reads, “Benefits of the EGO Power+ 56Volt Electric Lawn Mower.” Since this section relates back to the H2, it should be structured as an H3–kind of like Russian Nesting Dolls. (Hopefully that makes sense)
- Include a meta title and description for each post. If you’re using WordPress for your blog, we recommend downloading the Yoast SEO plugin to help you accomplish this.
Some of the later tips in this post have to do with making your posts friendly for search engines, so be sure to follow them.
4. Post More Often
Websites that are constantly churning out fresh content tend to rank higher in search engine results, and consequently, they get more traffic.
While writing blog posts takes a lot of time, it’s worthwhile for how much it can help increase your traffic.
If you can, post blog articles several times per week; ideally 2 or more articles. This will make sure you keep providing consistent value to your audience, and it will give your blog a boost in search engines.
Consistency is key, so make sure you create a blog posting schedule and stick to it.
5. Narrow Your Blog’s Focus
Have you ever heard the saying, “The riches are in the niches”? As it turns out, there’s a lot of truth to this statement.
Blogs that are focused on a specific topic tend to do much better than blogs that are more general or that include a variety of different topics.
Coming up with a niche tends to stress people out, but it’s one of the best things you can do to grow your blog traffic.
If you focus your blog correctly, people will start to recognize your blog as the go-to source of information about a certain subject. If you don’t focus on a niche, you risk confusing your readers. Plus, if your blog doesn’t focus on a single topic, it’s much harder for your blog to rank in search engines.
For instance, there are lots of blogs about gardening out there. But what if, instead of gardening, you blogged more specifically about indoor gardening? Your content would be more targeted and more likely to find an audience that’s looking for the exact information you provide. The more you can narrow down your niche in the beginning, the better.
Remember, once you establish some authority, you can always expand to more general topics.
6. Leverage The Power of Pinterest
If you think Pinterest is only for saving recipes you want to try, think again! Pinterest is a fantastic way to promote your posts and drive traffic to your blog. The reason for this is because Pinterest is a visual search engine.
Unlike other social media platforms, Pinterest encourages its users to click off of the platform to view and read blog posts. This is the exact type of user behavior that will help grow your blog traffic fast.
People log onto Pinterest and use the search feature to find blog posts about the topics they’re interested in learning about.
Seriously, you’d be amazed how much traffic you can drive to your blog with Pinterest.
7. Take Advantage Of Helpful Blogging Tools/Resources
If you want to save time and grow your blog fast, it’s a good idea to become familiar with some tools that will make blogging and growing an audience easier. Here are some of our favorite blogging tools to use:
- Canva: When you need to make graphics for your blog posts or Pinterest pins, Canva is the way to go. It is free to use if you don’t want to pay for a Professional subscription, however, I highly recommend upgrading to a paid plan. Honestly, our paid Canva subscription is one of the most important tools we use here at Be The Budget. This tool is extremely easy to use, and it can also help keep your branding consistent.
- Tailwind: Scheduling Pinterest pins can be tedious, especially if you don’t want to spend much time manually pinning content on the platform. Tailwind allows you to schedule your Pinterest pins ahead of time, so you can schedule all your pins at once and check them off your list.
- SEM Rush: This online tool helps you find keywords that will improve your blog’s search ranking. It tells you how competitive each keyword is, so you can make informed decisions about what content to write.
8. Start A YouTube Channel
A YouTube channel is another great way to grow your blog traffic. This is because the barrier to entry to starting a YouTube channel is much more intimidating than writing blog posts. In other words, anyone can sit behind their keyboard and write content for the internet, but getting in front of a camera to share your ideas with an audience is typically much more difficult for people.
A YouTube channel will make your blog stand out from the crowd and will be another source of traffic for your blog. It also helps to build trust with your audience because people get to see the real person behind your blog posts.
9. Collaborate With Other Bloggers
As a blogger, the journey can be lonely at times. Collaborating with other bloggers can be helpful because it will allow you to learn from each other’s successes and failures. Learning quickly from others’ mistakes will likely grow your blog faster.
Collaborating online also helps grow your audience.
If you pair up with another blogger and allow one another to write a guest post for each other’s blogs, you’ll be exposed to each other’s audiences. Try forming a collaboration with another blogger in your niche, and see how it grows your audience.
To find other like-minded bloggers, join Facebook groups or Pinterest group boards.
You could even search online for a local blogging community in your area.
10. Never Pay For Backlinks
Paying for backlinks is risky. Even though it might seem like a good idea, in most cases, it will end up hurting your traffic. It’s not worth the risk or your time investment.
Instead, focus on providing valuable content for your audience. The best way to get other websites and blogs to link back to your blog is to create content that’s useful and shareable.
11. Focus On Building Your Email List
Your email list is a powerful tool. People who have joined your email list have explicitly indicated that they’re interested in your blog and want to hear more from you. Your list will become especially useful when you have an offer or product you want to market to your audience in the future.
To start building your list, think about it from your reader’s perspective – people don’t sign up to receive just anyone’s emails. Offer a killer lead magnet so that readers are excited to sign up to your email list.
12. Take An Online Blogging Course
One of the best ways to grow your blog fast is to learn from someone who has already done it successfully. There are some great blogging courses out there, and they will teach you how to grow your blog traffic from square one.
Whenever you take a course, just remember that you can’t simply take the course and expect your blog to become successful – you have to actually implement the things you learn.
13. Run A Contest Or Giveaway
A quick way to boost your traffic and grow your blog fast is to run a giveaway or contest.
This will incentivize people to subscribe to your email list, YouTube channel, or other social media platform. Announce the contest by telling people to subscribe and engage on one of your posts.
Just remember, as a prize, you should always offer a gift that is relevant to your niche. For example, if you have a blog about gardening, you could give away a nice set of gardening tools. That way, you ensure the people that follow you are actually interested in gardening.
14. Pick The Low-Hanging Fruit
When it comes to choosing keywords for SEO, pick ones that are easy to rank for. Highly-competitive keywords are hard to win. And unless you’re #1, you won’t get much traffic.
So, focus on writing blog posts on less competitive topics so you have a chance of winning the #1 spot on a search results page.
Think about it – would you rather get 300 monthly visits from a less competitive keyword, or zero monthly visits for a highly competitive keyword?
Eventually, if you start to rank on enough search result pages, Google will start to consider you an authoritative site and will start showing your blog for more competitive keywords.
15. Scale Quickly By Hiring Freelance Writers
As I mentioned, churning out a lot of quality content quickly is one of the key ways to grow your blog traffic. If you’re not very confident in your writing skills, or if it takes you too much time to write blog posts every week, consider outsourcing some of your writing to freelancers.
Sites like Fiverr and Upwork are full of freelance writers who are willing to write your blog articles.
16. Add A Social Media Sharing Plugin To Your Blog
Make it easy for your readers to share your posts by adding a social sharing plugin to your website.
This will add convenient buttons to the sidebar, top, or bottom of your blog posts, encouraging people to share them.
And the more shares you get, the more traffic will hit your blog.
17. Promote Your Blog With Facebook/Instagram Ads
Running an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram for your most popular posts is a great way to boost traffic. You’ll be able to target people based on their interests, so your posts will get in front of people who are likely to click.
However, as with any paid promotion, it’s important to know what you’re doing. Seriously, there is no better way to waste money than to spend it on digital advertising when you aren’t sure what you’re doing.
18. Be Consistent
Like most things in life, consistency is key when it comes to blogging.
You may start to become discouraged if you don’t see instant success with your blog, but don’t let that discouragement stop you.
In fact, I recommend dedicating 2 full years to consistently blogging before you even consider giving up.
Like any business, blogging takes time.
Honestly, many bloggers fail because they don’t make it past the initial phase of hard work. Keep showing up consistently and commit to giving your blog plenty of time to succeed.
19. Take Advantage Of Email Automation
Email automation is awesome for keeping your audience engaged, and it saves you time. We use ConvertKit for our email service, and their automation tools are fantastic.
You can create custom email sequences that automatically send to people on your list when they sign up through certain forms and landing pages on your website.
This will keep your audience engaged, and your blog traffic flowing in!
20. Compress Your Images
Slow images will kill your website’s chances of being shown in a search engine.
Keep your website speedy by compressing your images before you upload them; or use a plugin that minimizes the size of your images after uploading.
21. Create Infographics For Your Blog Posts
Infographics give your readers information in a way that’s attractive and easily digestible. Also, people love sharing infographics on platforms like Pinterest.
As more people share your infographic, it’s likely that more people will click through to your blog post for more information.
And the best part is, you can easily make an infographic on Canva. All it takes is a few short minutes and a touch of creativity.
Just make sure to keep the information concise and easy to read.
Final Thoughts
Following these tips will help grow your blog traffic fast and bring you that much closer to blogging success! While growing a successful blog takes time, learn from these tried-and-true methods to start seeing results for your blog more quickly.
As long as you’re consistent, and take a step forward each day, I am confident that you will achieve the kind of success you have in your mind’s eye!
Now get out there and start blogging!!!
