14 Recipes to Drive Traffic to a new Blog

14 Recipes INTRODUCTION When you are starting a new blog, or even when you are already running a blog one of the biggest questions is: How can you get visitors to your blog? How can you drive (more) traffic to your posts? Of course, in the long run, you need to build an audience for your blog. But when you are just starting out that audience is usually still small. And even when you do not have a loyal audience, yet, there are ways to generate traffic for your blog. Here are 14 recipes for you to drive traffic to a new blog when your audience is still small. These recipes are not a replacement for building an audience. They are quick tips on how to start out and get readers to your blog without spending a ton of money on advertisements. Keep in mind that every blogger started out once. And every new blogger struggled to find the first few readers. It is up to you how much your audience will grow! A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 2 of 20 RECIPE 1: TELL YOUR FRIENDS, COLLEAGUES AND CUSTOMERS The first step towards promoting your new blog is to tell everyone from your address book who might be interested. Many new bloggers make the mistake that they first want to grow the blog before they tell anyone. That is the wrong way round. You cannot build a blog if you keep it a secret. Tell people and listen to their feedback. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 3 of 20 Hey, got a new blog! What do you think? Hot Tip: If you do not want to come across as self-promoting, ask for feedback on your new blog instead. This way you build a relationship with your audience and get valuable tips on what is good and what could be better. RECIPE 2: MAKE YOUR POSTS SHAREABLE IN SOCIAL MEDIA When you are starting a new blog, you want the news about this cool new blog to spread. The best way to make that happen, is to get people to share your posts. But far too often new bloggers make it extremely hard to share their posts. So, make sure your blog has everything it needs to get people to share your posts: A. Make the content easy to read, nicely formatted B. Provide share buttons and make it as easy as possible for your existing audience to share your content. They are your allies in growing and audience if you succeed in getting them to share your content your audience will eventually grow. C. Provide pictures in the right format for the major social networks that require images (at least Facebook and Pinterest) D. Provide a headline or text for the shares. Often the title/headline of your posts will suffice, but sometimes it’s too long or too boring A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 4 of 20 RECIPE 3: SHARE YOUR BLOG POSTS IN SOCIAL MEDIA Even if your social accounts are still small, since you are just starting out, you should still share your blog posts there. After all: If YOU do not share your content, why should other people do it? You should not necessarily create a social media account for every social network you can find. But you should decide on a couple of social networks where you expect to find your target audience and where you can easily build an audience. (I recommend Twitter as a starting point, since you can find an audience for almost anything on Twitter, and you can easily grow a targeted Twitter tribe if you follow some basic rules.) Create images for the social networks you want to focus on. Social networks like Facebook or Pinterest will not give you any traffic to speak of if you do not provide an image in the right format. In some networks like Twitter you can also reshare your content later. Since statistically only a A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 5 of 20 Hot Tip: With tools like Canva, Pablo or Pic Monkey you do not need a designer to make images that will work well in social media. small percentage of your followers will notice your post the first time the chances are good that you will reach a totally new audience with the second (or even third or fourth) share. Just make sure, you do not repeat yourself all the time and that you share enough different information. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 6 of 20 RECIPE 4: FIND YOUR TWITTER Twitter has been our most important source of traffic for years now. Twitter is a great starting point for growing a social audience. However, for yourself, there may be a better social network to build your audience. Figure out which one it could be. Here are some tips, on how to choose the perfect social network to start building your social audience. Here are some basics for the major networks for generating traffic: A. Twitter: You can find an audience on Twitter for almost any niche. You can actively build an audience on Twitter, even if you have no advertising budget and not audience right not. Twitter and content are a match made in heaven. Once your audience on Twitter is growing, you can cross-promote to other social networks. B. StumbleUpon: Blog posts can gain huge amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon even if you do not have any audience/followers on StumbleUpon. Make sure you do not only stumble your own content and like some post from other sources. How much traffic one post will get is not predictable. Also, the A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 7 of 20 traffic from StumbleUpon is often not the best traffic you can get. Many visitors from StumbleUpon will leave again without taking action. However, StumbleUpon can be a great traffic source for new blogs. C. Facebook: Still one of the best social networks to get traffic. However if you do not have an audience (fans for a fanpage or thousands of friends and followers on your personal account), you need to build an audience first. The easiest way to get new fans and traffic from Facebook is to invest some money in advertising. D. Pinterest: Great images can give you a ton of traffic from Pinterest, even if you do not have a large following yet. Do not be frustrated if your traffic from Pinterest does not instantly pick up. Some of the images start spreading days or even weeks after they were first pinned. Make sure your images are optimized for search: The image name and alt tags need to contain the most important keywords. Your pins and boards also need to have keyword rich descriptions. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 8 of 20 Hot Tip: While LinkedIn is mostly a social network for personal connections rather than generating trafAic, you may want to consider re-publishing some of your blog posts on LinkedIn Pulse. This will give you an additional audience and help you brand yourself as a great person who has something to say. RECIPE 5: LINK TO YOUR BLOG WHERE YOU CAN If you are active online there are quite a few places where you can link to your blog and where you can help people to find your blog: A.Your Email Signature B.Your social media profiles are a good start. C.Your business card D.Your website E.Your author bio in guest posts or speaker bio at conferences A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 9 of 20 RECIPE 6: COMMENT ON OTHER BLOGS FROM YOUR NICHE Keep in mind that your comments need to add value to the posts you are commenting on. You want people to recognize you as a well-informed and helpful person who is desirable to connect to or to follow. A comment, which at first glance reveals that you only wanted to mention your own blog will often be seen as little more than spam. Before you start listing all the grammatical or spelling errors in the blog post you are commenting on, think what you would respect more on your own blog: Someone talking to you about the topic you blogged about or someone who does not care what you post but whose sole purpose is to point out your grammar mistakes. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 10 of 20 Hot Tip: There is a Wordpress plugin called Comment Luv which allows you not only to comment on blogs. On blogs that have CommentLuv each of your comments will also show a link to your latest blog post. These links are Do-Follow. There are lists of blogs who use CommentLuv. Here is an example list: Top 70 Dofollow CommentLuv Enabled Blogs List RECIPE 7: WRITE BLOG POSTS THAT INFLUENCERS WANT TO SHARE Blogging success partly is about building connections, and there are several great ways to directly connect to other more established and influential bloggers: A. Write a list of great resources from your niche, i.e. a list of great blogs. When you share this list on social media, mention some of the social accounts of the listed blogs or resources. Some of them will share your list. B. Ask influencers or influential bloggers for an interview, which you can publish on your blog. Most bloggers feel honored if asked for an interview. And they usually are proud of it when you publish it. Most of them will even help you spread the word about it by sharing it in their social channels. C. If you have some blogging contacts from your niche, you can ask someone to write a guest post for your blog. This will add a new angle to your blog and the author usually will help you spread the word about his article in his social accounts. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 11 of 20 D. Curate influencer content in a blog post “The best content this week” or “the best articles on this topic”. When you share this, again include the Twitter handle or Facebook Page of the mentioned authors. Some of them will help you spread the word. When you feature other bloggers in your content, you can also reach out to them via email or social media and directly ask them to share the content in which they are featured. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 12 of 20 RECIPE 8: GUEST POST Guest posting is an excellent way to get yourself and your content in front of an audience, which someone else has already built. Keep in mind that a guest post is not a post about your own business but an informative post for the audience of the guest blog. You can still link back to your blog in the author bio. Many blogs accept guest posts. You can find blogs via Google search “keyword guest author.” Research what kind of topics run well on the blog. You can reach out to the blog owner via email and ask if they would be interested in a guest post. Either include a post draft or make some topic suggestions. Give some credentials of your content, either on your blog or some guest posts you already published. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 13 of 20 RECIPE 9: WRITE BETTER TITLES FOR YOUR BLOG POSTS The headlines of your blog posts are a decisive factor for your blogging success. Nothing will guarantee the failure of your blog more than boring and uninteresting titles. If the subject of your blog is social media, a blog post titled “social media” will be utterly useless, no matter how significant or unique your content is. At the same time a post titled “The one important fact you did not know about Social Media” may well attract an audience. There are whole businesses built on the success of titles. Finding great titles for blog posts is a science. But you can certainly follow some best practices or even processes to find better titles. When creating headlines for your blog posts, also keep in mind that your headline needs to work in social media. For instance, for Twitter, you need a headline, which takes into consideration that in 140 characters you need to fit in the headline, a link and eventually a Twitter handle. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 14 of 20 Hot Tip: For each blog post come up with a list of 20 different headlines. Ask someone else to choose their favorite title. Try the best 2 or 3 with social media. Learn from the results what works well in social media. RECIPE 10: BLOG MORE OFTEN Many new bloggers make the mistake that they do not blog enough. When you are new to the game and your blog does not have much content and many readers, then you need to blog often. And here is why: The more content you have, the more content you can share on Social Media and the more content can be found via Google. If you already see some search traffic, more content gives you more opportunities to get traffic from search. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 15 of 20 RECIPE 11: START AN EMAIL LIST If you already attract some readers to your blog, you want them to come back. One way to assure this is to offer some way to subscribe to your blog. A signup form on your blog or even an RSS feed people can subscribe to can give you very faithful readers. For many bloggers, their email list is their biggest traffic source. Simply send out an email announcing every new post you publish. To collect more email addresses you should consider creating a freebie, which your target audience would like to have and give that freebie away on your blog or a landing page in exchange for email addresses. Make sure the freebie is closely related to the topic of your blog. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 16 of 20 RECIPE 12: BE ACTIVE IN FORUMS OR GROUPS FROM YOUR NICHE You want to get yourself in front of your target audience, and one place to find this audience is forums or groups around related topics. But keep in mind, that in most of these niche forums or groups, people do not like new members to join, share a link to their blog and leave again. Most of the time these links will be removed, and you may even get banned from the forum. Forums are for connecting and discussions. You need to take an active part in conversations to leverage forums and groups. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 17 of 20 RECIPE 13: OFFER YOURSELF AS AN INTERVIEW PARTNER Would it not be nice, if other bloggers/journalists ask you for your opinion or interview you on your niche topic? But how can you find journalists or bloggers who are interested in your opinion? Try H.A.R.O – Help A Reporter Out. On HARO journalists and bloggers are posting their requests for statements, interviews or views on particular topics. You can browse the requests and answer whatever matches your skills and knowledge. The HARO interface is simple to use. But for niche topics, you may need to wait a while until a well matching request comes in. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 18 of 20 RECIPE 14: INTERLINK YOUR POSTS Many bloggers link to older blog posts for more information. But have you ever thought of linking from earlier posts to new ones? If you have one or two articles that get more traffic than your other posts, then you can utilize this traffic for some of your other posts by linking to them for further information. Choose the links you place in the wellrunning posts wisely so that your linked articles provide additional information to the article that gets the traffic. Some of the visitors to the older but well-running post will then visit the newer article. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 19 of 20 FINAL WORDS: When you are starting out with a new blog, one of the hardest struggles is to find the first audience and make it grow. The recipes in this guide can help you find more visitors to your blog and grow your audience. It will still take some time to get a blog running and to build a considerable blog audience. Do not give up too early and try and find new ways to promote your blog all the time. Many famous bloggers had to struggle for their first few readers. Growing an audience for a blog takes time, a lot of content and persistence. But how fast and how much your audience will grow is also up to you. A Free Guide by The Social Ms Page 20 of 20