How do you drive web traffic to your blog? And is it hard getting blog traffic? This is a simple question and so it would require a simple answer. But there are no easy answers as we shall come to see.
If you are a blogger or someone with online activity, you need traffic. Are you into e-commerce? Are you an author, a musician, or even a podcaster? As long as you are on the internet trying to showcase or promote your activities, you need traffic.
Because without it, you cannot grow your online business. But what is web traffic and why is it so important for your online presence?
What is Web Traffic
Web traffic is visitors to your website or blog. They come with the intention of finding something useful that can help them. Some of the reasons why they come are,
-To find helpful tips,
-To seek practical solutions that work
-To seek information on how to get things done.
Reading your blog they hope to come away with something of value, and if your blog supplies enough of the right value, they will always come back.
Why is web traffic so important?
Traffic is important for anyone and everyone who is on the internet, selling products or promoting affiliate offers, running an online business, or offering a service.
Web traffic is essential as a marketer if you want to attract customers and make sales. Traffic is a measure of how well your site attracts visitors. The more traffic you have means the more your site is doing quite well.
A site that has an increased amount of traffic has advantages because it means that, visitors express some kind of satisfaction with your content. People are interested in what you offer or write about on your blog.
The more interesting they find your blog, the more they’d want to explore it and read other content. This is what is called visitor engagement, and it has to do with the number of time visitors stay on your blog.
One thing to understand about site visitors is that, once they pick up interest in your blog,
– the frequency at which they visit your site increases.
-they become more interested in you as a person, and as a professional.
-they become avid consumers of your content.
–they are a landmine of opportunities for you to build relationships.
With relationships can come increased trust, and this is where you can tap into the needs of your audience. By building a relationship and knowing what pain points they have, you can offer the right products, that will benefit them.
But the potential your site has of becoming a much-frequented blog depends on the amount of traffic that it gets. It will also depend on where that traffic is coming from.
Types of Traffic and where to get them
As said before, traffic is visitors, or simply put, people that visit your website or blog. They can be tagged according to where they come from. And so as a blogger, you can get your traffic from social media.
This is social media traffic which if you want to be more specific, can be, Pinterest traffic, Facebook traffic, Instagram traffic, etc. In each case, traffic is coming from a specific social media platform.
You can also get traffic from search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and this is called organic or free traffic. This way of getting traffic requires employing SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and keyword research.
Paid traffic also called inorganic traffic, on the other hand, essentially means that you get traffic through paid advertising, by targeting a specific audience or group. You can do it through PPC(Pay-Per-Click) advertising or paid social advertising.
There is no limit to where you can get website traffic, the choice really is yours. In fact, you can even buy them on Fiver, which you may tag as Fiverr traffic.
But if you run a blog or an online business that you want to build into a brand, it is necessary to make wise choices and not be swayed by numbers.
Always use the appropriate channels to get your traffic. So now that you know where your potential traffic can come from it’s good to know how you can drive traffic to your site.
How do you drive traffic to your blog?
Getting web traffic is a common problem that every blogger faces. As long as you have a website or blog, you need traffic. The more your blog grows, the more traffic you’ll need.
The aim of every blogger is to have an insane amount of traffic where the numbers are in the six figures. With such an amount of traffic, the possibilities are endless. Think of what 10k monthly web traffic would mean for your website or blog. The potentials are limitless and you can harness that traffic,
-to grow your email subscriber list.
-have the opportunity to monetize your blog by offering personal or affiliate products.
-have better backlinks to your blog and of course,
–a collaboration with other bloggers, marketers, or companies.
All of this is good because it’s a boost to your blog. However, to achieve all of this you have to answer one question,
What must I do to drive traffic to my blog?
This is easy, you might say. And yes, definitely it is easy. You can write a 1000-word article on your blog, publish it and then copy and paste the link onto any social media outlet. You can create a Facebook page, open a Twitter account, and so on. You can also join online blogging groups to share your latest post.
But hey, look at your blog for a second to see what it looks like by asking two questions.
Does it have enough content?
Does the content convey enough value?
Does your blog have enough content?
When you set up a blog and want people to visit your blog, there’s not much you can do if your blog has little or no content. Content is essential and enough content is more than necessary if you want good traffic.
Take a minute to compare your blog to the normal supermarket you go to, every day. Little or no content is like seeing some shelves in the supermarket that are empty. Such a supermarket will not have many items for shoppers to choose from.
This will definitely drive people into searching for the next supermarket that has shelves filled with lots of items, that can meet their demands. In the same manner, your blog should be filled with lots of content. This should be content that drives traffic because traffic is tied to,
a) how much content you have and,
b) the length of your articles.
Let’s expand on this for a minute.
How much content should you have when you launch?
If you are starting your blogging journey, you may be eager to quickly publish a few posts, to see how quickly they will draw traffic. For some bloggers, this way of starting could have some negative effects on your blogging much later.
This is what is sometimes referred to as a quick launch as opposed to a planned launch.
In a quick launch, you are excited about your new blogging venture and want to quickly get things started. So you write a post or two and publish them quickly.
Is this a good approach?
Not many think it’s a good idea, because, you could post an article and then think of what next to write. And sometimes you may not have any ideas on what to write about. This will end up frustrating the continuity of your blog, making you post articles only when you are inspired to do so.
However, opinions differ in that for some bloggers, it doesn’t matter how much content you have. Even if you have only one article, just publish it to get started. Start your blog and don’t procrastinate.
The planned launch, however, is where you launch your blog with already a bunch of written articles, and some draft posts for continuity. The recommended number of posts to start your blog differs from blogger to blogger.
For instance, one blogger writes that when you start out, publish at least 2-4 posts first, but then have at least 2-4 more in your draft.
Another blogger recommends starting with at least 10-15 posts, so you can immediately see the benefits in terms of traffic. And yet another blogger still recommends posting about 3-5 articles when you launch your blog.
While the numbers differ, what they all agree upon is that after your initial launch, post content consistently, at least once a week. This way you can increase traffic to your blog.
How long should your articles be?
If you want to see traffic, you might be stuck on what works best when it comes to content creation. And here word count plays an important role because it measures how good or how mediocre an article can be. But far from that, it can determine your SERP rankings.
What is a Word Count?
Word count refers to the total number of words in your blog post. It represents the total expression of your thoughts on a particular topic in numbers. Now you might be asking, but how many words should a post have to be a good fit to get traffic, and rank well in the search engines?
The length of a blog post
The length of a blog post may vary but will depend on what type of article you are writing. Different articles may carry differing word counts. But no matter the word count involved, such articles must always carry information that has value for site visitors.
Even if the word count is less than 300 words, your content must convey enough value. However, you can write articles that fall under the following word count categories.
300-600
600-800
1,300-1,700
1,700-2,100
2,300-2,500
4,000 words and above.
What is the ideal word count for getting traffic?
To write an article that gets traffic, many bloggers are of the opinion that the length of your post should be about 1000 words and more. However, most would agree that the average word count to get good traffic should be 1500-2500.
This is a good amount to start seeing an influx of traffic and also for SEO purposes. It is also good for search engines, as they say, Google loves lengthy posts so its algorithm can crawl and index your site fast. However, it brings up the question of which content form is better, long-form writing or short-form posts.
Does the content convey enough value?
The next question to ask is if your content has enough value. Blog traffic is also tied to the quality of your content. It’s not enough to have an insane amount of content. The quality of your content matters. Taking the supermarket example again, think of it this way.
It is not enough to have shelves filled with items. People love quality products and will most certainly go for those items when they see them. And so it is with every blog post that you write.
This quality is the value every single blog post carries in it to give to your visitors. The value here means,
– how much impact the content you posted can make on your audience. Impact here means how much your content sways them into performing some kind of action on your site
-the impression they get after reading your content. Were they satisfied with the information? Was it what they were looking for?
To have a good influx of traffic means balancing value with word count such that,
Traffic= Content value + word count.
With the right content combined with the right word count, you are setting your blog for an influx of unstoppable traffic. Summarizing everything here’s what you should do to set your blog up to get an insane amount of traffic.
-Choose a niche based mostly on your passion or expertise
–Do research on that niche to know what others are doing
-Create content around your niche
-Get a domain name and hosting package
–Setup and customize your blog
-Fill it with content and post consistently.
Promotion is the key
This is a story that I picked up in a Facebook group one day. It’s one that talks about the importance of promotion. And it goes like this, a man asks his father why companies like Apple, McDonald’s, etc. keep doing advertising to promote their products even though, they’re already famous and do not need to promote themselves?
His father tells him that if they don’t keep advertising to promote their products, they could be forgotten in a split second, and customers will flock to the next available company to get what they want. “Such is the human mind.” His father told him.
This story illustrates the importance of promoting your blog. It is the key to constantly grabbing people’s attention, to show them that you are there to attend to their needs. Remember that while you are not in any real competition with anybody, your blog is competing with other blogs in the same niche.
And because you offer the same kind of content as others in your niche, you may have to do more to make your blog stand out from the rest. Promoting your blog is very essential to building interest around your blog especially if you have a product you are selling.
Final Consideration
After everything you’ve read, the great takeaway here is that you need to promote your content as much as you possibly can. It’s the only way to get your blog noticed so you can increase web traffic to your blog. However, there are strategies you can use to promote your blog which I will talk about in another post. For now, keep creating content quality content for your audience.
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