{"id":3502,"date":"2013-12-03T16:15:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-03T16:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/?p=3502"},"modified":"2013-12-03T16:15:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-03T16:15:16","slug":"5-effective-ways-to-increase-your-blog-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/3502\/5-effective-ways-to-increase-your-blog-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blog traffic became a huge factor in determining the success of an online marketing campaign. Traffic whether it is referred or organic could bring potential customers to a site that obviously makes the business profitable and increases its branding potential (especially when customers became brand advocates).<\/p>\n

There is a lot more benefits a brand could gain once it has a continuous flow of traffic. But the methods on how to actually do it are more important than the theories.<\/p>\n

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In this post, I\u2019ll share to you a few ways to improve your blog\u2019s traffic that are scalable and could be performed in any type of niche you\u2019re working in.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get started\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

1. Target social influencers when promoting your content<\/strong><\/h3>\n

You already know that it\u2019s not enough to create a content that is tailored to your target audience. Content promotion is a must right after your crafted your content and should be done twice the effort and time you exerted in your content creation.<\/p>\n

One of the key ways to amplify the reach of your content is to get in touch with social influencers who could be your brand followers and could make your content promotion easier than the usual tactic (given that they have existing followers who might be interested to read\/consume your content).<\/p>\n

Type in your industry in the Followerwonk\u2019s search Twitter bio and sort the results by social authority.<\/em> Social authority is not only based on the number of followers a person gains but also on how he actually engages with his social followers. The higher the social authority of the influencer, the higher is the person\u2019s engagement with his followers.<\/p>\n

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You can also use CircleCount to look for influencers who are active on Google+. Why do you need Google+ industry influencers? <\/em>Simply because Google is now favoring brands with engaging Google+ pages and posts that have high Google+ shares are more likely to rank higher on search results.<\/p>\n

Type in your keyword\/niche in CircleCount and you\u2019ll be able to see influencers who have a lot of followers on Google+. Reach out to them and offer your content. Remember that you don\u2019t need to be pushy in your outreach. <\/em>Just give them a heads up of your content and they\u2019ll be the one to decide whether or not your content deserves a share.<\/p>\n

You can use this email template to reach out to social influencers:<\/p>\n

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And boom! You could give a boost to your content\u2019s reach with just a few minutes of outreach.<\/p>\n

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2. Use commonly-searched keywords on your guest posts<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As I have mentioned in my<\/a> guest post on FindMyBlogWay, creating high quality content assets should be done inside and outside your blog. The more you provide good content assets on other sites, the more brand signals you\u2019re sending to search engines. These brand signals could be acquired when people search for your brand-related terms (brand name, offerings, etc..). This actually happens if you could get people remember your brand by providing content that is unique, comprehensive and could be a good resource\/reference for blog posts.<\/p>\n

Given that the authority site where your will contribute your content have high domain rank, it becomes easy for the blog posts hosted on that site to rank for targeted keywords. The reason is that authority of the main page can be passed to its internal pages.<\/p>\n

Take advantage of this by targeting easy-to-rank keywords on your guest posts. If your guest post ranks high on SERPs, it will receive continuous traffic depending on the search volume and seasonality of the keyword used. And the more visitors landed on that guest post, the chance of getting referred traffic through the site is higher.<\/p>\n

Referred traffic doesn\u2019t come automatically when visitors landed on your guest post. The content should entice users to visit your site by linking to your site\u2019s deeper pages and adding a call to action to your guest post.<\/p>\n

3. Use freshness for your content assets<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Freshness had been released by Google to serve users with updated content pieces. This would help small brands to dominate the search results with updated and high quality content.<\/p>\n

You can actually use freshness for your content to maximize its potential to rank on top spots of organic results given that it\u2019s actually what the search engines and users are looking for in a content (fresh!).<\/p>\n

To determine if your preferred keyword favors fresh content in the search results, type that keyword in Google search. And look at the publishing date of each of the post. Just by looking at the dates, you can already determine if freshness greatly impacts ranking results in your niche.<\/p>\n

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4. Automate alerts for unlinked\/linked brand mentions<\/strong><\/h3>\n

If you truly provide utility for your target audience, getting mentions from various web places is nearly possible for your brand. There are several reasons why webmasters would want to link to you. One reason would be the comprehensiveness of your content that it is deserved to be referenced by bloggers for their content.<\/p>\n

Bloggers are not always perfect when they link to external sources. Some of them would just link to your homepage though it should be linked to your internal page(s). Others mentioned your brand name or your name but don\u2019t actually linked to your site or even to your social profile.<\/p>\n

These instances are common to every brand and you just have to monitor every mentions of your brand to get the most value of them.<\/p>\n

Unlinked or linked brand mentions can be easily identified when you use alert tools. The most common among those tools is <\/em>Google Alerts<\/em><\/a>. You need to setup search queries using the tool to receive emails that list pages where you had been mentioned in. Otherwise, you\u2019ll receive plenty of junk emails in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Here are a few advanced search queries you can use to setup in your Google Alerts (I\u2019ll use my site name as my example):<\/p>\n