Sometimes you have to do the dirty work that no one else wants to do in order to find success.
There are a lot of glamorous ways to get blog traffic.
I’m sure you’ve read a few articles on that. Maybe some of them have been written on this blog.
Today we’re going to focus on the unpopular ways to get more traffic for your blog. These are the things people have to do that get traffic, but because they take more work people are usually willing to ignore them even if it means their blog and business will suffer.
But since you’re a hard worker I thought it would be right up your alley.
1. Forget About Search Engines
This one is tough because when you focus a little on optimization for search engines you can see some changes in your rankings.
But if you focus too much on what you think the search engines want you’ll turn yourself in circles and you won’t create good content.
It takes longer to build a blog that people want to visit no matter what channel.
Google and the other engines have always told people to write content for target readers first. Google always tries to optimize their results for the end user (or for their ad revenue). Trying to optimize for the machine can lead to short-term success at best.
The long game is better played by forgetting about the search engines.
Write for people. Use the keywords people are searching for to help you make content and variations of the keywords people are looking for.
2. Provide Content For Other People
This one is not popular because you do a ton of work with no guarantee that it will bring you more traffic.
But the more I try to do this one the more I see it working in the long run to bring more traffic to this website.
It could be a blog post that you write for another site (no follow any links). It could be an interview. Heck, contribute content to someone and don’t even ask to be mentioned.
Do whatever you can to get in front of other audiences. Pay it forward by providing your best advice. You’ll grow your reputation in the industry and your traffic will increase as more people search for information about you.
3. Grow Connections
This takes time, but is worthwhile.
Social media has made it easier, but connection on forums, websites and through email are just as effective even if they’re more old school.
The more connections you have in the blogging world the likely those connections will be to share your content with their audiences.
That’s how traffic works. You have to build your audience, but in order to do that you have to tap into the audiences of your connections.
4. Contribute To Social Media
This one is tough for me. All of these are tough, but being more active on social media is a tough one for me.
On the surface it’s hard to see the value in creating content for something else, but contributing to social media does grow your following and that leads to more traffic.
Tweeting more unique tweets and creating messages on the various social networks builds your follow. It’s necessary if you want more blog traffic.
It also takes time. That’s why it’s hard. I see the benefits and I still find it hard sometimes.
5. Write More
Simple, but you would be surprised how hard it is to write blog posts regularly. The Internet is littered with bloggers that have given up because they weren’t seeing the fruits of all the work pan out.
Some will tell you that you don’t have to write all the time to be interesting. If you write quality stuff people will wait, but they always want more.
I compare it to music.
I’m a fan of country music. There are artists that release music every 3-5 years. It’s always great. People wait for it and buy the new music like crazy when it comes out, but in between they really don’t care that much. They’re happy with the catalog of hits, but if you’re not doing something new people look for something else to fill the void.
On the other hand you have artists working like crazy to put out music all the time. Back in the ’70s and ’80s some released multiple albums per year. I don’t know how they did that.
But people stay interested.
You have to keep people interested to get more traffic.
Find a balance that works for you, but if you push yourself a little bit to write more you will get more traffic.
Conclusion
Getting more blog traffic is not an easy thing. Everybody is looking for the shortcut.
There are rarely shortcuts. Usually it takes hard work.
That’s why these items are unpopular, but they work.
Try one or two of them out for a while and your blog traffic should increase.
Image: Flickr