A blog is not just a personal or professional diary – on the contrary, you want your thoughts to reach the maximum number of people on the social media. Your blog is the most effective when people read your posts, comment on them and share them in their own online social circles. If you are managing a business blog, you would also want to ensure that the posts create the right impact with your clients. It is not just important to write a great a post –you also have to ensure that it attracts good traffic and reaches its intended audience.
Here are 7 tested ways to improve traffic to your blog.
1. Reduce your bounce rate
Bounce rate is defined the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site. To reduce the bounce rate, make sure that your post is interesting and engaging enough to attract and hold reader attention. If your audience likes your posts, they will probably share it on their online social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.
2. User-friendly layout and navigation
People who enjoy your posts may be willing to share it with others also. However, they will share only if they can easily find the call-to-action buttons. Make sure to add the share content buttons for popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc., at the end of the post. You may also consider adding them after the main heading and before the start of the post.
3. Exploit the power of the social media
Through social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can publish links to your blog posts. Social media is a great medium to spread the word as well as to prove your credibility and expertise within your industry. You can also give your readers the option to share the blog as well by placing sharing buttons on your posts. Also include blog subscription CTAs within some of your other content such as your newsletters, ebooks, webinars, or other downloads. This will enable you to capitalize on the people who are already interested in your content.
4. Clearly display the subscription buttons
Avoid complicating user action by unnecessary logins. Display a call-to-action (CTA) to subscribe to your blog, add RSS subscription button, and a simple one-field action module near the top of your blog, above the fold. Highlight these buttons so that they stand out clearly.
5. Demonstrate the value of subscribing
Having a dedicated sign up page on your website for subscribing to your blog can help to increase subscribers. On the sign up page, you can provide information such as the amount of subscribers you have, testimonials of current subscribers, examples of past blog posts topics etc. This will give your potential subscribers an insight into your blog and the value they will receive by subscribing to it.
6. Improve the page loading time
Loading time is a major factor leading to page abandonment – 1 second loading means 7% reduction in conversions. Slower page response results in increase in page abandonment – in fact, slow loading time could also lead to your site being penalized by search engines such as Google. The back end performance of a website directly impacts search engine ranking. As a site owner, you should explore ways to improve loading time by optimizing your application code, optimizing database queries, and ensuring you have fast and responsive web servers.
7. Add exclusive content
High quality, engaging and informative content will drive more traffic to your blog. Create content that is relevant, and informs and educates your target audience. While your blog can be long, the paragraphs shouldn’t be. Use lists, images and headings to break content and illustrate a point.