This is a guest contribution from Ness.
Everyone wants more traffic to their blog, don’t they?
Image courtesy Moyan_Brenn, licensed under Creative Commons
If you’ve been staring at your analytics wondering what’s going wrong, you might be making a few mistakes that are holding you back.
Not Having a Marketing Strategy
The first thing that should be thought about when blogging is how you will be marketing it. There are so many different ways to promote and market your blog, but without a good strategy or plan, you won’t be successful. This is extremely important at the start of your blog because you won’t have many viewers, so you won’t get any word of mouth visitors. All of the people you will be attracting are from your marketing efforts.
Rushing Content
Content that is rushed will always get very few viewers. Other blogs provide their viewers with quality content, so why would people want to stay and read a rushed post that isn’t as valuable? They won’t.
Take your time and create the best content as possible. You will attract more people and you will also be ranked higher (long term). The better the content, the more chance you have at ranking higher.
Improper Branding
Branding your blog can have some major effects on your traffic. Everything that you post for the public to see can be used to benefit your brand or the reverse. Bad branding will decrease your chances of attracting traffic, drastically.
Remember, branding your blog is more than the look and feel – it’s the tone of voice and the content too. You should be doing everything in your power to try and help your image and increase your authority.
Not Using Keywords
Keywords should play a big part in every blog post that you create because if you don’t know the phrases people are using to search, how can you expect to match those searches? Start by doing keyword research to find the keywords that will attract reasonable traffic for your topic. Keyword research can also help you find great blog ideas!
No SEO
If you want to rank higher, you need to apply search engine optimisation. Although I mentioned a few aspects of SEO so far, there are plenty of other techniques that you will need to learn and implement into your content. The truth is, if you want to rank higher you shouldn’t be posting content that is not properly optimised.
SEO is a long term strategy but once you have the basic SEO techniques down, you will see your blog posts creep the search engine results.
Not Understanding Your Competition
To be successful in your blog, you are going to need to know what your competition is up to. Research the marketing strategies they are using, what kind of content their audience enjoys, where their traffic comes from, and everything else they are doing to give you some ideas on how to improve your own blog. Using the information to come up with a better strategy will give your blog a better chance at being successful and attract more traffic.
No Social Media Presence
Billions of people log into their social media accounts every day and share content with their friends and family and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have become an incredible way to gain a large amount of traffic to your blog – if used correctly. If you can target an audience and provide them with something they want to read, then your blog’s traffic will see a massive increase in no time.
There are plenty of ways to attract more traffic to your blog, even if no one knows you yet, but if you’re making any of these 7 mistakes you’re sabotaging your own success.
Have you made any other mistakes when it comes to building your blog? Maybe you can help others avoid them!
Ness writes articles for MakeAWebsite – a site providing reviews on hosting companies allowing users to compare the performances of each host. You can go ahead and visit their website if you need any help in choosing the perfect host for your domain.
Great post, Ness!
I agree with what you had to say, 100%! Blog posts should never be rushed – I see blogging much like gardening, it takes time and requires your constant attention to be successful. I also like how you mentioned researching the competition. I agree! Not only should you research other niche blogs but they work wonders for becoming inspired to write new things about the niche as well. Good job!
Article that I think is useful, when I tried to build a professional web I just work alone without a group. and it makes me like confined and long to begin work.
Great tips Ness. I believe that knowing what your competition is up to is the key to attracting more readers to your blog.
Your Ideas of short blog posts is very nice. it is very help full to, who start the blog posts and also younger people, especially, for going interviews
Good advice, but I’m giving up my addiction to numbers and traffic. It just takes too much time. Besides I’m a writer and an artist not a marketer and a salesman. I’m just going to write and share and if people don’t come it’ll be their loss.
Good SEO, smart promotion and quality content are always the key. And consistency, blogging is not a sprint ;)
As per my views SEO and Social media strategy plays an important role. Also I agree with you, selection of keywords matter a lot. Thanks Ness for sharing these tips.
Sir but how to do proper branding. Please put some light on branding.
Branding is heck of task but can easily be done if one is clear on one’s marketing strategy. So it directly relates to task one of the post
Very useful post. Marketing, SEO and social media plays a crucial role to get traffic. Thanks for the share.
I agree for all the above points but some where on the way all these look so familiar. They look like old school lessons ‘that needs to be done’ but it has been put in a ‘not done’ format.
I am definitely looking forward for the new and creative ways to build traffic. Thanks for this post.
I agree with you. SEO is time consuming. I have a information site. I am not getting get more traffic for my site. Always I will try to create good link. Thanks for sharing great article. I hope one day I would get more traffic.
I’m surprised at how much implementing a solid social media strategy can go. We recently brought an apprentice into our business and over the last two weeks he’s gone to work at implementing a bare-bones social media strategy for our biz. Within two weeks we’ve seen a significant improvement in traffic and engagement across virtually all our content.
Very helpful tips, Ness. Being successful and getting many traffic in blogging takes a lot of hard work and effective strategies.
Excellent! Helped me realize I’m doing some things right. Thanks.
Every blogger and Internet marketer has to learn in their unique way and can totally relate to what you’ve mentioned in this post. When I first started out blundering and making tons of mistakes with blogging in 2007, I was using an RSS automated blogging program which republished content from news sites and article directories. Ignoring the fact I had to add genuine natural content of my own to the site, I got delisted from Google search results. Over the course of time, I read, studied and understood the importance of creating unique content for people to read and enjoy, as well as getting indexed by search engines to generate traffic. And today, I am in the business of creating 100% unique content and no longer use RSS automated blogging programs to produce content for my site. Although, I still have lots of work to do in the look and feel of the site. Thank you for this thought provoking blog post.
Nice article Ness! Thank you but it seems It will help me building my SEO strategy as for now I was repeating some of the mistakes you mentioned and I was getting very low traffic.
Informative article. Thank you Ness.
Definitely. In our niche of Tech writing here in Malaysia, we have many who just write two to three articles a day on just product launch announcements. And they are doing well on Alexa! (top 700k)
At times it’s frustrating to write unique content, as it’s so much easier to just write on a launch, but I guess the hard work will pay off in due time, no? :)
For me Keyword Research is what I’ve found to be most important, knowing what to compete for and what to avoid trying to compete for. I remember when I started blogging I was completely clueless and for a long time I had little traffic. It’s been years though, with time I got to know things. Thanks for helping other people out there who are as lost as I was.
I like the part about understanding your competition. I have probably learned 80% of everything I know from my competition from people that have already been down the long road. Thanks for the post its always good to be refreshed about the basics.
When I first started blogging in 2008, I’ll admit I was guilty of rushing content and not having a social media presence.
That has changed now with the new blog I started last month and into this new year. I’m on Google+ as well as Twitter and even have my blog and social profiles tied onto my Steam community profile.
Social media has definitely made a huge difference, especially with Google+.