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.
