How To Get Traffic To Your Blog – 20 Methods For Traffic Generation

A blog or website without visitors can’t survive for long. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if there is no one that will read it. That’s why learning how to get traffic to your blog is so important.

If you’re just starting out blogging, and don’t know how to get traffic to your website, this beginner’s guide will show you how to do just that.

Of course, there are even more advanced ways of getting website traffic, but you need to know these “basic” ones first before we move on to the crazy stuff in the future.

So let’s begin:

1. It Starts With Your Niche

By now, you should have already found your niche and created a blog. So in order to get more traffic to your blog, your first step is to know what to write about. 

Preferably you chose to enter a niche that you know some stuff about. If not, things will get a bit complicated.

You will basically have two options:

• Spend a lot of time researching what to write and what others are doing
• Pay freelancers to write content for your blog

But if you’re already familiar with your niche, then your golden, you should already have a few ideas in your head about what to write, even before you start your blog.

If you don’t have any ideas, don’t worry, see the next point:

2. Research Topics to Write

Having a niche and knowing what stuff to right is great… but you also need to do some research and find out the topics that people are interested in.

This is especially important if you get stuck not knowing what to write about.

So one of the ways to find out fresh topics to write about and get more traffic to your blog is to go and see what’s trending on Google Trends.

Let’s say your blog is all about gardening, maybe you didn’t know that people don’t just search for gardening in the middle of winter…

So by using Google Trends you could quickly see what topics are popular right now.

Use these related queries, to create amazing content, and by doing that you will ultimately get more traffic to your blog.

You could also use SemRush for more advanced and in-depth research, where you could see exactly how many people are searching for these topics and keywords every month, what your competition is writing about, and more good stuff like that.

3. Create content pillars

A content pillar is basically a more in-depth article where you try your best to provide as much value and help as possible to your readers. This is the content that will most likely rank higher up in the search engines, so make sure to make it great.

This type of content is usually in the forms of Guides, Tutorials & How To’s.

All the content pillar articles should have a much bigger word count than your usual articles. This longer content gets shared more on social media and ranks higher in search engines than the shorter articles.

Make it about 2500-3000 words.

So if you want to get traffic to your blog, this is definitely one of the best ways to do it.

4. Write better headlines

Writing better headlines is a digital marketing skill that you will have to learn during your blogging career, and it’s best to learn it quickly.

Having a great headline for all your posts will make it easier for you to get traffic to your blog. Here are a few examples of how a great headline can benefit your blog traffic:

• Keeping visitors longer on your site (a visitor usually exits the site in 3-5 seconds if they don’t see something to intrigue them)
• Improving your SEO rankings (make sure to add your main keyword inside the headline)
• Increases your chances for your article to Go Viral

Like I said previously in another post, clickbait headlines simply work. So try to incorporate some of that clickbait-y flavor in your articles, but don-t overdo it.

5. Optimize Articles for basic SEO

Optimizing your content for SEO is the most important thing that you will have to do before hitting that “Publish button”. That is, if you want to get traffic to your blog for free from the search engines.

Even if you don’t care about SEO and getting free traffic to your website, you should still apply the SEO basics for all your blog posts.  Use a plugin like Yoast, or All in One SEO, to help you out in understanding some SEO practices better.

Once you get the hang of it, you will then be able to much easier implement these SEO techniques while writing the articles.

For example:

• Add the main keyword in the title and H1 headings
• add the same keyword in the permalink (URL of the article)
• Use the same main keyword in the first paragraph of your article
• Use alt attributes for your images
• Add main and related keywords in headings (h1, h2, h3) inside the article
• Create a proper meta description, having the main keyword inside
• Add external and internal links to your articles
• Write a minimum of 500 words, but I recommend 800-1200 at least

6. Try to Go Viral

Going viral is not an exact science. No one can really predict which of their content pieces will go viral, or when it will happen (or if it will ever happen).

There are many YouTube creators who have tons of videos uploaded, but yet only a few of those videos will ever go viral and get traffic from all across the web.

Sure there are a few ways to influence which of your articles will go viral, if you have a large following or if you pay for traffic, but in general, even if you do that, it’s still not 100% bulletproof.

People could simply not care about what you wrote… 

Here are a few tips to improve your chances of going viral and get more traffic to your website:

• Create a giveaway (use digital marketing tools like Gleam or Vyper) and pay for shoutouts on Instagram for it
• Boost your post on Facebook (more on that later)
• Use great headlines and featured images

If you do all of these, chances are that some of your blog posts will go viral and shared a thousand times on social media and the result of that will of course be more traffic to your website.

7. Add photos, videos, & infographics

As you can see from this blog post, I add images to everything. They help make the content easier to read and digest, and sometimes they can provide helpful information that can’t be explained otherwise.

Adding images and infographics to your posts will give you a massive opportunity to capitalize on other sources of traffic for your blog for example Pinterest.

There are plugins that can automatically add a “Pin” button to every image on your website so that visitors can easily click on the Pin button and instantly share it on their Pinterest page.

There are marketers that have websites that receive a ton of traffic through Pinterest, even more so than from Google. A favorite marketer of mine Jon (From FatStacksBlog), uses Pinterest constantly for one of his niche sites, he recently wrote an article: Pinterest VS Google traffic, which showcases the power of Pinterest even more.

If you can turn your articles into video content and share it on YouTube and other popular video websites, then that’s going to bring you even more traffic to your website. So if you can, do it.

8. Build an Email List

Ever heard of the saying: “The money is in the list”?  I don’t know who first said this, but these simple words have been stuck to me for ages now it seems.

And for a reason…

Email marketing is still pretty powerful even in this day and age with all the new “shiny toys” like Tik-Tok, Instagram, push traffic, etc.

Creating an email list should be your top priority, especially if you want to make money blogging. Sign up to an email marketing service like Getresponse, Aweber, or any other company that you like.

After you’ve done that, it’s time to add some sign-up forms so that you can collect email addresses and create a newsletter.

Add one in your sidebar, one at the bottom of the article, you can even add a pop-up (but a slightly less annoying one), and ask readers to sign up through them every chance you get.

Now when you write a new post or want to promote something you can just send an email to your list and you will get instant clicks and traffic to your blog.

Check out my latest guide to learn more: how to start an email list.

9. Make Your Content Easy to Read

I’ve talked about this before, and I will keep this short… Basically you want to make your content easy to read, so that your visitors can get quicker to the point.

People these days are busy, they don’t have time to sit through and read a 20-minute article if they are not captivated by something.

You basically need to create what’s known as “scannable text”, where you create content in such a way that it can be read and interpreted very quickly by someone who is just skimming through.

You can achieve that by incorporating the following into your articles:

• Create lists
• Add bullet points
• Bold words
• Make use of headings
• Short paragraphs

10. Create backlinks

A backlink is basically a link to your site coming from another site. This was pretty important back in the day for SEO traffic, and people used to mass spam and create backlinks on thousands of websites, and Google would then “reward” them with no. 1 spot in the rankings.

It doesn’t work like that anymore, you can’t just spam your way to the top now.

Instead, you want to create a meaningful and quality backlinks the manual and more “harder” way.

You research your competition and see where they get their backlinks from, with a tool like SemRush, and then you try and email the sites that they got a backlink on, hoping that you can get a link back to your site as well.

It’s easier said than done and 8 times out of 10 you won’t even get a reply back, but when it happens, it’s amazing.

There are many strategies and ways to create quality backlinks, but in hopes to keep this article short, I will have to talk more in-depth about this another time.

11. Guest blogging

Some people might push for the idea that guest blogging is dead and it’s not a relevant way to build backlinks anymore. Here’s the thing, guest blogging isn’t all just about backlinks.

If you got a website with a low amount of traffic, and you go on another more popular and successful site, write an interesting piece of content for them, add your description and link back to your own websites, you will more than likely get a portion of that popular’s site readers to come to your blog and check out your articles also.

The SEO benefits from that guest post backlink are also nice to have, even though Google said that they don’t care too much about guest post backlinks, it can still work if done right and not in a spammy way on hundreds of sites.

12. Push Notification

You know how you go to some of your favorite websites and suddenly you get a pop-up that asks you to subscribe to their push notification newsletter?

It might look “spammy” but the truth is that it works, and it’s a great way to get traffic to your blog.

Every time you write a new article, people who have subscribed to your push newsletter will receive a notification in their browser telling them that you just posted something new.

That’s instant traffic again, just like email marketing.

13. Update Your Article

Writing new content all the time is great. But you know what also is great?

Updating old articles with new information and freshen them up a bit to keep Google and your audience happy.  Google cares a lot about the date a post was published or updated.

They want to serve the freshest information available to the people who are searching for something.

So keeping your articles updated is a great way to drive traffic to your blog for free.

14. Publish more

It seems such an easy solution right? Well, it kinda is… I mean sure, you might not be able to write 5 articles a day, but even if you write once every few days, it’s still going to be great.

Because…

The more content you have the more chances you have to rank for some of them in Google and gain more traffic for your website.

Makes sense? Yeah, it does…

There are people posting 3 or more times a day, every day. I’m not saying to be like them, you could simply just write one good post per week and then use the other time to promote it.

Oh yeah… sometimes writing too much might not be an effective way to get traffic to your website, sometimes it’s better to just write something and then spend the next couple of days trying to promote it everywhere.

15. Start a Podcast

Podcats are fun, whether you’re going hard in the gym, or driving somewhere, listening to your favorite podcast is an amazing way of staying updated and learning things.

It’s also easier to produce than videos, and the podcast market is not as oversaturated as the video one.

Plus, it can be as long or as short as you want, so that you don’t spend too much time on it if you don’t want to. There are many platforms out there to promote your podcast such as Sticher, iTunes, Spotify, etc.

The podcast world is just getting started, and as years go by I’m sure that you will see all your favorite businesses having one.

So why not jump on the wagon and start before your competition does huh?

16. Optimize Your Blog Loading Speed

Getting traffic to your blog is fine and dandy, but if you don’t have a fast loading website, it’s all useless.

Did you know that people will usually leave a website if it takes more than 3 to 5 seconds to load? Well, now you know.

Make use of caching plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP rocket, etc. and use a CDN service like Cloudflare, and optimize your images.

Oh, I almost forgot…

Website speed is important for SEO, Google wants your site to load quickly, otherwise, they will not rank it as high as it deserves. Their words, not mine.

So if you want that sweet free organic traffic, you better make sure your site loads quickly.

Use tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom to test your website speed and see how to improve it.

17. Focus on Value

Writing a lot is great and all…but is it any useful?

Does your content provide great information, help, and value to your readers? No? Well in that case you better change your whole writing game, because you’re writing nonsense.

Make sure to always try and do your best to HELP others first, money is nice but if you don’t answer the needs of someone who just searched for something on Google, you will lose that visitor to a site that talks more in-depth about that topic or issue.

18. Find related communities

Find other sites, forums, blogs, and groups that are all on the same topic as yours. Join them all, start commenting and engaging with the community, and of course, add a link back to your website if it’s possible (but not in a spammy way).

This is another way of getting traffic back to your website fast, especially when you’re just starting out and your blog is brand new.

But don’t just comment useless things, try to get emerged into the topic, and provide tips and overall be helpful and knowledgeable if you can.

Quora is great for doing this. There are so many questions being posted every second on that website, and if you know your stuff good, and give them an answer and you have links to your website, you will get traffic back in no time.

19. Find your own voice

Yeah, sounding like everyone else is not really a good way to have your blog remembered. You know there are usually quite a lot of people that just type in your blog’s address and go directly to it, simply because they remember something great about you.

So try and be funny (depending on the topic this might not always be the case), insightful and clever.

Don’t worry though, nobody who just started out got their style of writing down to a T perfectly. It takes practice and lots of writing figure it out, so it will come in time.

20. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign

If you can afford to spend a few dollars, you can boost your posts every time you write one for like $5-$10 a day or more. Depending on the niche and country you’re targeting you can get quite a few people to click on your posts and check out your site.

It’s a great way to kickstart a post and start receiving some traffic, and see if the audience is engaging with it or not. Many times they will even leave a like and also follow your page, so that’s great for getting more traffic later on.

You don’t even have to use Facebook if you don’t like it, there are many other cheap website traffic sources out there.

Wrapping up: How To Get Traffic to Your Blog

Getting traffic to your blog can be at times difficult, but as technology evolves, there will always be new ways for people to promote and get traffic to their website.

However…

New technology isn’t always the case though, the old stuff works just as well even in 2022. Things like email marketing, writing great content, guest blogging, optimizing for SEO, etc.. will always be great methods to receive a lot of visitors to your site.

If you combine many of the methods (if not all) that I wrote about in this article, you will for sure see some results. Some might work slower than others but it will still be worth it in the end.

Also if you want instant traffic… there’s always another way.

You can pay for it, and get as much traffic as you want, whenever you want, to what content you want. Sure, it’s way riskier, and there is a high chance that you will lose money, but there are many websites out there who rely simply on paid traffic for their whole business, and it works.

Check out my article on cheap website traffic sources, and see what I recommend if you’re interested in paying for traffic.

Let me know in the comments if these methods were helpful for you, and if you have something to add to this article that would also be great.

Cheers,

Stephen

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