Get more Traffic to your Blog without relying on Search Engines

Most bloggers are all too familiar with the feeling of publishing a post that they are really proud of, only to find that it doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.

As the traffic counter sits at zero, all of the hard work that went into crafting the post simply goes to waste.

It can be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to throw yourself into writing good content for your blog only to have it get ignored by the search engines.

This happens far more often than you might think – especially in competitive niches.

There are countless other blogs out there vying for the attention of a relatively small group of readers.

If you want your content to get noticed, you need to go above and beyond to create something phenomenal.

As you might guess, this takes a lot of time and effort.

It may also require a monetary investment.

Not long ago, Rand Fishkin provided some helpful tips on how to get more readers to a blog in one of his Whiteboard Friday presentations.

Here are five hidden strategies that you can use to increase the amount of traffic that you get to your blog.

Best of all, these strategies will also help you get more links and shares.

Let’s dive right in!

1. Share your content multiple times

Recently, Garrett Moon of KISSmetrics wrote a post outlining how most businesses don’t share their content frequently enough.

The typical strategy for the majority of businesses is to share a new blog post through social media directly after it is published and then to ignore it.

Although this is a great way to generate some initial interest in your blog post, it doesn’t provide you with the same level of reach that you could achieve if you shared the post multiple times.

Sharing your blog post more than once allows you to connect with additional users who may have missed it the first time around.

Try to spread it out over multiple social media platforms. When you first publish your article, share it on all of the major platforms.

Then, go back to each platform individually over the next couple of weeks to share it again.

A lot of people avoid this tactic because they think it feels spammy.

However, it’s an effective way to make sure that you are delivering high-quality, relevant content to all of your followers, regardless of when they happen to be online.

2. Convince influencers to write content for your blog

Every niche has a few key people who have huge followings on social media and who write excellent content on a regular basis.

Convincing one or more of these people to write guest posts for your blog is a fantastic way to get noticed.

This approach has multiple benefits.

For one thing, you get a wonderful piece of content for your blog that’s likely to get a lot of shares and backlinks.

Typically, influencers will also share a link to the post through their social media accounts, allowing you to tap into their large following to get additional traffic to your blog.

There is a catch to this technique, however.

Most influencers won’t write content for your blog unless it is exceptionally well known or has an excellent reputation in your industry.

They may, however, be willing to write a piece of content if you pay them for their service.

If you are planning on paying for content anyway, you may as well pay someone who has a lot of influence in your industry to create it.

Along with money, there are other ways you can convince these bloggers to contribute to your site including the following:

* If you have a large following on social media, offer to share their content with your followers.

* Provide them with a link to their own site from the content that they write for your site.

*Give them some of your products or services for free in exchange for their post.

Leveraging the power of influencers is one of the most effective ways to get more readers to visit your blog.

Because these contributors usually write for a lot of different publications, they may even link to the piece they wrote for your site from a much larger site at a future date, providing even more benefit.

3. Don’t ignore the Hummingbird

As cognitiveSEO’s Razvan Gavrilas recently pointed out, Google’s Hummingbird update has provided countless opportunities for bloggers to use synonyms to get their content noticed.

Google has been using synonyms in its ranking algorithm for several years now.

In essence, that means that you can rank for related terms without having to actually include them in your content.

For instance, an article on your site that includes the phrase “SEO company” may also rank for phrases like “SEO agency” without actually having to have the word “agency” anywhere in your content.

If you want your page to rank even better for the phrase “SEO agency”, you should try to include it in your content.

By incorporating a variety of different synonyms in your content during the optimization process, you can get your site to rank well for a number of relevant words and phrases.

This process is a lot easier than you might think.

All that you have to do is identify common synonyms that are used for the primary keyword phrase of your article.

Next, look up those synonyms using Google’s Keyword Planner tool.

Incorporate any of the synonyms that have a decent amount of search traffic into your content.

This not only can help your post rank well for these synonyms but also make your content more interesting to read.

As technology continues to advance, Hummingbird will no doubt start to do a better job of evaluating the content, making it practically impossible to have any influence over how your site is ranked.

Currently, however, there is still an opportunity to use synonyms to increase your search ranking.

4. Optimize your default tweet text

Make sure that the default text that shows up when people share your content on Twitter is properly optimized.

As Ross Hudgens recently pointed out, most blogs don’t have properly optimized tweet text, meaning that they are missing out on an opportunity to gain new followers.

When designing your default text, make sure that it includes not only the URL of the article and the title of the post but also your Twitter handle.

That will make it as easy as possible for new people to find you.

5. Use your content in multiple ways

Coming up with excellent content usually involves a lot of legwork.

For instance, you may have to conduct surveys, perform case studies, and really dig in to do in-depth research. All of this takes time.

The hard part is figuring out how to drive traffic to a website while you are working on your next major post.

One of the easiest ways to continue generating interest is by using your content in more than one way.

For instance, you may be able to transform an old blog post into an engaging podcast that people can listen to while they drive to work.

Finding multiple ways to use the same content is an excellent timesaving technique. Not only that, but it also allows you to reach many different audiences.

Here are some of the ways that you can repurpose a typical blog post:

* Create a podcast by reading your post out loud. When you are done, upload the podcast to iTunes so that people can listen to it at their leisure.

* Turn your blog post into a PowerPoint presentation or slideshow, and then upload it to sites like SlideShare.

* Create a video based on the content of your blog post. This doesn’t have to be highly involved. You could even create a series of bulleted points from your blog post with video transitions between each set of points. Then, all you have to do is record a quick voiceover.

* Make an e-book out of several related blog posts. You can then add a link to your website where people can download it or you can share it through social media.

Creating excellent content takes a lot of hard work. You may as well leverage that work as much as possible by using your content in more than one way.

As with everything that you do for your business, you should always make quality your top priority.

Each time you publish a new piece of content, make sure that it is something that your followers will really appreciate.

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