8 Tips to Grow Your Blog Traffic Organically!

Whether you are a professional blog writer, or a startup working from a coworking space trying to generate buzz around your project, traffic is the most difficult part of a successful blog. Best practices in content marketing are always changing. Gone are the days of unnatural keyword stuffing, shortcut tips and tricks. It feels odd to say, but if you want to grow your blog you need to create useful content. Of course, search optimization and consistency are still key.

It’s important to appreciate that not every blog is going to have the advantage of being fun. This post will help those content marketers who have the difficult task of making corporate blogs more human, any policy writing less boring, or food blogs less… nope food blogs are basically always welcome. Remember, useful doesn’t mean fun. Let’s get into it.

Understand How Much Writing Firepower You Possess

Writing teams are often small. Small, but overwhelmed. The result here is either good content that is behind schedule or poor content that’s on schedule—except nobody wants it. There are a couple of things you can do here, the first is to establish real expectations around content writing that will result in more useful content creation. This could be as simple as reducing the amount of posts per week from 4 to 3. An extra day to use for writing, research and editing results in better content.

Another thing you can do is reach out to other departments and see if anyone else would be interested in writing. This is a quick way to give a boost to your content team, without having to go through the time consuming and expensive process of hiring more writers. This becomes particularly useful when your writers aren’t specialists in your given niche—the sort of topics that can be researched but do have a cut off point as to how far a writer’s comprehension can go with surface-level research. For example, in a development company the writers are likely techies first and writers second. Any programmers that can write or provide the most up-to-date information for your blog increases content quality and reduces the time spent on research. In such situations, external contributors (to the writing team) shouldn’t worry about writing quality, only on contributing specialized content. Writers can edit things to ensure the content reads well.

Establish a Flexible Calendar

Don’t write purely out of spontaneity but also don’t have completely strict deadlines. You might aim to publish content on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. However, if the Wednesday piece could be made twice as good if it’s released Thursday afternoon—release it Thursday afternoon.

Create a shared spreadsheet in which people can add blog topics to, assigning different topics to the strengths or preferences of each writer. As for how often you go through the process of approving and assigning blog topics, that’s up to you. It could be weekly, monthly or even quarterly. This is often dependant on the breadth of your blog and whether you’d like to target a certain product or service for a period of time.

All topics should go through a keyword researcher: Google’s Keyword Planner or Keyword Explorer by Moz are popular options. Some social research is necessary: see what other people are saying and more importantly what they haven’t. Apps like Buzzsumo can speed up this process. You want to find the answer to the following questions:

• What messages are resonating with different audiences?
• What question is this post answering?
• What SEO purpose or marketing event will this piece of content support?

You may only find an answer to one of those, which is fine, as long as each topic has a purpose.

Flexibility is an important value that should extend beyond your posting timetable. Overwhelming work and life schedules will cause you to burn out. Burnout will seriously lower productivity, at times the most productive option is for you and your team to stop blog writing and remove yourself from the internet altogether.

Write Genuinely

You are a human, your readers are human, write like one. Give careful consideration to the tone of your blog. A corporate blog will have a certain standard of formality, but you should do what you can to reduce boredom. Use personal pronouns such as “you” and “I,” ask rhetorical questions and reduce any extraneous and overly verbose content that doesn’t give anything to the reader.

Each writer has individuality that your blog should take advantage of. One writer might enjoy problem solving and will be better at tutorial writing. One might have more experience or perhaps their own relevant side-projects that can be featured in the blog.

Will writing genuinely directly grow blog traffic? Probably not. Useful content is still the most important factor. But giving your writers a license to write more personally does make things easier for them, they’ll enjoy their work more and will either produce more content or produce content that they care about. Naturalizing the writing process can positively impact blog traffic.

Optimization Is Different For Each Post

Each post has limitations for how well it can be optimized. Some posts can appropriately include more keywords, links, catchy headings/subheadings, image and video content. You may have set some feature requirements you want each blog to hit, e.g one keyword, two backlinks and 1 video. If a post cannot naturally feature all of the features you’d like, simply don’t include them. Parts of a post that feel forced are quick to cause readers to bounce. Readers can understand that your blogs need to have some marketing purpose, but it shouldn’t feel like it’s being shoved in their face.

Page Speed Optimization

It feels like this is in every blog related to anything to do with web traffic, and it will continue to be until blog owners get the message. Any web page has about 3 seconds to load before the viewer leaves.

Mobile traffic becomes more important every year. Therefore your blog needs to be mobile responsive. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support is worth investing in and will quickly boost your search traffic.

AMP pages are essentially stripped down versions of your site that load instantly. They’re a great idea for anyone wanting to secure better clickthrough rates and more conversions. But, AMP can cause you problems if implemented incorrectly—it may not agree with all the current aspects of your blog and will negatively affect website traffic. In our case, we found that we didn’t have the time to perfectly implement AMP on our own.  We outsourced AMP development to CodeClouds. Surprisingly, the entire project was affordable! If looking for mobile development experts, they’re a recommended choice.

Find Ideas Using Social Media

No matter how popular your blog actually is, take the time to establish a social media presence. It’s free and will become more important as your blog grows. Each platform provides a channel for your viewers to provide feedback and give topic suggestions. They might suggest what the sequel to an article should be or ask you to provide a completely different solution, here’s an example below:

Creating posts that your viewers want is not only better for creating engagement, but also lets them know that you’re listening.

Don’t Slack With Your Newsletter

People are becoming increasingly picky as to what they let appear on their email and even more picky with what they click on. Don’t just list new posts and expect viewers to click-through, even if they’ll find those articles useful, there needs to be something that is attention grabbing enough to stop them from overlooking the email. Medium is a great example, of course they have the advantage of featuring fresh content provided by creatives from around the world. You on the other hand need to create variation in your subject lines, play off recent industry news, use rhetoric and personal pronouns. For example, don’t rinse and repeat a boring blog title such as:

• 10 Ways to Web Page Increase Loading Speed

Instead say:

• Web Page Loading Speed, Your Business Has 3 Seconds Or It’s Dead
• Remember Your Loading Speed? Well Your Customers Shouldn’t
• In 2020, It’s Instant Loading Speed or Nothing

Use your newsletter to bring up any older posts if they’re relevant again. Update any information that may have changed, if the information has developed in some sort of way, you need to fill in the gap.

Finally, Prioritize One Thing At A Time

There is no quick route to growing blog traffic. It’s like a snowball: it starts off small and slow, but once you get some momentum it quickly doubles, triples, quintuples in size.

You need to identify one main focus per year and nail it. Your first year you may want to focus on growing traffic mainly from search engine result pages. This year will be all about search optimizing posts and writing about topics that are trending. Your main focus may be about increasing the amount of sign-ups to your blog. Here, you can start to introduce unique content—if it’s not unique it has to be twice as good (if not more) as your competitors. Attach your best content to lead ads. Your third year may be about increasing sales through your blog. Highlight your products and or services when appropriate. You can introduce posts are a product or service centric to avoid randomly forcing a salesy vibe on otherwise interesting content. Include products within your blog email and ensure almost all content is ending with a call-to-action.

Your Blog Is What You Make It

You can come up with any excuse to justify why your blog is mediocre. You could invest the same energy in finding ways to make a blog better. A positive attitude towards your blog is the first step to growing traffic and will encourage your team to share the same passion. Improve your content writing team where possible, take the time to make useful content and keep it genuine. Your approach to technical optimization is up to you—if you have developers in-staff then more power to you. If not, rest assured there are plenty of affordable development companies you can outsource to.