There’s nothing more disheartening than putting a huge amount of work into creating useful content on a blog that no-one reads. As a matter of fact, that’s most webmaster’s concern.
There are a lot of blogs out there and it can be hard to get yours noticed in the crowd. Except of course, you decide to do something different with some level of luck. However, Here are seven tips that should help improve your blog’s visibility and start that much-needed web traffic flowing to it.
1. Promote your blog using social media
Each external link you add for a blog post is an additional point of discovery for both human visitors and search engine bots. The more you have the better, but you need to be careful in where and how you post those external links. Spamming links where they are not welcome will backfire in a big way, sooner or later.
There’s also no point in sharing links in places that get no web traffic and have no search engine authority. That just ends up being a waste of time. If you want your posts to get traction then you need to share them on active social media accounts that you have put work into. Your accounts should at least have some seed traffic flowing to them to allow them to grow.
So share each new blog post across your social media network accounts including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Tumblr. If your post has any unique images that are worth sharing then also share those on image sharing sites such as Pinterest and Imgur, along with a link to the post. And put in the effort to grow those accounts by being at least a little bit active on those platforms.
2. Write engaging blog post titles
The title of your blog post is often the first thing a potential reader will see. It will be the text shown and linked in search results and may have added weight in search engine keyword ranking due to its high visibility.
The post title also usually appears in the URL for the post.
In many cases, it may be the only info that a potential blog visitor gets to provide them with context for your post when the URL is embedded in an external page. This makes the title an important part of your blog post that should not be overlooked.
3. Include contextual photos
A picture is worth a thousand words but in the case of blog posts, its true worth is to add some visual context for what you are saying in the post. A good image can help people understand what you are talking about and it can also act as a mnemonic to help them remember your post. And ideally, the pictures you use should add value to an already useful post, rather than trying to add substance to a bad one.
4. Add subtitles to videos in your posts
If your post includes a video then adding subtitles for the audio content of that video is a great way to give search engines more to index. This involves a lot of work if you do it manually though. Transcription can be a time-consuming process, so making use of audio to text software is smart.
You can use software and services such as Audext audio transcription to easily turn speech in the video’s audio track into text that can be used as a subtitle track. Audio to text converter online Audext also lets you sync the text with the speech in the audio and add titles for the speakers who are talking in the audio track.
If you are using any sort of audio to text transcription then you really need to utilize it before you merge your speech audio with music or sound effects though. None of these audio transcription programs are good at transcribing speech that is corrupted by non-speech sounds. So create your tracks separately, transcribe the speech track, and then merge the audio tracks together so that they are synced up with the audio transcription subtitles.
5. Incorporate keywords
While search engines use many indicators to try to judge the value and context of a post or webpage these days, keywords still play a big role in search engine optimization. Do your research and try to find some high-traffic and low-competition keywords that are relevant to your post and can be worked into it seamlessly. It can be tricky to work some keyword search phrases in with a well-written post, so don’t be afraid to add bridging words into the keyword to make it more readable.
6. Add social media sharing buttons
Many of the people who read your post will want to share it with their friends. Some will also wish to post a link on social media sites such as Reddit if the post has interesting, useful, and original content worth sharing. Adding social sharing buttons to your post is a great way to let them easily do that. You can find many plugins and extensions for popular blogging platforms like WordPress that add these buttons to your post pages automatically.
7. Invest in smart promotion
Advertising can be a great way to effectively print money if you get it right, and a great way to throw money away if you don’t approach it intelligently. Your ad dollars are often competing with those of other advertisers who have fine-tuned their ad spend to the point that they are eking out as much value as they can from their money. Unfortunately, with auction-based advertising systems this often means that you need to do the same to get any value from your ad dollars.
If you do manage to find a formula that gives you a positive return on your advertising investment then you can spend money to make even more money though. Do some A-B split testing to fine-tune your ads. Look at a variety of different advertising methods and services to find ones that are worth using for promotion. Don’t be discouraged by failures – you will have more of those than successes but you only need one success to start down the path of profit.
These seven tips should give you a good starting point to optimize your blog promotional strategies, and squeeze out some more traffic from your efforts. There are many other things you can do to improve your traffic flow, but most of them are going to be specific to your blog. So take a look at your blog and ask yourself what opportunities are there for improving its visibility and shareability.
Everything you do adds to the chance of one of your posts taking off virally and giving your blog a much-needed boost in the process.
