7 ways to amplify traffic with your blog
In an ever-changing, dynamic SEO landscape, some things have strangely remained constant.
Blogging is one of them and thankfully so.
Amidst the million, maddening Google algorithms and talks of SEO being redundant, a good quality article still does the work for you.
It draws eyeballs and it gets you the link juice for free.
So if your blog is long dead, then this is the perfect time to resuscitate it.
For 2018 promises to be the year of the blogger and there are tell-tale signs of it already.
Recently, there was a very interesting statistic on Hubspot, which revealed that companies that use their blogs effectively have 97% more inbound links to them. (https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
There you have it. If you are still not maximising the potential of your blog, then here are 7 tips that will help you drive traffic using perfectly curated blog posts on your website.
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There’s a method to the madness:
The days when you could create blog posts on just about any topic that was closely related to your business are long gone. Blogging today needs a lot more effort and planning. You need to chalk out a concrete content strategy that involves keyword research, analysing trends linked to your business, spying on your competition and coming up with nuggets that engages your users and brings in the traffic. We know what you are thinking. That’s easier said than done. At times, you just cannot come up with good ideas for your blog articles. That’s where our next tip is going to help you immensely.
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Chuck the keyword research part of it:
If you are still spending hours trying to find the best keywords for your business website, then you are wasting crucial time and effort that can be spent in doing more productive things for your blog. I know that’s going to ruffle some feathers. But the fact is that most of the ‘money’ keywords are being dominated by the big guys. Even if you spend hours to come up with a keyword that has excellent chances of sending traffic to your website, you will most likely be competing with websites that have a domain authority of 90 or more. That’s time better spent on trying to find content ideas for traffic-magnet articles.
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Using Free Tools to come up with content ideas:
If spying on your competition doesn’t seem to be helpful enough, then there are a bunch of free tools on the internet that can help you come up with ideas. Buzzsumo is one of our personal favourites. And it is so ridiculously simple to use. Log on to the Buzzsumo website, enter your keyword or topic into the search bar and it comes up with article titles related to that key phrase that has the maximum user engagement. For example, if you search for ‘Content Marketing’, it reveals to you that the article ‘6 Tools to turbocharge your content marketing in 2017’ published on entrepreneur.com has more than 30k shares. That’s your billion dollar content idea right there. Hack the content, rehash the title and make a better article. That brings us to our next tip. Other than Buzzsumo, there are other tools as well like Ubersuggest and Quora, that we like to use.
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Don’t limit the words:
500-word blog posts are obsolete. Well, even 1000 worders don’t seem to work these days. Backlinko did this very interesting study (https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking) last year which revealed that the average word count on the top 10 results on page 1 of SERPS is 2500. Even the website ranked 10th had an average word count of 1700. If you are still hiring college students to write 500-word blog posts, it clearly isn’t helping you. Create long-form content. Make it elaborate. Add references where relevant. Create How to articles, tutorials and guides that offer value to your audience. And when you have enough data, you can convert it into a video.
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Integrate a video into your blog post:
YouTube has changed the way people consume content. It has exploded in popularity and with a sharp increase in the number of people using Smartphones, it’s all set to rise further. It is estimated that there are 1.5 billion users watching videos on YouTube every day. That’s a whole lot of traffic just lying out there waiting to be tapped into. And contrary to what you think, making videos for YouTube isn’t an uphill task anymore. You can hire freelancers on Fiverr to make the videos for you or you can use tools like Promo Editor, Unstock Video Editor or Typito to help make small sized videos. Integrate these videos into your blog post and it increases user engagement automatically. P.S. When you run out of ideas to make videos on, rehash your old blog posts and use them.
Show the love:
There’s nothing worse than coming up with the perfect article and not having any social signals to show for it. Imagine when a new visitor logs on to your website and finds that there is this 5000 word tutorial without a single share or like on social media. Throw some social signals on your blog post. A few shares, some likes, a bunch of tweets, nothing like some numbers to motivate your new readers to share it as well. Asia Virtual Solutions has one of the best social signal packages that you can check out here. It’s an eclectic mix of signals that will help you in more ways than one.
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Analytics is your friend:
The gold standard in blogging these days has shifted from keyword research to buyer intent. That’s where analytics comes into the picture. Take a quick peep at the behaviour tab in Google Analytics to discover what people are searching for on your site. On more occasions than one, we have discovered a bunch of topics that people were looking for but we had never even considered writing about. That’s buyer intent on a platter for you.
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You cannot have a cookie-cutter approach towards blogging anymore. It is one of the most effective traffic pulling tools that you have on your hands. But you have to be ready to put in the works. We hope that these tips help you reinvent your blogging and content strategy in the year to come.