Steve Balmer would have chanted “conversions, conversions, conversions” instead of his infamous “developers” chant had he been running a website and not been the CEO of Microsoft at the developer’s conference in 2006.
Why? Because it’s all about conversions in the online world.
And how does one improve their conversion rate? More traffic.
Yes, more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean higher conversions, but if you play your cards right, then an increase in traffic should always lead to higher conversions.
Great – now you’re wondering how to attract more people to your website. It’s wise of you to swing your thoughts that way because I’m about to share some really bright ideas with you to increase your traffic.
Keep in mind that taking interviews should not be treated as a quick way to boost traffic. This is a method that has far deeper implications than just an immediate traffic boost.
But there’s no denying that interviews attract a lot of traffic if done right.
Interviewing your industry thought leaders is not just a great way of knowing them or asking them for advice about the industry; it’s also a great way to leverage their followers and penetrate their audience.
Also, it boosts your blog’s credibility and recognition. Thought leaders are usually followed and trusted by a large number of people, and if they share your interview with their audience, that alone helps to get the word out pretty quickly. Here at WPblog, we started doing interviews because they’re a great source of knowledge.
Here’s what you can accomplish with the right approach to taking interviews from your industry thought leaders:
However, we quickly realized the marketing potential of interviews as well and have since planned to increase the frequency of inviting people for a chit chat.
Reddit is a social media platform with more than 330 million users, and not a lot of people are taking advantage of that.
With Facebook’s ever-decreasing audience reach, it’s not really the best platform to share articles or promote your website anymore (not without paid advertisement, at least). Yes, Twitter is still there, but it’s mostly for interacting with people and keeping conversations alive. There are plenty of other platforms as well, but getting traction on all those mediums requires a lot of work.
Reddit, on the other hand, provides a quick way for you to share your content with people around the world. If your content is great, people are going to shower it with love!
Hence, Reddit is one of the best places to go to promote your creations and bring in extra traffic to your website. Do keep in mind, though, that you have to be careful how and which subreddit you post to because the moderators are rather particular about everyone following rules. You should also be aware that Reddit isn't the most friendly platform towards direct advertising, so be sure to follow organic marketing strategies before diving in.
But, rest assured, if you contribute something meaningful, you can expect a spike in your traffic from the popular social media website!
Long tail keyword optimization is one traffic gaining technique that most bloggers don’t pay a lot of attention to. This could be because you don’t really know how beneficial this blog post optimization strategy can be.
There’s a lot of opportunities to take advantage of when it comes to long tail keywords. While your keyword research may show that shorter keywords have a lot of search volume and that longer keyword searches have low search volumes, this often means that there’s less competition on those keywords.
Hence, it’s not only easier to rank on such long keywords, but writing on long tail keywords also means that you get to take the reader on a journey that isn’t possible on short tail keyword articles. Such articles are written around the search intent of your users and tend to deliver on their exact needs.
All this leads to better organic traffic and lower bounce rates.
Also, as a side note, remember that people tend to search long-tail keywords more often than they share short-tail keywords.
Think about how travelling the world opens you up to new experiences and discoveries that you never would have seen otherwise. The same goes for the content on your website. You can keep creating content for your website all you want, and that’s cool. But the moment you browse outside your website and discover the huge online world, you realize its true potential.
Leaving analogies aside, just know that guest blogging is one of the best ways to bring extra traffic to your website. Just like how you leverage other people’s followings from interviews, you can tap into other blogs’ audiences via guest blogging.
When you write for other blogs as a guest author, not only do you become a contributor, but your name is also getting exposure to their readers. This acts as social proof that you are an active member of your industry, helping readers to take you more seriously.
But, most importantly, it creates backlinks to your own website. The links to your website could be in the author's profile or they could be in the content. Either way, if you contribute meaningful content, people are going to want to check your content and your website, which ultimately means that you’re attracting more traffic. The higher authority website you guest blog on, the more traffic you can get for your own website.
So, you write a lot of content, right? Great, because writing a lot of articles is a sure-fire way of attracting a lot of traffic. But do you know what simple repurposing can do for you? Let’s talk a little about that.
A lot of people think that content refers to written content only – that’s not true. There are so many types of content you can create that you’re probably missing out on engaging a large part of your untapped audience. Just to give you an idea of the different types of content you can create, take a look at these multimedia ideas:
That’s probably a lot of information to take in at one time. But it clearly illustrates the many ways you can create content apart from written material.
But the best part is that you can simply take any of your written articles and use its content to create an infographic, video, Instagram post, slideshow or any of the other forms of visual content that I’ve mentioned above.
The fact of the matter is that not everyone is up to reading an article. Some people prefer the same information in video format, or some may prefer an infographic. If you can provide all three formats in the same blog post, you’ll get engagement the likes of which few other blogs may be enjoying.
For example, if you have a how-to article on your blog, you can turn it into a screencast video for your audience, and you’ve got a lot of video watchers hooked on your website.
So, we’ve discussed 5 ways to bring more traffic to your website. However, this is by no means an in-depth guide to increase your website’s traffic, because there are plenty more ways (some maybe even better) to attract crowds to your site.
The above-mentioned ways, though, are some of the proven ways that we’ve attracted a lot of unexpected traffic to our blog.
We set ourselves a target of improving our traffic stats in two quarters, and so we put all the above methods to test. Sure enough, we started to reap the rewards of taking interviews on industry thought leaders, optimizing our content for long tail keywords, blogging on other reputable sites such as this one, taking our content to Reddit, and repurposing our blog posts to meet the demands of different users.
If you want to take strides towards raking in the traffic numbers you aspire to for your blog, all you have to do is start taking these suggestions and put them into action. By practicing these methods on a regular basis, you’ll start to see a spike in your analytics dashboard soon enough!