Most blogs thrive on traffic. Most people who set up blogs intent to attract as much traffic as possible to their blogs for various reasons. It could be for monetary purposes or just to ensure that the information they are offering reaches as many people as possible. Be that as I may, attracting traffic to your blog is not a walk in the park. It’s a process that requires strategy, patience, and dedication. Let’s look at some of the most effective strategies that will attract the most traffic to your blog come 2018.
Classical
Before focusing on the latest technologies used to increase traffic to blogs, let’s not forget the conventional methods for attracting traffic.
Anyone who runs a blog or website knows that content is king. The quality of content you provide is what will determine whether people will frequent your blog. If your blog is about cars, then ensure that you provide the best news, advice, and rumors about cars. This will ensure that your audience is interested enough to visit often to check what’s new. Use simple language that will make it easy for any interested guest to your site to understand what’s happening. Using the cars blog example again, if you go too technical about cars, some people will not understand what you are writing about and that will cause them to lose interest.
Yes, as a professional, if you use technical terms, correctly, it’ll make you seem like a guru or something. But be moderate. Provide content that those who can understand your jargon will appreciate, and also that those who can’t, even though they’ll have to Google the strange terms to understand what’s going on, at least they won’t have to google an entire sentence to understand it.
Quality content will make people excited and since today you can share almost any digital data instantly, most people won’t be able to resist the urge to share something they like. You can see that quality content in itself not only attracts one visitor, but by the time one visitor shares it, and then another, and then another, you’ll end up attracting may be a thousand visitors to your site – through one visitor. How awesome is that?
Digital Networks
Networking or connections is the key to marketing and letting the world know about your products and services. In the online realm, social media is perhaps one of the most important, if not the most important way of spreading the good news about your blog. Yes, social media has been around for a while, but still, it’s one of the most effective ways of promoting your blog.
The thing to consider as 2018 approaches is what is changing about social media, and how will that affect the way things are done in the web, thus affecting your blog. One good thing to do is paying attention to the new social media sites that are surfacing and observing how they are influencing the internet. You should be on the major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, QQ, Tumblr, Instagram, or Sina Weibo. If you are not familiar with some of the social media sites listed, that’s a sign that you should know your social media sites better. It’s obvious; make use of social media to promote your blog.
Participate in social media groups and alternative communities so that you can give people a hint of what you have to offer, and where applicable, provide a link to your blog so that those interested can find out more about you and what you have to offer. Moreover, participate in blogging communities.
Provide feedback and support other bloggers, particularly those in the same frequency as your own; i.e., if you are blogging about cars, there other bloggers out there in the same frequency. Check out their blogs and say a thing or two. A good portion of them will notice you and return the favor. This will, in turn, enable those other bloggers to include backlinks to your blog in their blogs; hence, increasing traffic to your blog.
Mobile First
Google will soon alter its search engine to give priority to mobile devices. The reason behind this is that Google has determined that in the recent years, more and more searches done using the search engine originated from mobile devices. This is something that is likely to be implemented in 2018.
Therefore, you should ensure that your blog is optimized for mobile devices. Whatever platform you use, ensure that it has considered this aspect of web design. Chances are that most blogging platforms will have had this feature as part of their design. But it doesn’t hurt to check. Better safe than sorry.
How does this affect traffic? Simple, most people will be using a mobile device to access the internet. The portion of these people that’s interested in viewing your blog’s content should also be able to access it. It can’t be simpler than that.
Traffic bots
They are good. They are bad. It depends on who you are consulting with, and from the perspective, you are approaching the issue. Traffic bots are applications used by search engines, as well as other websites to visit websites for various purposes; like monitoring user behavior, or to interact with the content in the websites or blogs either maliciously or benevolently. Before 2013, it was determined that traffic bots were the majority of the traffic received by most websites and blogs.
From 2014, more human visitors have visited websites and blogs. Traffic bots also help in increasing traffic to your blog and thus giving it a better chance of getting a higher ranking on search engines, which means even more traffic. You can either install a desktop application that will be sending the traffic bots to increase traffic to your blog, or you can subscribe to an online service that will do the task for you.
Traffic bots have been a controversial issue because they are not necessarily the kind of traffic you want. Nonetheless, they still help to generate the kind of traffic you want. It’s best you handle them with care and learn how to best manipulate and take advantage of them.