D o you want to get more traffic to your blog? Traffic is a hot topic in the blogosphere because it’s the lifeblood of every blog.

Gone are the days when you could attract a huge amount of organic traffic by simply updating your site.

Those basic tactics won’t work now, but with the right strategies, you can still grow your traffic rapidly.

In this article, I’ll show you some of those cool strategies that still work to drive more traffic to your blog along with some actionable steps. Implement one of these tactics every week and you’ll be on your way to increase your blog traffic exponentially.

Let’s get started!

1. Identify the Right Blog Topics

If you’re blogging just for fun, it’s fine to write about whatever you want.

But if you’re serious about getting traffic to your blog, the first and foremost thing you need to focus on is keyword research.

What is keyword research? Simply put, it means finding the words that people are using to search Google and other search engines. If you identify those search terms, also called keywords, then you’ll know exactly the topics that you should be writing about on your blog. Then when you use those keywords in your content, your blog posts will be more likely to show up in the search results.

Keyword research lays the foundation for your blog, so you can attract the right audience who are interested in what you’re offering on your blog.

Without keyword research, you’ll fail to convert your traffic into email subscribers and customers. That’s because you won’t be writing about the topics your target audience is searching for, and even if you do, they won’t be able to find it in Google.

With keyword research, you can target the right keywords for your content, which helps the Google algorithms to understand what it’s all about. This will boost your chances of your articles popping up in response to a search.

How do you do keyword research? One way is to start with a blog post idea and then brainstorm different ways people might search for that topic in Google.

Then, start searching for that topic yourself. Make a note of the titles that appear in search results, and the suggested searches at the bottom of the page.

This will give you a good idea of what other people are searching for, and how they’re phrasing it.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, check out this guide on how to do keyword research for beginners.

2. Create Pillar Articles

pillar articles

Once you have a good idea of the topics people are searching for, the next thing you need to do is to create a series of pillar articles.

Pillar articles are longer blog posts on more general topics related to your blog niche. Pillar articles can be thousands of words long. They tend to be “evergreen”, meaning they’re not quickly outdated, and they bring in a lot of traffic even after months – if not years – of creating them.

Pillar articles help you…

  • Bring in a rush of new readers, social shares, and links back to your blog.
  • Bring in more readers over time even if your content is buried in your archives.
  • Bring in search traffic because so many other sites eventually link to them.

So how do you create pillar articles the right way, so they continue to drive traffic even after years?

Here are a few steps to get you started:

  1. Content ideas: Come up with a list of pillar article ideas that you want to publish on your blog. These should be more high-level topics that you can write an in-depth post about.
  2. Research: See what other people are writing on the topic, and think about how you can create high-quality content that’s even better.
  3. Editorial calendar: Build an editorial calendar and add these ideas to the calendar. Make sure to give yourself enough time to write longer articles.
  4. Stick to the plan: Choose a publishing schedule and stick to it, no matter what. Check out our tips to write faster to help you stay on track!

This strategy can take time to work, but it’s a great way to build your audience and your reputation. Plus, you’ll see your traffic continue to grow over time.

3. Apply Basic SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of best practices that help make your site more search engine friendly. The better your site is optimized for SEO, the more traffic you can get.

And while SEO can seem complicated, it doesn’t have to be.

You can easily apply SEO to your web pages and blog posts using a plugin like All in One SEO.

all in one seo plugin

When you create a new page or post in WordPress, All in One SEO will give you a TruSEO score that tells you how well your content is optimized. It also gives you an actionable checklist you can use to improve and unlock maximum traffic.

Plus, there are other powerful features like automatic meta tags, smart XML sitemaps, WooCommerce SEO, and much more.

There’s also a free version that includes all of the basic SEO features you need for your website.

To learn more, check out our detailed review of All in One SEO.

4. Create a Viral Giveaway

Want a tip that will work to get massive traffic NOW?

Running a giveaway is a great strategy to skyrocket your traffic and email list. A viral giveaway works like wildfire because it piggybacks on word-of-mouth advertising to help you get more traffic and signups.

Joshua Earl, a freelance writer, has managed to grow his email list by 3,418% in just 11 days by running a viral giveaway.

viral giveaway contest

So, how does a viral giveaway work?

  • Set up a contest/giveaway on your blog with a plugin such as RafflePress, which is the best giveaway plugin available.
  • Announce a price for your audience to encourage participation.
  • Encourage the participants to share the giveaway to earn entries.
  • Promote your giveaway everywhere on the web.

Create Your Viral Giveaway Today

RafflePress is the best WordPress contest plugin in the market. It helps you unlock viral growth by turning your website visitors into brand ambassadors. Best of all, you can use it for free!

Get RafflePress for Free

For more details, see this step-by-step guide on how to run a viral giveaway.

5. Build an Email List

Did you know that on average, 70% of your website visitors will only stop by your blog once and never return?

That’s why building an email list is so important. An engaged email list can help you drive repeat visits to your site.

When you build an email list, you can build a connection with your visitors by sending them valuable content over time.

Repeat visitors are more likely to convert into customers, compared to first-time visitors. In fact, studies show that it takes 3-4 visits to your website for your potential customers to actually think of doing business with you.

That means as you drive repeat visits, you’re also gaining your subscribers’ loyalty, in turn turning those subscribers into customers.

Using optin forms from OptinMonster, like this lightbox popup, is the best way to get blog visitors onto your email list:

email popup from OptinMonster

Blogger Jennifer Roberge used this to increase her email signups by 159%!

See our guide on how to get more email subscribers for more tips and tricks.

6. Start Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is when you write an article to publish on someone else’s blog. It’s long been a popular way to build brand exposure, expand your reach, build authority in your niche, and of course, drive traffic to your blog.

Though it’s been around for a while, guest blogging isn’t dead!

If done right, it’s still a great strategy to demonstrate your expertise and drive massive traffic to your blog.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, probably you’ll know some of the top blogs in your niche that accept guest posts. But don’t limit yourself by only writing guest articles for a few blogs that you already know.

Instead, use Google effectively to find potential blogs that accept guest articles.

Below are a few sure-fire methods I follow to find them:

  • Search your topic + “write for us”, “contribute”, or “submit a guest post” to find on-topic blogs that accept guest posts.
  • Install Mozbar on your browser. It’s a free tool to weed out irrelevant blogs from the results.
  • Visit each blog that you think is worth posting an article for and then send them a guest posting proposal.

For example, here’s how I’d use Google to find the potential blogs to guest post for.

find guest blogs

I’m using the inurl search operator to narrow down my results. (Check out this Google search operator guide for more advanced searching tips.)

Using the Mozbar extension, I avoid any blog that has a Moz DA (Domain Authority) of less than 40. This way I can ignore less authoritative blogs and save my time writing for more influential blogs with more traffic.

7. Use Email Outreach to Ask for Links

Email outreach is another great strategy to drive an insane amount of traffic to blogs and websites.

Basically, you write great link-worthy content, make it even better, and reach out to the right people for backlinks.

Brian Dean calls this strategy the skyscraper technique.

This strategy of getting backlinks from all around the web has helped him double his organic traffic in just 14 days.

Since we’ve already covered how to write pillar articles in this post, let’s take a deeper look at reaching out to the right people.

This outreach strategy is helpful for any other purposes including guest blogging where you’re supposed to send emails to different editors. The better your outreach process is, the more time you can save, and of course, the better your results.

How to Use an Email Productivity Tool for Outreach

An email productivity tool like Streak, which I use and recommend, will let you track how often emails are opened and what links recipients click on your emails.

Streak is a free Gmail and Chrome add-on to track your email activities and improve your productivity.

With its Snippets, you can use a library of frequently written emails, so you don’t have to write it from scratch.

The most important feature that l like about this app is its CRM. It lets you integrate a CRM into your Gmail inbox, so you get a bird’s eye view of what happens to each email that you sent.

With Streak, you don’t need to create a separate spreadsheet or a pipeline for tracking the progress of all your emails, since it’s integrated into your inbox.

For example, take a look at the email pipeline I created for my guest blogging campaigns.

cold email pipeline

By simply looking at the CRM, you can instantly figure out to whom you need to send a follow-up to get a response.

8. Add Browser Push Notifications

Since its inception, mobile apps have been using push notifications to increase user engagement. Now the same technology is available in browsers as well for publications.

With push notifications, you send an alert to your regular reader about a recent blog post or any updates that you want them to know. The key point is that you’ll be able to send a notification to your users’ browser even if they’re not present on your website.

PushEngage is a great app that lets you send push notifications to your subscribers.  

pushengage website

The best part is that PushEngage has a free plan that lets you send 120 notifications/month to up to 2500 subscribers.

To find out more about PushEngage, check out our list of the best push notification software.

9. Regularly Update Your Articles

It’s true that pillar articles are evergreen content, but if you want to keep your articles fresh, you’ll need to constantly update them.

The freshness of the content is also a ranking factor in Google, so you need to keep it updated. Otherwise, your competitor’s article would rank higher on Google, dropping your position on the search results and organic traffic.

I use and recommend SEMrush for keeping an eye on the position for my preferred keywords on Google.

position tracking

Using their Position Tracking report, you can upload all the keywords that you want to rank for. This helps you figure out which article needs an update.

You can also tag the keywords based on priority, so you can see the position of your keywords in the search results page. If you see a significant drop in certain keywords, then you can go ahead and improve your article.

After a few days of updating your article, you can view the stats and see if the recent update has made an impact on your ranking.

10. Run a Facebook Ad Campaign

If you’re willing to spend a bit of money to grow your blog traffic, Facebook ads are a great way to do it.

Just linking to your posts from Facebook won’t do much. If you’ve been promoting your blog posts on your Facebook page for a while, you might have noticed that the number of Page followers doesn’t always equate to the reach of your posts.

According to Syed Balkhi, the Facebook organic reach problem has a Domino effect.

If you have one bad post, then it will impact the reach of your next post.

Now since fewer people see your next post, there will be an even lower number of interactions which creates a negative chain reaction. Before you know it, your page’s organic reach vanishes.

Similarly, if one of your posts does really well, then your next post will have a better chance of succeeding due to the increase in visibility.

How would you tackle the Domino effect and continue driving huge traffic to your blog from Facebook? Advertising.

By advertising on Facebook, Syed Balkhi, has found an improvement in the organic reach of WPBeginner Page and an increase in traffic by 332%.

wpbeginner facebook ad

If you want to boost your own traffic with Facebook ads, follow these tips:

  • Only share posts that you believe would interest your followers.
  • Like any other social network, rich media like photos and videos get more attention on Facebook than any other types of content.
  • Constantly review the engagement using Page Insights, so you know what works best with your audience.

For more details, check out OptinMonster’s guide to Facebook ads.

I hope these tactics will help you boost your blog traffic.

Do you have any traffic tips that you’ve applied to your blog and seen a big difference? Leave a comment and let me know. I’d be interested to chat about this one.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to check out our guide on blogging SEO to get even more traffic to your blog.

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  1. yes.kaWIN on August 20, 2019

    Wonderful article. Thanks for writing!

  2. Thanks for sharing this blog it would really helps me allot.

    1. Good to hear, James!

  3. Thanks for the article. Is it enough to update the article or do you need to edit the Published On date?

    1. Hi Melvin, if you update your article the next time Google crawls your site it will notice a difference from the last time and re-index the page. Changing the ‘Published On’ date is just another indicator to the Google crawl. But for readers of your blog, this can help them see you’ve made some changes. So, ideally update both so it’s clear to Google and your readers that you’ve updates the content. The only caveat is that this should be for significant changes to the content. For example, if you only update a spelling mistake then there’s no need to change ‘Published On’ date.

      1. Very clear, thanks. I’ve been wondering that for a while because that date is also an important factor of why someone clicks on your article in the SERPs. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t differentiate between the first time that an article is published and the last time it’s updated.

        1. Your WordPress theme controls what date/time is visible. If you right-click then select “View Page Source” on your blog post, you can see there are three date/times: published_time, modified_time, updated_time.

    2. Todd Lloyd on June 26, 2022

      I recently updated my theme to have the published date under the header. I think it’s a competitive advantage for both SEO bots and for real readers. I think people really like to see up to date content. It’s reassuring.

  4. Jack Shawn on February 6, 2020

    Thanks for sharing such a useful information. I will definitely use the tricks and tips to get more traffic on my site. Traffic can be increased using SEO tricks. Thank you again for the post.

  5. Thanks for the great write-up!

    From choosing domain names to hosting site, to creating content, everything requires a lot of work. This is also true for getting site traffic. It needs a lot of work to get your site up and running and at the same time, build relationships with bloggers and site owners to solidify your online presence and reputation.

    This article also offers great help for me as I am still getting my way into leveraging my own traffic and familiarizing the ins and outs of building site traffic.

    This is awesome!

    Cheers!

  6. Ogundipe Adekemi on April 29, 2020

    Mind-blowing contents , thanks

  7. Aakash Verma on April 30, 2020

    This is such a helpful article on various topics related to blogging and there’s so much to di in this space that a lot is missed and here I learned quite a few new things. Thank you so much for that.

  8. md rakib on May 25, 2020

    Thanks for sharing this blog

  9. Thanks for the wonderful article.

  10. Rahul Arora on August 14, 2020

    Hey, thanks for sharing this amazing article.
    Trust me, this article helped me a lot. Before reading this article I am not getting to much traffic in my website but after reading this article I am getting a very good amount of traffic into my site.
    Thanks for sharing this.

  11. Thanks so much for this… it’s nice to read and feel good that you’re doing the right things! 🙂

  12. I have read this article its very helpful for me and many others like me i have bookmarked it for my friends also.

  13. Ashish dhole on August 29, 2020

    Backlinks are very useful for getting rank and traffic also. So personally I use guest posting for my blog. But still, I am not getting High DA for that. So can you suggest me some tips for getting High Domain Authority for my blog?

    1. Hey Ashish,

      Backlinks are very useful at increasing your site’s domain authority. You can check out our article on How to Get Backlinks which has some tips for getting high authority backlinks to improve your DA.

  14. Jane Parker on September 19, 2020

    Exceptional Article! I think the best described article for the get website traffic. It is step by step so I get all answers to my questions and is very informative at the same time.

  15. What a insightful article. I’m a new blogger and really want to understand ways to get traffic to my site. Thanks for sharing!

    1. Thank you, glad you found it helpful! 🙂

  16. AMAZING AND VERY BENEFICIARY CONTENT.

  17. palwasha khan on September 4, 2021

    Thank you so much for sharing a great post. this article is too helpful to us that could solve all the confusion. I am really thankful to you for such an article. keep sharing great ideas.

  18. Explained very well. Thanks for sharing such an amazing post.

  19. Serena Biancarelli on October 20, 2021

    Hello,
    thank you very much for all this information and tips for SEO. I just started my blog and it’s hard to start well! Thank you again I will bookmark your article!

    1. Thanks Serena, happy you found this article helpful. Good luck with your blog!

  20. I like the way you told about how to get traffic on a website by using different strategies.

  21. Jenkins Davies on February 9, 2022

    Wow! fabulous! The blog is very important to me. It’s help me a lot. I’ve learned so many useful things regarding this blog. Thanks a lot!

  22. This is valuable information. I have been trying to increase my blog traffic for the past months. I’m going to try using this tips. Thanx…

    1. Thanks Pertunia, we hope these tips help you improve your blog’s traffic!

  23. Julie Fernandes on March 9, 2022

    As a beginner, I am struggling a little to get a decent amount of traffic in a month. This blog post was seriously helpful. PushEngage gives me hope to get a better amount of traffic this Month.

    1. Happy you found it helpful Julie! Feel free to check out our PushEngage review to learn more about how it can help you grow your traffic and engagement. 🙂

  24. Cube Accounting Solutions on April 14, 2022

    Thank you for Sharing

  25. Jashpreet kaur on April 27, 2022

    I think your blog is helpful for get more traffic

  26. tips4toop on June 27, 2022

    This blog is very informative. This is very useful for a beginner like me. Thanks for sharing this useful information.

  27. Rakshana on June 28, 2022

    Hi David,

    Thanks for sharing such a useful information. I will definitely use the tricks and tips to get more traffic on my site..

  28. Imperial Money on September 12, 2022

    Thanks for sharing such a amazing Blog.

  29. your blog is very good and informative knowledge
    Thanks for your effort

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