Increase Traffic to Your Blog for Free in 2019
In 2019, while there are more options than ever before to increase traffic to your blog, there is also a lot of competition for readers’ eyeballs. At the end of the day, you want to focus on getting as many viewson your blog as possible. This can be done without a budget at all — you don’t need to spend money on advertising; the best way to do it is to provide value and make sure that your blog gets in front of the right audience.
Spending enough time using strategies that can increase the likelihood that readers will not only read their articles, but more importantly, share it with others, will improve your blog’s brand and monetization opportunities. This article gives three key recommendations to follow if you’re looking to get more readers for your blog. It’s like exercising — results won’t happen over night, but if you stick to the right steps, you’ll get to where you want to be.
1. Focus! Identify the WIIFT & Your Audience
What’s In It For Them (WIIFT)?
WIIFT is short for What’s In It For Them and is one of the most commonly taught concepts in leadership communication; in fact, I first hard about it in my communication course at MIT Sloan’s MBA program. But it’s not exclusive to leadership communication. Whether you’re speaking, presenting, or writing, WIIFT is a necessary first step in creating something interesting and worth sharing.
Exercise — before getting started on drafting the blog, make sure to first answer the following question: what will the reader leave knowing that he or she wouldn’t have known if they didn’t read your article?
You should be able to answer the question in one sentence. If you can’t, then the article you’re about to write isn’t focused enough, and will have a hard time providing maximum value to the reader. This will lead to fewer shares and subscribers, which is an opportunity cost for your blog’s brand.
On the other hand, if you can answer the question in one sentence, you need to then decide if the answer is interesting enough. If it is interesting enough and you decide to move forward with drafting, you’ll need to do one more thing: identify your audience.
Identifying Your Audience
The answer you wrote down should be more than enough to help you with this step. For example, if the answer is: the reader will leave with a basic understanding of quantum physics, then you can say that your audience is 1) people who do not have a basic understanding of quantum physics but are interested in learning about it.
This is a very important exercise because not only will you know your reader better, but you’ll also have the information needed to make a much better outline, draft, and final publication of your blog — one that will drive traffic to it.
By identifying the WIIFT and using the profile of your audience to draft your blog, you’ll be able to come up with content that is focused and valuable to the right audience. This will increase the value of the blog to the right readers, which will in turn increase the likelihood of shares and subscriptions.
Why Focus Matters: An Example
If I stumble on your blog after Googling how to get started with gardening, I am probably going to need more help in the future on gardening. If I saw that your blog’s articles have a common theme of helping noobie gardeners like myself go from 0 to hero in one month with daily tips and Q&A sessions and all these other amazing, helpful articles and resources, you bet I’ll subscribe!
On the other hand, if you only have one article on gardening, and then a few on your favorite local pizza shop, and then some on why your dog’s most recent birthday party was a disaster… That’s just too much noise, and I’ll likely turn away to find another source of knowledge.
I’m not saying lifestyle blogging is a waste of time, it’s just hard to monetize your own lifestyle/brand before you have, well, a brand. So if you’re just lifestyle blogging and writing “whatever you feel like” instead of thinking about what’s in it for the reader, then you’re missing the mark.
2. Start Caring About the Metrics That Matter
Looking at the amount of time you spent blogging is a misleading metric. Time spent is not strongly correlated with views. Stop writing harder, and start writing smarter.
The metrics you need to be looking at instead of time:
- Visitors — how many people visit your blog on a monthly basis? Challenge yourself to grow this number every month.
- Time on article(s) — how long do people spend reading your articles? If you blog on a place like Medium, these metrics are unavailable, but if you have your own blog, then you can see those metrics using Google Analytics IF the user clicks somewhere else after reading your article.
- Amount of shares — how valuable does your audience find your content to be? This is a harder metric to figure out and requires more manual searching. I do it by just plugging in the URL and/or title of my article to search bars of social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn and see what pops out.
So when you write your next article, you need to be thinking about those three things. Namely, how do I attract more visitors; how do I provide enough value for them to actually read it; and how do I push them to share the article with others?
The SEO Edge
As a blogger, you’ve probably come across the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) many times. If you don’t know what it is, in a nutshell, it’s essentially the practice of positioning your content in a way that makes search engines like Google show you as the top result for the searches you want to be the top result in.
SEO is not a waste of time; rather, it is a necessity. You need to figure out what your keywords for each article is, and then plant those words and phrases into your article to help give it a boost. Do it especially for the title. For example, on one of my recent articles, I titled it: 6 Additional Ways to Monetize YouTube Videos in 2019. Why? Because 1. my target audience for the article is YouTubers who are trying to monetize their videos, and 2. they are likely looking for relevant tips, not tips from 2004. So from that, I constructed my article title to reflect those types of search terms. As a result, the article became #1 ranked in the search Monetize YouTube 2019, and I have most of my traffic from Google referrals.
Stop Trying to Shakespeare Your Titles
I alluded to it in the previous paragraph, but my recommendation is that you do not spend too much time trying to come up with a clever title before you have an audience. Catchy, clickbaity titles work once you have a following that will actually share your content.
Before you hit that threshold, chances are 1) your clickbaity articles won’t even be seen by people because you have no traffic, and 2) people who do see your clickbaity article will not know what your article’s about, and might not click it (because they don’t know you, so they don’t know what you write about).
Instead, write a very practical title that people will be able to read and immediately say “a-ha! This is what I am looking for!” This tip links back to the SEO suggestion — you should try to incorporate SEO into your title, because it also helps guide you in making a very practical title.
3. Get Your Hands Dirty with Monetization
The third step is planning for your blog’s future. As it grows, inevitably you’ll have to spend more time on it to maintain it. It may become your job, but that means you’ll need to make money from it. No, you do not need to succumb to placing banner ads all over your website. There are many ways to monetize a blog outside of advertising. Don’t get caught up in throwing up ads all over your site — it can damage your credibility for first-time viewers. Instead, think about alternatives to ad monetization:
Answer Questions
Use Worthyt (www.worthyt.io). You create a profile, set a price for answering questions, and then just paste your profile link into the signature of your articles, or wherever you want. If your readers have any questions, they’re able to send you questions through Worthyt for the price you set. They get to receive an answer from a thought leader, while you get to receive support from your community and people who found your knowledge valuable.
Create a Business Email
Don’t settle for a “Contact Me” email. Everybody and their grandmas email you through that. Let companies know you mean business by creating an email specifically for business inquiries. This signals to companies that you are open for sponsorships, and that emailing you won’t just be a waste of time.
Start Doing Sales and Outreach
Many bloggers think that the process of monetization is: write until you get a million subscribers and then wait for businesses to reach out to you. False. Once you’ve decided on your blog’s themes, find companies that match your theme. Go reach out to their marketing/PR departments after you get maybe 10,000 subscribers and sell them the idea of sponsoring a blog post. Get on their radar. Even if they aren’t interested today, you’ll put yourself on their map and can revisit them once you’ve grown your subscribers. Smaller businesses might take you up on your offer because you will be less expensive to sponsor than larger outlets. This is especially valuable if you serve a niche market.
For example, if you have a blog that talks about the best ways to groom your dog after a shower, start reaching out to brands that sell dog shampoo, clippers, dog towels, etc. You’d be surprised — sometimes getting that sponsorship deal isn’t about how many viewers you have, but because you simply asked for it.
Building your brand as a content creator will take some time, regardless of if you spend money or do it without a budget at all. The best solution for increasing your blog’s brand recognition is to increase the likelihood that readers will share your content. You do that by providing value through identifying your audience, clearly structuring your WIIFT, and using those two pieces of information to craft a focused article. Combine that with SEO, and you’ll start seeing a noticeable improvement in readership over time.
Monetizing your blog in 2019 is not an impossible task; you should be thinking about it as you grow your blog’s brand, because one day you may need that monetization to work on it full time.
