blog traffic

How To Get More Blog Traffic With Less Work

February 9, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you ask a blogger about his/her goals, it won’t take long before you hear “get more blog traffic” as one of those goals.

It takes a considerable amount of work to boost your blog traffic, especially in the beginning. The work is worth it in the long-term, but you can take some shortcuts along the way. These shortcuts will cut down on your workload so you can commit more time towards other priorities.

Even then, you may still find yourself committing a significant amount of time towards promotion. However, certain tasks can be reduced or even eliminated.

Create Evergreen Posting Cycles

If you’re the person continuously scheduling your social media posts, put this as Priority #1. Scheduling your social media posts seems like a priority, but with so much automation available, it’s more harm than good to continue scheduling your content.

Instead, you need to create an evergreen posting cycle. That way, all of your social media posts sequentially get posted over and over again in an infinite loop. I only create new tweets 2-3 times per year when I want to incorporate more of my new content into my current evergreen posting cycle.

I don’t have to constantly copy, paste, and write social media posts over and over again. This is the beauty of automation.

For a while, I used HootSuite’s bulk uploader which allowed me to schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks. Since then, I now use ViralTag which may be more expensive, but it has evergreen posting cycles for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and many others.

I set up these evergreen cycles once and forget about them. The rest takes care of itself.

Republish Your Old Content

It’s great to publish new content. In fact, I write a new blog post every day. However, you can republish your older content to save time.

The idea behind this tactic is that instead of writing a 1,000 word blog post (or more depending on your preference) you update an existing piece of content. Preferably, update one of your top pieces of content.

By updating your top content, you’ll get search engines to notice and point more traffic to that content. You can also use successful content to drive more traffic to your new and emerging content.

Some bloggers have such massive libraries of content that all they do is republish and hone their existing content. You may not be at that point yet, nor may you want to implement that approach, but it’s worth considering.

These same bloggers that only update their new content frequently write guest posts to drive more traffic to their content. These bloggers often publish their best content on other people’s blogs while still providing immense value on their blogs.

Delegate Tasks

I always look for more ways to delegate tasks within my business. The more tasks you can delegate, the more of your time you can commit towards other areas.

And not all tasks are created equal.

You only perform certain tasks because they are necessary for your business. These tasks generate no revenue but help keep everything in place. Scheduling new content, editing the content, growing your social media audience, and other tasks fit the list.

You need to delegate these types of tasks and focus on what only you can do (i.e. creating videos for a training course).

Some of these tasks may be difficult to hand over. I know it was difficult for me to hand over my Twitter growth to someone else. However, that decision was well worth it and allowed me to pursue other ventures.

If I had to continue growing my Twitter audience on my own, there’s no way I would have hosted the Breakthrough Success Podcast or any virtual summits.

Delegating more tasks opens the doors to more opportunities, and more importantly, time to think. You can think about how you’ll expand instead of just doing.

Taking 10-15 minutes to do nothing but think of ways to expand is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. It’s similar to creating an outline for each blog post you write. You know that the initial time it takes to create the outline will save you massive time and result in a higher value blog post.

Think of the 10-15 minute daily “Thinking Time” as writing a blog post outline for the longest piece of content you’ll ever write. It’ll definitely come out better with the initial Thinking Time.

Craft Email Rubrics

Most people spend an extraordinary amount of time in their inboxes. It seems like for every email we reply to, three new emails come to replace it.

Your inbox is a crowdsourced to-do list which, without moderation, will pull you away from what you’re actually supposed to do.

You may also send emails to reach out to more people. While this can be delegated, many people prefer to do the outreach themselves or at least in the beginning.

Eventually you’ll find yourself writing the same kinds of emails and answering the same questions over and over again. Understanding this principle is essential for getting out of your inbox quicker.

Instead of writing a different email each time, begin crafting email rubrics. Keep those emails in an easy to access folder on your computer.

The next time you respond to the same question here’s what you should do:

Head over to the email rubrics folder

Copy the appropriate email rubric

Paste the rubric into the email

Include the person’s name

Send

This will save you a lot of time. Instead of writing the email word-for-word over and over again, you can click a few buttons and then the exact email shows up. You can also apply this for outreach emails and any emails you find yourself sending often.

As bloggers, we will get the same types of emails. Developing rubrics for our responses will streamline the process so we can respond to and send more emails in a shorter period of time.

In Conclusion

Blogging take a lot of work. You have to create, promote, and monetize your content. None of those three key factors can be missing.

However, there are ways to streamline the process and cut through the noise. Delegation will help you streamline any process, but you should consider automation first. There is no reason to delegate a task that can be easily automated.

Regardless of how much time you shave off from your process, commit to implementing at least one tactic from this blog post. Whether it’s contacting potential employees on a site like UpWork or getting started with ViralTag, get in the habit of taking action based on what you read.

What were your thoughts on these tactics for getting more blog traffic with less work? Do you have any additional tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Are You Ready For A Surge In Blog Traffic?

February 3, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Every content creator’s goal is to drive more traffic to their content. We see fellow bloggers getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, and we want in on the action.

But are you actually ready for that surge? Are you prepared?

It’s something most content creators don’t think about. Many people think that their brands will reach the upper echelons of success if they get a massive surge in blog traffic.

Did you ever think of what would happen if you got a surge in blog traffic? Let’s say Gary Vaynerchuk did everything in his power to promote your content to his community. You’d get a massive surge of traffic for sure.

But what happens if that traffic fades away? Do you still have a way to communicate with your audience? Or have you lost all of that traffic?

Most people only think about getting more traffic. If only they had more traffic, they’d be more successful.

That’s not real success, especially from the content brand side of things. All of the top content creators know that you need two things to become successful.

Traffic and conversions.

You can get millions of visitors every day, but if you convert none of them, then you’ll be out of business in no time.

It’s natural for us to want to boost our traffic. More people see our content, and that creates more possibilities with word of mouth.

However, you also need to convert your visitors into subscribers. As you communicate with your subscribers through email, you will significantly strengthen the bond you have with your audience. Your subscribers are the people most likely to spread the word about your brand and buy your products.

Traffic comes and goes, but subscribers continue paying attention to what you offer. And getting an email subscriber is different from getting a social media follower.

On social media follower, millions of people (billions in Facebook’s case) are competing for a single user’s attention. On Twitter in particular, logging in a minute later versus a minute earlier will determine which tweets you see and which tweets you miss.

Inboxes may get filled with about 100 emails per day, but that definitely beats competing with the billions of social media posts that come out every day.

And we love checking our inboxes. The instant gratification is too tempting to resist. We are addicted to our inboxes because we remember the best things that happened to us in the inbox.

My mind subconsciously thinks of moments like when Seth Godin said he’d like to be a guest on my podcast. I don’t open my inbox and consciously think, “When I opened my inbox a while back, Seth said he’d be a guest on my show. This email must be just as good or even better.”

But our subconsciouses think that all of the time. They want that instant gratification. Even if you don’t find something as good as one of the best email you received, you still feel good about marking the message as read.

People don’t have the time to mark every social media post as read. That’s why you need to turn as many of your social media followers, readers, listeners, and viewers into subscribers as possible.

To hone in on this mindset, the big step is to determine your landing page and site wide conversion rates. If you get 100 people to visit your landing page, how many of them do you expect to convert? If you get 1,000 people to visit your website, how many of them become subscribers?

When you’re thinking about these questions and optimizing for higher conversion rates, you’re almost ready for traffic.

Even at this moment, you’re not 100% ready for a surge in traffic.

The final step to ensure you’re ready for a surge in traffic is setting up an autoresponder that leads to product sales.

Yes, the money is in the email list, but if you don’t have an autoresponder, you’re not making money. Sure, there is always the possibility of you promoting an affiliate offer or one of your products later on.

But you need to make money with your autoresponder…especially if you want to earn the right to use Facebook ads.

I’m always testing different approaches with my autoresponders. My favorite approach is to send three emails containing free content and then 3-4 emails promoting the product. In those free content emails, the content is related to the product I’ll sell shortly, and I do some soft sells in the postscripts of some of those free content emails.

Once you get some sales, you’re in business. At that point, you’re ready for a surge in blog traffic.

But even when you’re ready, you’re still not done.

You can run A/B Split Tests to boost your landing page and site wide conversion rates. Once tweak to copy can boost your conversion rate by 10%. To put that into perspective, if you attract 1,000 people to this new and improved landing page, you’ll get an extra 100 subscribers.

You can then optimize your autoresponder. See which messages perform better than others. Tweak the messages which are under performing.

Finally, we have the sales page, the one thing I didn’t talk about. If you get product sales, you have a sales page that converts. However, is it converting at 1%, 2%, or something much higher?

Track the number of people who visit your sales page and see how many visitors buy your product. It’s easier to do this on some sales pages than others, but it’s well worth the effort.

Try changing one thing. Whether it’s the copy or the promotional video you use, make something different. See how that affects sales.

If you can double your sales page’s conversion rate, then you’ll double your income. You also double your income if you do just one of the following:

Double your blog traffic

Double your conversion rates

Double your autoresponder’s effectiveness (sometimes an effective follow-up is all you need, but look at all of the messages in yours)

In Conclusion

If you take action based on this blog post, you’ll be ready for that surge of traffic. Until you are ready for the traffic, stop reading those “How To Get More Traffic” blog posts.

You need to be ready for the surge in traffic. Now’s the perfect time to prepare.

What are your thoughts on the prep work for a successful content brand? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get Massive Blog Traffic From Twitter

February 1, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Twitter is one of the best social network for driving traffic to your blog. Hundreds of people visit my blog from Twitter every single day.

It’s the social network that allowed me to establish my presence and expand from there. I believe Twitter is the easiest social network to dominate. And it’s not pay-to-play like Facebook (the list will grow as the years go by).

Plus, Twitter has momentum. Twitter’s slow growth is a thing of the past, and it’s change to 280 characters is already having a big impact.

If you want to get massive blog traffic from Twitter, follow these steps.

#1: Optimize The Pinned Tweet

You can pin one tweet to the top of your profile for maximum exposure. While most tweets have a lifespan of 20 minutes, the pinned tweet is immortal. Anyone who views your profile sees that tweet before seeing anything else.

With exposure like that, you must use that power wisely.

The best tweet to pin is one that promotes your landing page. That will result in more people joining your email list. As the landing page sits on the top of your profile and racks up more engagement, the social proof will be staggering.

#2: Tweet Often

I send out a tweet every 5 minutes. At some point in 2018, I may experiment with sending one tweet every two minutes.

Some people don’t like that I tweet often, but most people don’t mind. In fact, many people enjoy getting a constant stream of value from me.

The reason I can tweet that many times is because of the user experience. A tweet that I sent out at 4 pm is in the infinite bottom pile of tweets by 4:02 pm. If people log in at 4:02 pm, they missed my tweet from 4 pm.

That’s why I have a tweet scheduled to go out at 4:05 pm so this individual has a chance to see one of my tweets.

#3: Promote Yourself 90% Of The Time

Some experts recommend promoting other people more often than you promote yourself. I disagree with that advice, and you can see it in the way I tweet.

Almost all of my tweets promote one of my blog posts, videos, or podcast episodes. It’s not by accident. People don’t care about the source as long as the information is valuable and true.

As long as I promote valuable content, it’s okay. The moment I create bad content and promote that content often, that’s when more people will tell me to share other people’s stuff.

#4: Grow A Targeted Audience

Audience size is just a number. It’s the people within your audience that determine your success on Twitter or any social network. If you just focus on growing an audience, you risk growing an audience that is indifferent towards your content.

Growing a targeted audience means finding people who have a predetermined interest in your niche.

That means following the followers of influential people and brands in your niche. Then, you schedule a steam of tweets towards your content that is related to the same niche.

If you remember that small paragraph, you know the secret. All you need to do at that point is implement.

I currently use ManageFlitter to follow targeted people who are likely to follow back. ManageFlitter provides plenty of filtering options. They even provide a Remote Account Management option if you don’t feel like doing all of the clicking.

#5: Analyze The Data

As you grow your targeted audience and send more tweets, your Twitter Analytics will become a treasure trove of valuable info. You can see which of your tweets received the most engagement and which ones aren’t as popular.

You can use this data to determine patterns…and then act.

When I first used Twitter Analytics, I realized that my audience wanted more Twitter based articles. You can make determinations like this by looking at the engagement of your most popular tweets.

Twitter related articles topped out all of my other tweets.

With that new knowledge, I wrote more articles about Twitter and saw my Twitter traffic grow even more.

Be sure to routinely analyze your data, because it will change. Now my audience wants more articles about content marketing, and that’s exactly what I have been providing them.

I don’t write as many Twitter articles for that reason, but since I saw a significant gap since my last Twitter article, I wrote this one.

At one point, Twitter was my most popular topic. Even though it’s not the top dog for this blog anymore, I still need to write about it since my audience is interested.

To provide value to the people focused on content marketing, I connected these Twitter tips with getting more blog traffic.

You won’t make those types of decisions or know anything about your audience unless you analyze the data. Twitter Analytics is free and provides you with all of the data that matters, so there’s no reason not to use it.

In Conclusion

Twitter is on the rebound towards further greatness, and now is a great time to expand your presence on the blue bird.

You’ll get maximum blog traffic by knowing and caring about your audience. You’ll provide them with the content they want instead of what you feel like tweeting out.

What are your thoughts about using Twitter to grow your blog? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Hit Your Blog Traffic Goals

January 22, 2018 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

It’s very common for bloggers, video creators, and podcasters alike to set site traffic goals. Some people aim for 100,000 monthly blog visitors while others aim for 1 million podcast downloads.

But most of these site traffic goals involve a significant long-term time investment. Some people get frustrated with slow progress and give up on these goals all together.

And yet it’s possible to achieve our site traffic goals faster than we realize. It’s possible to surpass 100,000 monthly blog visitors in under a year. But if it’s possible for some people, why aren’t we all doing it?

There are only two reasons for this phenomena:

It’s a lot of work, and only a few are willing to put in that much effort.

We don’t know how.

You’ll learn the how part soon enough. At that point, it’s up to you to put in the work. Let’s go deeper so you discover how to hit your site traffic goals.

#1: Optimize Your Content For Social Shares

From here on, I’ll refer to the people with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, millions of downloads, and millions of views as colossal content influencers. That will make it easier for me to write this blog post.

Colossal content influencers tend to share a few things in common. A glaring commonality is that they all get hundreds or even thousands of shares for all of their new content. These individuals have large email lists of devoted fans, but that’s not the entire story.

These same people optimize their blog posts for social shares. It’s common practice to include social sharing buttons at the top or bottom of every blog post. This is a default option you can get from WordPress and similar options.

But this is a limitation.

You need to give your visitors as many opportunities as possible to share your content. You can include blocks of text throughout your content that invites people to share your content. You can even have the social media buttons on the side as someone consumes your content.

For YouTube videos, you can include a Click To Tweet link in the description.

#2: The Ultimate Hack For Getting People To Share Your Content

For every blog post I write, I set a goal to include at least five outbound links. Outbound links lead to other people’s content. For videos and podcast episodes, you can mention at least five articles and people in each new release.

A few days before the blog post goes live, I’ll then contact everyone I mentioned. In this email, I do three things:

Let them know I mentioned them in the upcoming blog post
Tell them when the blog post goes live
Ask them if they can share it

If people say yes, I’ll follow-up with the link on the day the blog post gets published. I’ll also provide a prewritten tweet to make it easier for these people to share my content.

Since I publish a new blog post every day, that means I have to mention people a grand total of 1825 people every year asking them to share my content. Since these people are in the blog post, many of them will share it. Some of these people will even consume your content and become devoted fans.

They’ll point back to your content frequently and show people where you mentioned them. They’ll spread the word on social media and to their audiences.

Some of these people can drive 10 visitors to your content. Others can drive 100, especially if some of these people decide to share your content more than once.

If you mention 10 people per blog post, you’ll then contact 3650 people every year asking them to share your content. The more people you mention in your content, the better these numbers serve you.

I reach my goal of mentioning at least five people in each of my blog posts by writing the blog post first and mentioning others later. Once I have a view of the entire blog post, I can then determine what kinds of content and people I can include within my content.

For videos and podcasts, I plan out who I will mention before I start recording. For interviews, it’s more off the cuff, but I have a general idea of who to mention if a specific topic comes up (i.e. I know who to mention when the conversation turns towards webinars).

#3: Add More Depth To Your Content

depth

My blog posts are rarely under 1,000 words. Most of my podcast episodes are 30 minutes or longer. Why so much?

The answer is depth. I’m providing my audience with more value for each piece of content I publish. People don’t want to filter through a bunch of blog posts, episodes, and videos when all of the information is in a single piece of content.

We want lengthy guides instead of fragmented advice. This is why long form content outperforms short form content.

When I started writing 2018’s blog posts in late November, I set my benchmark at 1,000 words. Now I am gradually increasing that benchmark. Every week, I’ll add an extra 100-200 words to the benchmark until I can consistently write 2,000+ word blog posts in an hour or less.

Long form content also requires a different content consumption mindset. Your visitors need to stick with you for the long haul to finish reading the 2,000+ word blog post or listening to the 30 minute podcast episode. If you get people to invest that kind of time into your brand, you can expect them to enthusiastically come back as long as the value is good.

#4: Grow Your Email List

Your email list is where the magic happens. This is where you turn visitors into subscribers, and eventually, into devoted fans. Everything you do for your content brand should always be done with the intention of growing your email list. If you decide to send tweets promoting your content, ask yourself, “How is this action helping me grow my email list?”

As you grow your email list and inform them of your new publications, you’ll attract more returning visitors who will share your content with their friends.

#5: Stay Optimistic

i'm possible

It’s easy to get discouraged when we fall below our expectations. As you continue to create and promote content, remember that you have a long journey ahead of you. Growing a content brand takes time.

The people who seem to hit massive site traffic goals in under a year had to squeeze at least three years of work into that one year.

So I encourage you to stay optimistic. If you believe in yourself, learn each day, and have a bias towards action, you’ll achieve your site traffic goals.

In Conclusion

Most of these tactics focused on social shares. Adding more depth to your content creates a more valuable experience and helps your search engine ranking, but social shares generate the buzz and help you move much closer to your site traffic goals.

To maintain long-term traffic regardless of how much the rules change, get as many of your visitors as possible to subscribe to your blog.

The journey is a long one, but well worth it for those who put in the effort. It’s not about if you’re willing to put in the effort. It’s about actually putting in the effort.

What are your thoughts on these tactics for achieving your site traffic goals? Do you have any tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Can’t Get Eyeballs On Your Content? Here’s The Fix

January 5, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Wondering how you can get more people to visit your blog, watch your video, or subscribe to your podcast? If so, you’re not alone. Even the most successful content creators want to get more eyeballs on their content.

Marketing nowadays is a race for everyone’s attention. Many brands capture people’s attention for several hours in a given day. Chances are you want to create a similar effect with your content in which some people will spend hours each day consuming your content.

If you’re struggling to get eyeballs on your content, then use this game plan to drive meaningful attention to your content.

Focus On One Traffic Source First

The biggest reason people struggle to generate more blog traffic is because they diversify their traffic sources. While this is a great long-term strategy, the short-term results in you spreading yourself too thin.

It’s difficult to master traffic generation when you’re trying to master 10 different methods for generating traffic. You’ll have a much easier time trying to master one traffic source and then expanding from there.

To speed up the process, you can hire a coach or an expert who is great at driving traffic via a specific traffic source. This will significantly help with your learning curve for one traffic source.

You can then master another traffic source as one traffic source is either completely delegated or a coach guides you step by step on mastering the other traffic source.

Direct Everyone To Your Email List

email marketing

No matter how much traffic you get, that traffic won’t do you any good if you can’t direct people to your email list. You may get short-term attention, but that attention won’t materialize into long-term revenue if you don’t get people on your email list.

There are plenty of methods to grow your email list, but you must pick a few that work best for you. My personal favorites are the following:

Promoting my landing page on social media many times each day
Getting partners to grow my email list (this usually means providing your partners with affiliate links)
Optimizing my blog with welcome mats, pop-ups, and other tools that boost my blog’s overall conversion rate

All of your efforts need to direct people to your email list. No exceptions.

Get Into Partnerships

As mentioned before, getting partners to grow an email list is one of my favorite methods. This is free and you build a lot of great relationships.

When I hosted the Content Marketing Success Summit, I had dozens of partners help me promote the summit. This resulted in thousands of new subscribers that I wouldn’t have gotten on my own. As an added bonuses, these were highly targeted subscribers since they went through the some of the summit’s 50+ interviews all about my niche.

To get involved with partnerships, you need a good reputation and have a funnel with high conversion rates. The higher the conversion rates and overall commissions received, the more likely you’ll get someone as your partner. As you get more success stories, you’ll recruit more partners and some partners will even come to you.

For the affiliate program, I recommend using SamCart. They offer a variety of integrations to email lists, Optimize Press, and more. In addition, SamCart will help you create sleek order pages with 1-click order bumps that can significantly add to your bottom line.

You’ll get a 14 day free trial to SamCart if you join with this link.

Activate Your Network

expanding network

Most of the advice you’ll hear about networks is how important it is to build your network. Get to know some influencers because they’ll help later on, and then the advice stops.

Building your network is easy. Just reach out to a bunch of influencers asking questions, praising them, or presenting them with an opportunity (i.e. appear as a guest on my podcast).

Activating your network is the harder part. In activating your network, you get people to promote your content, leave testimonials for your products, and advise you when you ask for advice. The best way to activate your network is to stay in constant touch.

If you haven’t contacted people in your network for more than three months, you need to contact those people this month. Whether it’s a “Hello” or “I found your latest content interesting,” you need to keep yourself in these people’s frames of mind. That way, they remember you when an opportunity comes up, or if you ask them to do something for you, they are more likely to do it.

Get Great At Creating Content

You spend all of this time attracting the eyeballs to your content, but you need to get people to stick around as well. Part of that is creating content that spreads, but also extending the experience visitors have on your blog.

In my blog posts, I intentionally link to some of my past content to enhance the experience people have on my blog. The more often you write content, the better you’ll get at crafting impactful content.

I recommend writing one blog post every day. This will force you to keep the chain going and provide your visitors with an intense amount of value.

In Conclusion

Every content creator wants to drive as much meaningful attention to their content as possible. Even the most successful content creators, or perhaps, especially the most successful content creators want more eyeballs on your content. You should (and probably do) too.

However, with time at a premium and a ton of content getting created each day, the growing gap between time and available content makes this goal more challenging to accomplish.

But with every challenge lies an opportunity. Getting eyeballs on your content is a game of patience, smart work, and persistence, but once you get thousands and eventually millions of people to flock to your content, you’ll know that the effort was worth it.

What are your thoughts on these tactics? How do you get more eyeballs on your content? Do you have any questions for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic From Instagram

September 30, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Ever get random blog traffic? It’s a mixed feeling of excitement and the question, “What can I do to get more traffic from that source?” I was recently surprised by Instagram traffic to my blog.

I followed targeted people on Instagram to grow my account, and I noticed that Instagram brought 10 people over to my blog that same day. Ten visitors a day adds up to 3,650 new visitors each year. I’m not doing cartwheels over an additional 10 visitors, but neither am I discounting the potential power of Instagram to increase my blog traffic.

In fact, I am doing cartwheels precisely because those visitors came from Instagram. At the time, my last Instagram post was two months old, and the one prior to that was almost a year old. I attracted 10 people to my blog via an inactive Instagram account. Imagine if it was an active account.

That’s why I was doing cartwheels.

Now I’m dreaming of the day my monthly Instagram traffic surpasses my monthly Twitter traffic. One-thousand daily visitors from social media alone has a nice ring to it. Today my blog is consistently getting more traffic from Instagram, and that traffic is growing.

Want to get blog traffic from Instagram? Follow these five tips:

#1: Link To Your Blog In Your Bio

This is how I got my initial 10 visitors. I followed people, they followed me back, and some of those people decided to check out my blog. I was also experimenting with a second method (but more on that in a second).

Linking to your blog in your bio is perhaps the easiest way to increase traffic. It takes a few seconds and requires little to no effort. All you do is edit your bio and add a link to your blog.

It’s that easy!

#2: Grow A Targeted And Active Audience

There are many ways to grow an audience on Instagram. Many sites out there offer myriad ways to grow your Instagram fans, particularly those encouraging you to buy followers.

That method doesn’t interest me. In fact, buying followers will not give you an authentic picture of your account activity and most will be bot accounts. At one point, I used a point exchange site to build up my Twitter audience during its infancy stage (I stopped when my account had 1667 followers), but I did nothing like that for my Instagram account.

I am more interested in methods that will actually result in an audience of people who are interested in my pictures and ready to engage with my posts. And you should be too.

Build a targeted and active audience by hanging out where the targeted and active people hang out. How? First, find an influencer in your niche with a big audience. Next, visit the influencer’s account and look at his or her latest post and who has engaged with, or liked it. Finally, follow all of those people.

It’s that easy. People liked the picture because they were interested in that topic (your niche). These people are likely active and engaged on the platform, so this simple follow strategy will help you build your own audience.

#3: Post Pictures Of Your Latest Blog Post

The day I received 10 visitors from Instagram to my blog I did not include an image from my latest blog post. But if I had, I would have easily doubled my visitors. Posting pictures of your latest blog posts on Instagram is a creative way to use the platform to increase your blog traffic.

Most of my blog post images are 300×300 pixels, but I can quickly and easily resize them to 400×400 pixels so that they are optimized for Instagram.

#4: Post Pictures Made To Spread

If I share a motivational quote on Instagram, it doesn’t usually result in a direct increase in my blog traffic. If anything, I’ll receive an indirect increase in traffic because some curious people will click on my blog link.

These types of posts are designed more for spreading power than traffic power. The stronger your image’s spreading power, the more people that image reaches. Motivational quotes happen to perform very well on virtually every social network. These pictures normally get a lot of engagement and attract followers.

This means my blog post images are seen by a larger audience. Motivational quote pictures motivate others and increase my following, which brings more attention to the blog post images that drive my traffic.

#5: Make Those Pictures Awesome

Each picture you put on your Instagram profile needs at least 10 minutes of care and attention (with the exception of random pics taken in the moment). I hire a freelancer to choose and edit my blog post pictures, and it looks like I’ll be hiring another freelancer for the motivational quote pictures as well.

If you want to create the pictures yourself, use Canva. It’s a free tool that makes image editing a breeze.

In Conclusion

While ten visitors in one day doesn’t look like much, Instagram is attractive because of its potential to bring in serious traffic and revenue.

Instagram users are active and engaged, so if you aren’t already using the platform, start now. You don’t need many followers to get dozens of likes for each picture you post.

The potential Instagram has to transform your business is huge. However, the only way Instagram will transform your business is if you take action.

What are your thoughts about using Instagram for business? Which of these tips resonated with you the most? Have any Instagram tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.