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how to get more blog traffic

Why It Is Important To Focus On SEO Even When Small Results Come In

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Focus On SEO

SEO is overrated, and there’s no question about it. Many people think of SEO as a way of getting a very noticeable increase of traffic in a very short amount of time. When quick results don’t come in, many people give up on SEO. Little do these people know that SEO is a critical part towards having a successful blog in the long-term.

There are many examples of how blogs went from under 50 visitors every month to getting well over 50 visitors every day. The statistics above are from this blog. Although Twitter has played a big role in those statistics, search engines started to become more significant as soon as traffic from Twitter went up. When I first created this blog (and several months after it was created), this blog got little to no visitors from SEO. I remember jumping up and down with joy if my blog got 5 visitors from search engines.

I am sure there are people who are still not sure about SEO. Some people need the traffic now, and SEO is not a great way to get immediate traffic. Although you may not see your efforts pay off in the first few weeks, rest assured that you will start to see your efforts pay off 6-12 months later. If you plan to turn blogging into your full-time job, then you need to have SEO as a part of your strategy. One of the reasons my WordPress statistics spiked upward is because of SEO. Although it took a very long time to get the spike, the spike did come, and now this blog gets over 100,000 visitors every year.

 

 

5 Easy Ways To Boost Your SEO

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No matter how much you are boosting your SEO, it takes a long time to see the results. In addition, some methods of boosting SEO are more challenging than others. Even if your blog is not getting the full benefits of SEO, it is still important to optimize on it so you see the results come in later on. If you are not getting the best results from SEO, chances are you will want to improve your SEO in a few minutes. These are 5 easy ways to boost your SEO, and they all take about 1 minute each to implement.

  1. Add tags to your blog posts. Tags are what people search on Google to find your blog post. If you want people to search for “How to get more blog traffic” to find your blog on Google, that entire phrase needs to be one of your tags. The ideal tag is 2-6 words long. You want the tag to be long enough to break away from some of the competition but not too long to the point where no one will search for that particular tag. People aren’t entering “How do I get more blog traffic super fast at one of the fastest rates in history” into Google’s search engine.
  2. Include links to your older blog posts in your new ones. Just look at some of your older blog posts and see which ones you can incorporate into your new blog posts. This reduces your blog’s bounce rate.
  3. Add social sharing buttons at the bottom of your blog posts. When people share your blog posts on their social networks, that also increases your SEO. This is one of the simplest ways to get search engines to notice about your blog. All you have to do after that is create content worth sharing.
  4. Write about Google. That’s an easy way to get more traffic which boosts your SEO and gives you more visibility. You will be amazed with what happens when you write about Google.
  5. Use your social networks often. This last one takes more than a minute to implement, but chances are you were already using social networks before reading this blog post. If you use HootSuite Pro to schedule your posts on your social networks, it will save you a lot of time.

Those are five easy ways to boost your SEO. These tactics are easy to implement and will have a powerful effect on your SEO. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional advice? Please share your thoughts below.

 

The Biggest Mistake Bloggers Make With Their Subscription Boxes

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There are millions of blogs. Although a majority of bloggers have a subscription box on their blogs, many of these bloggers are creating ineffective subscription boxes that take up space and get no subscribers. In order to establish a powerful presence for yourself on the web, you need to have a subscription box that is going to get you more subscribers.

Here’s where the mistake comes in. Most bloggers decide to caption the button something like, “Subscribe Now” or “Subscribe For Free Updates.” The mistake is that the buttons include the word “Subscribe.”

Even when my blog’s traffic started to increase rapidly, I continued gaining a small number of subscribers. Even though my blog was getting thousands of extra visitors I was not getting a lot of extra subscribers. In some cases, I would not get a new subscriber to my blog for a week.

Then, I made a small change to the subscription button. The original button said, “Subscribe Now For Free Updates,” but I decided to make that button say “Count Me In!” Right when I made that change, I immediately got more subscribers. Now I am gaining several subscribers every day.

Growing your list is one of the most important ways to build a strong presence for yourself on the web. By growing your list, you will be able to get in contact with more people who want to buy your products. Does your subscription box say “Subscribe Now” or something similar? If you are using the word “Subscribe,” then you need to change that to get more subscribers.

 

6 Reasons To Schedule More Blog Posts

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There are many bloggers who underestimate the power of scheduling blog posts. While some bloggers rarely schedule blog posts, other bloggers are publishing as they write. There are only a few bloggers out of the millions of bloggers out there who schedule their blog posts. Scheduling blog posts has many benefits, and here are six of them:

  1. You have control over when your blog posts get published. We want as much control as we can get. Scheduling blog posts gives us the control we need to have. If you write a blog post at 5 am when many people are still sleeping, you can schedule the blog post to get published 4 hours later and then go back to bed.
  2. You can publish blog posts consistently and frequently. Publishing blog posts consistently and frequently is a crucial element of a successful blog. By scheduling blog posts, you will be able to be consistent while remaining frequent.
  3. You are less likely to burn out. When you are about to burn out, you do not have to write a blog post. Instead of writing that blog post and burning out, you will be able to take a break for the day. Taking a day off will not change the fact that you have several blog posts scheduled ahead of time. The more blog posts you have scheduled, the more space you have to take breaks to avoid burning out.
  4. Your writing will become better. That is not a lie. The main reason why certain blog posts are poorly constructed is because of the consistent time limit. If you are only writing 1 blog post every day and publishing 1 blog post every day, there are going to be some days where you may start writing at midnight. In order to keep the consistency, some bloggers have to write blog posts at midnight, and those blog posts are filled with typos and bad sentences. Having multiple blog posts scheduled will allow you to take breaks on these nights. In addition, more scheduled blog posts means you won’t have to worry about the time as much. You will be able to write longer, better blog posts and have time to proofread them. If you have numerous scheduled blog posts, then the urgency is gone. You now have time to write better blog posts.
  5. More days off. This one works like a double-edged sword. If you take some days off, then you will still have numerous scheduled blog posts. However, if you take too many days off, then you will run out of scheduled blog posts. When taking days off, be sure to take no more than 2 days off every week from writing blog post. Please note that the more days off you take, the more blog posts you have to make up when you are no longer taking days off.
  6. You can focus more of your time on bigger projects. If you are working on bigger projects such as writing a book or completing a training course, you can take a day off from writing blog posts so you have more time to work on the bigger projects. This allows you to invest more of your time into the bigger projects so you get them done in a faster amount of time.

Those are the six reasons why you should schedule more blog posts. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have another reason for scheduling numerous blog posts? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

8 Reasons Why Most Blogs Don’t Get Any Traffic

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no blog traffic

There are some blogs that get a few hundred visitors every month while other blogs are getting hundreds of visitors every day. While some blogs are getting a lot of traffic, some bloggers struggle to get 3 visitors every day. Many bloggers give up after looking at the bleak numbers for a few months. However, there are reasons why most blogs do not get any traffic. These are 8 reasons.

  1. Your blog is new. People do not know about new blogs. At one point for any blog, whether it be Mashable or a social media expert’s blog, was getting 0 visitors. People need to know about you in order to visit your blog. By writing blog posts consistently and building your presence on your social networks, you will get more traffic.
  2. You are not utilizing social networks properly. If you are neither tweeting about as many of your blog posts as you possible nor engaging with your followers, then you are not utilizing your social networks properly. You need to engage with the followers that you have so they stick around and visit your blog posts. In addition, your posts need to send people to your blog instead of someone else’s blog.
  3. You do not write blog posts consistently. If you do not write blog posts consistently, the people who were visiting your blog will forget about you. If someone visits your blog for the first time, and you don’t add any new content to your blog for that month, you lose the chance of that person returning to your blog.
  4. You do not build your list. Building a list is essential towards your success. The more people are on your list, the more customers you will have each time a new product gets launched. These are some tips you can implement to build a bigger list.
  5. Your blog has a high bounce rate. If your blog has a high bounce rate, that means people are visiting and leaving your blog without sticking around. You need to get people to stick around the first time so they will come back a second time and eventually add themselves to your list. A lower bounce rate will also allow your blog to get more views. These are some ways that you can lower your blog’s bounce rate.
  6. Your blog is not up to par with other blogs. In the beginning, your blog posts will not be as good as competitor’s blog posts. My first blog posts were not nearly as detailed as the blog posts that I write now. The only way to get better in this regard is to write every day. By writing every day, you will become a better writer which will lead to better blog posts.
  7. Your blog has bad SEO. Although SEO is not the best way to get short-term traffic, having good SEO will allow you to get good long-term traffic. Having good SEO will make your blog easier to find in search engines, and when you start experiencing the surge in traffic over the long-term, you will be very happy that you enhanced your blog’s SEO. These are some of the methods I used to improve this blog’s SEO.
  8. You don’t have a plan to increase traffic. Whether your blog gets 10 visitors every day or 100 visitors every day, you need to have a plan to increase your blog’s traffic. You need to identify the things that you are going to do differently to see your blog grow. The more your blog grows, the more sales you will make.

Those are the 8 reasons why most blogs do not get any traffic. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and tips below.

 

Why You Need To Respond To The People Who Comment On Your Blog

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blog comment

Why do you want more comments on your blog posts? Most bloggers want more comments on their blog posts to show that people interact on their blogs. Bloggers want conversations to get started on their blogs to indicate that their blog is popular. The most popular blogs also happen to have numerous comments on every blog post. It’s not a coincidence.

What most bloggers forget is that they can build conversations by simply responding to other people’s comments. Responding to someone else’s comment counts as a comment in the grand total. If you respond to 25 comments, people will see that your blog post has received 50 comments. That shows bustling activity and popularity: the two things that people look for in a blog.

Not only is responding to the people who comment on your blog a way to bring up the numbers, but responding to other people’s comments will allow you to further open discussion. By further opening the discussion, you will encourage more people to comment and possibly learn about things in your niche that you did not know about before. As you continue replying to comments and building your presence on the web, some people will write a good comment on your blog just to get your reply. There is a point when a blogger becomes so famous that a reply from that blogger means a lot.

Another benefit to responding to comments is your ability to build stronger connections. The advantage with WordPress (and many others) is that the person who comments must enter their email address. By requiring everyone who comments to enter their email address, you will be able to reply to those comments and send emails to those people. The people who commented on your blog will be very grateful that you took the time to send a personalized message, and that will allow the connection to build. A new connection can end up becoming a customer, subscriber, or better yet, a returning customer.

There are many benefits associated with replying to comments on your blog. Do you reply to the comments on your blog? If you leave a comment below, I will be sure to respond.