5 Ways to Drive Traffic to a Blog

For the last two weeks, we have been charged with driving traffic to our blog. I am here to attest – this is much more difficult than one might think! With 16 other classmates and over 800 Facebook friends, I thought my plea to read my musings on web analytics and search engine optimization marketing would garner at least 50 views.

But I was wrong.


I, sadly, report that I have only had 36 visits and 22 unique visitors to the blog in this two week period. This, of course, does not take into account my own traffic since Blogger has this great feature that allows you to not track your own page views. 

Google Analytics offers a wealth of information with which I can measure and report my blog’s success. Depending on the purpose of the blog, what one would analyze and report would be different. Baer (2010), a blogger for Convince and Convert, says that a content-driven blog should focus on total visits, new visits and search-driven visits; whereas an e-commerce focused blog would focus on visit duration, page views per visit and referral traffic. 

Let’s look at the analytics for this blog:
• Total visits (since November 11): 36
• New visits: 50%
• Search-driven visits: 0
• Visit duration: 3:15
• Pages per visit: 4
• Referral traffic: 54%

Too bad, my blog is not an e-commerce blog because these metrics are definitely more positive than what he says a content blog should focus on! But, as most of us know, what you measure is what is important to me. So just because Baer says I should be measuring total visits, new visits and search-driven visits, does not mean I have to do that. I believe it is better for my blog to measure total visits, visit duration and pages per visit. Considering that there are only four blogs to view right now, viewing an average of four pages per visit is great news!

In the coming weeks, there is at least one more assignment which requires that we generate blog traffic and report on it. In order to do this effectively, I need to generate more than 35 visits in a two-week period. How might I accomplish this feat?

Here are my top five ways to drive traffic to a blog:

1. Make sure your content is search engine optimized. When you want to know something, what is the first thing you do? If you said, “Google it!” you are in a large group of humans that take to the internet to answer most every question they could ever imagine. “Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely” says Gunelius (n.d.)

2. Promote your blog everywhere. Have a LinkedIn account? Promote your blog. Twitter? Promote it. Facebook, Google+, or any other social media account? Promote. Promote. Promote. And don’t just promote online. Next time you are at a business meeting and a topic comes up that you recently blogged about comes up, tell people to take a look at your blog for more ideas. In fact, why not put a link or QR code to it on your business card?

3. Write list posts. Content needs to be shareable so that others do the promotion for you. Did you know that 49% of Americans believe online word of mouth to be credible (McCarthy, 2011)?  Why are lists so shareable? They are easy to read and understand. I just checked out the Copyblogger site. Out of 30 of its most popular articles currently on the blog, 16 of them are list blogs. Coincidence? No. Lists work.

4. Interact with other bloggers and link back to your blog. This does a couple of things. First, it provides some “link juice” as Fleischner (2011) would call it. Link juice is an important part of search engine optimization as it helps your blog rank higher on search engines. Second, commenting on other blogs starts a conversation with others that may be interested in your blog’s content. Of course, if your blog is about marketing, don’t comment on a blog about dogs with a link to your blog. It does not do anyone any good.

5. Pay attention to your Google Analytics and react appropriately. Notice a certain site is sending quality traffic to your site? Check it out and see if there are other ways for you to interact on that site. According to Fishkin (2012), “there's all sorts of great insights to be gleaned by looking at where visits originate, analyzing how they were earned and trying to repeat the successes, focus on the high quality and high traffic sources and put less effort into marketing paths that may not be effective…Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you're succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don't ignore it, or you'll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential.”

If you need more ideas on how to generate traffic, PRGirl offers 50 ways to do so (notice the list??) on her site.

How do you generate traffic to your blog? What analytics are important to you?