1.Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines: Search engines are the #1 source of traffic for most established blogs.

Its proven, 70% of most website traffic come from GOOGLE search engine. That’s how powerful search traffic is; after all, Google is the biggest website in the world!

It’s important that you don’t ignore SEO; familiarize yourself with the concept of SEO and optimize your blog and your articles to rank well for relevant keywords in Google and other search engines.

2.Guest Blog: One of the fastest ways to grow your blog is by writing for other people’s blogs; in other words, you can look for a blog that is much bigger than yours and write an article for that blog. You’ll be allowed to have a bio that includes a link to your site in your guest post. This can result in a lot of traffic for you.

3.Start an Email List: Ask most successful bloggers what the top source of traffic to their blog is and they’ll tell you that email is in the top 3. Highly successful blogger Darren Rowse always record a traffic spike (the kind that almost doubles his blog traffic) whenever he sends an email to his list about a new blog post.

Email is such a powerful medium for generating traffic that many bloggers vouch for it; the reason is simple, all things being equal, your email list will only keep growing and rarely decrease. Even more, unlike your blog traffic that can fluctuate, you have access to a database of the people on your email list and can always email them.

If you haven’t started building an email list, start now. Install the free SumoMe plugin and use their email list building options including the ScrollBar, Popup and Welcome Mat.

4.Publish More Articles: One of the most effective, but often ignored, ways to get traffic to a blog is by publishing more articles; research from Hubspot has shown that businesses that publish 16+ blog posts monthly get 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than businesses that publish between 0 – 5 blog posts monthly.

Seven-figure blogger Neil Patel also revealed that his monthly traffic went from 46,134 visitors to 59,787 visitors because he increased content frequency from 1 article to 2 articles weekly.

No matter your niche, research has shown that publishing more content will always lead to an increase in traffic for you; increase your content frequency to 2 or more articles a week, and you’ll notice a significant increase in traffic to your blog.

5.Publish Longer Content: Research has shown that Google and other search engines give preference to longer, comprehensive articles; research by serpIQ that analyzed top 10 results for over 20,000 keywords came to the conclusion that Google ranks content that have more than 2,000 words better than content with fewer words.
Research by Buzzsumo, in a partnership with Moz, which analyzed over 1 million articles, found that articles that are 3,000 – 10,000 words get twice as many shares and 3 times the links content that have fewer than 1,000 words get.

In the Neil Patel article we referenced earlier, he also reveals that one of the top reasons why his blogs get a lot of traffic is because he writes in-depth and comprehensive articles; the average article on Neil’s blog ranges from 4,000 to 8,000 words, and the result is that he ranks for lots of long-tail keywords, which leads to significant traffic on the long run.

6.Feature or Interview Owners & Influencers of Popular Social Media Groups: There are several Facebook and LinkedIn groups with thousands and tens of thousands of followers; unfortunately, most people try to get traffic by spamming these social media groups, only to end up having their articles removed. A better way to get traffic from social media groups is to interview owners, or influencers, of these groups and ask them to share the article you feature them in. Even if they do not share your article, you can share it in the group yourself as a member of the group.

7.Feature or Interview Owners & Influencers of Popular Social Media Groups: There are several Facebook and LinkedIn groups with thousands and tens of thousands of followers; unfortunately, most people try to get traffic by spamming these social media groups, only to end up having their articles removed. A better way to get traffic from social media groups is to interview owners, or influencers, of these groups and ask them to share the article you feature them in. Even if they do not share your article, you can share it in the group yourself as a member of the group.

8.Develop and Execute a Social Media Strategy: Simply creating social media profiles and sharing your latest articles won’t cut it. Develop a social media strategy by focusing only on key social networks, engaging with influencers and top pages, and, interacting in groups to grow your social media reach. Also make sure you constantly post updates, and regularly recycle old articles on social media; simply sharing your article once, or once in a while, won’t cut it. Most popular bloggers share links to old articles on their blog for years. Posting frequency should vary depending on the social media site; research shows that it is optimal to post twice daily on Facebook, thrice daily on Twitter and Google+ and 5 times daily on Pinterest.

Follow me @MuteaEvans on all social media platforms to understand what i mean.

9.Do Cross-Promotion with Other Bloggers: Find a blogger with similar audience to yours and see if you can do a “shout out exchange”; in other words, you mention them on your blog and they mention you on theirs. You can also promote them to your email list while they promote you to theirs.

10.Include Social Share Buttons on Your Blog: Many bloggers fail to include social sharing buttons on their blogs and this is costing these bloggers social shares, exposure and traffic. While it is not clear to what extent, research shows that adding social share buttons to your page will lead to more shares of your content and as a result increased traffic.

11.Publish Regular Infographics: Research shows that infographics shared on Twitter get 823% more retweets than images and articles. Neil Patel reveals that infographics have been so effective for him, often helping him catapult his blogs from no traffic to over 100,000 visitors monthly. In his words, old infographics generate more than 50,000 monthly visitors to one of his blogs.

12.Look for Interview Opportunities: There are blogs and websites that are dedicated to interviewing successful people and showcasing their stories; if you have an exciting story or have a success that you can showcase, you can reach out to these websites and ask them to interview you.

13.Convert Your Blog Posts into PDFs and Submit to PDF/Document Sharing Sites: Convert your blog posts into a PDF and submit it to PDF sharing sites; make sure that the final PDF file includes your bio and a link to your site so that people know how to find your blog after they finish reading the PDF.

14.Run a Viral Giveaway: Viral giveaways can have massive impact on your bottomline, and a good case study to this effect is Josh Earl, who was able to get 482,044 people to visit his blog and 187,991 people to subscribe to his blog in just 11 days. Now, that’s a phenomenal result!
If you’re struggling to get traffic to your blog, perhaps it’s time to start your own viral giveaway; look for a product that is in high demand in your niche and offer people an opportunity to win it by joining your giveaway. Let their chances of winning increase by inviting more people to join your giveaway.

15.Create a Viral FREE Report eBook: Create a high-value, concise ebook and make it available for free, no strings attached (don’t even ask for an email). Now, share that ebook everywhere you can and encourage readers to share it as well, be sure to include a bio inside the ebook. Corbett Barr did this in 2010 with his ebook “18 Months, 2 Blogs, Six Figures”. The result was that this ebook led to a massive increase in traffic to his blog, and lots of new subscribers.

16.Have a Keyword Research Strategy: Many bloggers enjoy lackluster search rankings and, as a result, poor search traffic due to not having a keyword research strategy; do you research keywords before publishing article on your blog, or do you just publish new articles? Incorporating a keyword research strategy into your content marketing strategy will go a long way to boost traffic to your blog.

17.Publish a Controversial Response to Top Bloggers and Thought Leaders: When an industry leader publishes an article, or says something, that you disagree with; publish a response on your blog explaining why you disagree with the industry leader. Most industry leaders will share your article, especially if your response is well-thought out and informative.

18.Be an Influential Blogger’s Success Story: While most bloggers struggle to get traffic, authority bloggers with hundreds of thousands of readers go over and beyond to send traffic to people who can validate them; if you take the advice of a popular blogger and get results from it, he will happily showcase you to his audience and send traffic back to you.

19.Constantly Refresh Old Posts: One of Google’s ranking factors is content freshness, and this reportedly affects as much as 35% of Google searches; this supports research from Hubspot that shows that blogs that publish 16+ articles monthly get 3.5X more traffic than blogs that publish less than 4 articles monthly.
One way to benefit from Google’s freshness algorithm is by publishing more articles on your blog, while another way is by updating old articles; review articles you published months and years ago, eliminate outdated information and bring them forward. This will impact your blog’s search rankings and lead to more traffic.

20.Proper SEO Slug/Permalink Structure: Do you know that your blog’s SEO slug/permalink structure can go a long way to influence your search rankings and traffic to your blog. The best SEO slug is the one that includes your title in a descriptive way, while removing unnecessary words like verbs.

21.Proper Site Structure: Just as a good SEO slug is important, it’s also important to have a proper site structure; make sure your site structure makes it easy for search engines to index your content. Make sure that every page on your blog is indexable, and have an archives page or sitemap that will make it easy for search engines to crawl your content.

22.Enable Trackbacks on Your Blog: Anytime you publish a new article on a blog hosted with WordPress, it gives you an option to enable comments and trackbacks; a “trackback” is an automatic notification sent to any website you link to, allowing your link to be featured in their comments section as well if approved.
If you link to top blogs in your article and you and the blogs you linked to both have trackbacks enabled, a link to your article will appear in their comments section; this will ensure people seeing comments on their blog can see a link to your articles, and it’ll eventually lead to more traffic for you.

23.Don’t Ignore Basic SEO: Many bloggers ignore basic SEO, and they eventually suffer from it. Most successful bloggers get as much as 50% or more of their traffic from search engines; taking the right measures when it comes to SEO can double your blog traffic within a short period of time.
Things like using the right title tags, having a catchy description, ensuring that your site is easy to navigate, etc, can lead to a significant increase in traffic to your blog.

24.Use Images in ALL Your Blog Posts: Research shows that articles with images get 94% more views compared to articles without images. Make sure every article on your blog include one or more relevant and appealing image, and this will significantly boost traffic to your blog.

25.Leverage Hashtags When Promoting Your Articles on Social Media: You can also boost your readership by using #hashtags when promoting your articles on social media; by using relevant hashtags, you’ll make your content discoverable when people search for content in your niche, and you’ll also benefit should an hashtag you use become trending around the time you used it.

26BONUS .Make your website faster: Research shows that a one second delay in website loading time will result in a 7 percent loss in conversion, and that slow websites cost the U.S. e-commerce market $500 billion annually. Not just this, but you’ll also lose 40 percent of visitors to your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If your website is slow, then you’re already losing half your visitors. Make your website faster and watch your traffic increase significantly.

IN CONCLUSION
What other techniques do you have for promoting a blog/generating traffic? Kindly share in the comments section 🙂

P.S: If you need more help or guidance, feel free to leave a comment below. And if you have your own strategies to drive traffic to your blog, don’t be shy to share