Blogging is a great means of driving traffic to your website, establishing authority in your niche, and boosting your brand’s online presence. But in today’s competitive online landscape, getting users to visit and read your blog is not as easy as it used to be.
If you’re starting a blog for the first time and don’t have thousands of dollars to dump into it, this article is for you.
While your content may be relevant, engaging, and interesting, it may still fail to get the attention it deserves – Unfortunately If you build it, they will not come. We’ll have to put some effort into getting eyeballs on our content. Not to fear, we’ve compiled some of the best tips to help you start generating blog traffic asap!
1. Get Optimized (SEO)
Search engine optimization or SEO is extremely important when it comes to driving traffic to a website or blog. By optimizing your blog posts for the search engines you’re giving yourself the best chance to earn a page 1 ranking for relevant terms.
Search engine traffic is one of the most popular forms of traffic blogs typically generate.
You can improve your visibility in search engines by optimizing your content, having a fast website, building external backlinks, and linking internally as much as you can.
For a more detailed checklist for how to optimize your blog for the search engines check out our Ultimate Guide: SEO Checklist for Bloggers. Â
2. Write Captivating Titles
Your blog posts’ titles can help to attract potential readers or push them away. Therefore, they are incredibly important. If the titles are not captivating, then the reader will not bother to read the rest of the content.  This is one of the most common blogging mistakes we see new bloggers make.
So, how do you make your titles captivating? Keep them short and concise, ensure they are topic-relevant, evoke emotion, and incorporate the relevant keywords. Don’t focus too strongly on SEO.Â
When you’re just starting out you won’t be getting much search traffic no matter how optimized you are.  Create punchy headlines and follow the rest of the steps below to start generating traffic immediately.
3. Identify your Target Social Platform
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest receive billions of active users per day. And if properly used, they can be a powerful means of driving free traffic to your new blog.
Find similar blogs in your niche and see what social media channels are popular for them. Instead of being everywhere at once, focus all your attention on the most popular channels.
A quick, but risky way to generate traffic from social media asap is by posting on pages and in groups. Moderators and admins discourage this type of behavior but if you can get the art of providing value and sharing your content you can benefit tremendously from this technique.
4. Comment on Blogs
Blog commenting is one of the most effective ways of boosting your blog’s visibility and making it more interactive. It should be noted, however, that your comment could be quickly deleted if there’s any sense of solicitation. Therefore you must provide value! When you comment on a blog post you should offer a helpful opinion and make people reading the comments want to read yours.
An added benefit of blog commenting is backlinks. Backlinks help boost your authority in the eyes of search engines and will help with organic traffic. As beautiful of a perk as this is – your goal no matter what should be to provide as much value as possible.
5. Quora
Quora is a great source of free referral traffic. Apart from helping you to drive long-term traffic to your site, Quora can also help you to establish yourself as a thought-leader in your niche. When you post relevant, educational, and thoughtful answers, people will see you as someone who knows what they are talking about. However, make sure you are not overly promotional, as this may get you banned from the platform.
Simply go into Quora and search for whatever topic your blog article is about. Find a thread and offer your insight.  At the end of your “answer” add a link to our post and say something like “I hope this was informative for you, I actually just wrote a post about this exact topic. Check out this link for an even more thorough answer to your question.” Then link your post underneath.
6. Guest Posting
Chances are there are thousands of other niches in your blog, which are already established. As much as they may be your direct competitors, you can still leverage their visibility to drive traffic to your new blog. To do this, you just need to locate them and offer to contribute as a guest blogger. For new bloggers, guest posting is really an amazing tool. When done strategically you can get your content in front of new audiences and get new traffic to your website for free.
7. Keep Writing and Sharing
If you want to keep attracting visitors to your blog, you need to ensure that your content is as fresh as possible. In fact, blogs and websites with fresh content tend to rank higher on Google, compared to those with stale and outdated content. Therefore, make sure you create and post fresh content on your blog at least twice per week.  This is something you always want to keep in mind especially when you start a new blog. As you create more and more content be sure you’re continuously updating the older content as well.
Summary
The old ways of stuffing your content full of keywords and building spammy links to grow authority are gone. Nowadays when you ask yourself how to grow a blog for free, keep these tips in mind.  The theme throughout all these techniques is value. No matter what you’re doing to promote your blog you have to be providing value. This could be through Quora, blog commenting, or social media. No matter what, make sure you have quality content that provides an abundance of value and answers all of their questions and you should have free traffic to your blog in no time!
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