10 Proven Strategies to Get More Blog Traffic

in this video i'm going to show you exactly how to get more traffic to your blog the secret content promotion in fact the strategies i'm about to share with you have helped grow my blog to 407 000 monthly visits and 150 000 email subscribers i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic and if you want proven strategies that you can use to get more traffic to your

blog you'll love this video keep watching when i launched my blog a few years ago i had no idea what i was doing so i read a bunch of articles and watched a bunch of videos on how to grow a blog and pretty much everything i saw said the exact same thing the key to growing a blog is to publish high quality content on a consistent basis so that's what i did i published a new blog

post every week for months spoiler alert it didn't work flash forward to a few years later when i launched backlinko and i completely changed things up so instead of publishing a bunch of content and hoping that they brought in traffic i decided to publish a small number of epic posts and then promote the heck out of them and it worked thanks mostly to the promotional strategies that i'm about to share with you in this video my

blog's traffic grew in record time without further ado let's start things off with strategy number one use guest post bonuses guest posting is a great way to get traffic and backlinks to your blog there's only one problem it's really hard to get people from your guest post to your website in fact one industry study found that the average guest post brings in only 50 visitors so what's the solution guest post bonuses with a guest post bonus

you don't just add a link to your site at the bottom of your guest post instead you offer up something that makes someone want to visit your website after they finish reading your post for example a while back i published this guest post on the buffer blog and yes i had a traditional author bio link but i also created a unique bonus just for readers of my buffer guest post and that single guest post brought in

471 visitors in the first month which is almost 10 times the traffic that you'd usually get from a guest post which leads us to our second strategy update and improve old blog content last year i started a huge new project for my blog update every single post that i ever published now it wasn't easy but this project helped boost backlinko's overall traffic by 25.71 compared to the previous year on the surface 25 more traffic might not

sound like a lot but that 25.71 increase equals 410 322 more visitors every year which is a lot with that let's dive into the steps first go to the last page of your blog feed that's right all the way back to your very first post then update and improve that post for example i found that this old post from my site was in desperate need of an update it was so out of date that actually a

lot of the content didn't even make sense anymore so besides replacing that out-of-date info i decided to make the post actually better specifically i replaced old visuals and images added new strategies and all in all made the post straight up better than the old version finally i pushed the changes live and changed the last updated date in wordpress which boosted the overall traffic to that page by 85.2 percent rinse and repeat this process for as many

posts as you can if that's one post no problem every little bit helps if it's 10 that's even better in my case i ended up improving about 40 different blog posts it took a few months for these changes to roll out but in the end it was worth it let's get right into strategy number three leave super helpful comments on other blogs this is something that i did a lot when i was first starting out for

example i'd leave comments that added to the discussion or sometimes i just leave supportive comments for bloggers that i wanted to build relationships with and this helped me get on other people's radar screens without being a pushy jerk face because let's face it nobody likes a pushy jerk face in fact these comments directly led to invites to write guest posts and to go on other people's podcasts which leads us to strategy number four publish content with

data content with data is blowing up right now that's because content with data is a great way to help your blog stand out for example a few years ago we published this massive search engine ranking factor study overall that post led to thousands of shares on social media and lots of high quality backlinks the only problem was that study was super hard and expensive to pull off there were servers crawlers data partners bugs problems millions of

data points and lots more problems to contend with and yeah when i started i knew that this type of industry research was harder to pull off than a list post but this was kind of insane well i recently learned that you can publish content with data without going crazy for example last year we published this study on voice search now to be clear this study took a lot of work our cto had to manually ask google

home 10 000 questions plus we had to analyze the data so yeah it wasn't easy but this study was about 20 times easier than our search engine ranking factor study and it still did really well not only did we get a traffic spike the week the post went live but people still link to and share our study and unlike my search engine ranking factor study pretty much anybody could have pulled this off all you needed was

a google home device and someone willing to put in the work we just happened to be the first to do it let's move things along here with strategy number five syndicate your content on linkedin believe it or not but linkedin is blowing up right now yes that linkedin in fact good old linkedin now has 645 million users and despite those numbers i don't hear a lot of people talking about linkedin which is good news for you

and me because it means linkedin is still untapped in fact you can get traffic from linkedin just from publishing your old blog content there for example i recently reposted this post from my blog on linkedin i literally copied the exact post word for word and despite being an old post that was just collecting dust on my blog it got 3 800 views pretty cool and now it's time for strategy number six cross-pollinate your audience i have

over 90 000 followers on twitter despite the fact that i almost never share anything there so how is this possible i cross pollinate my audience let me explain how this works with an example like most people whenever someone signs up for my email list i send them to a thank you page now what's a little bit unique about my thank you page is that there's a link in call to action that asks new subscribers to follow

me on twitter and i've had that link there for years and over the years that little button has led to about 20 000 twitter followers which is pretty crazy with that it's time for strategy number seven blog post announcement newsletters it's no secret that an email newsletter is by far the best way to promote your new content and over the years i've tested about 20 different formats and layouts for our newsletters and all that testing has

led to one big takeaway lesson simple blog post announcement newsletters work best for example here's a newsletter that we sent out to the backlinko community about my latest post as you can see no fancy graphics no logo no images just a quick intro and a link to the post and because our newsletters focus on the message over fancy graphics or logos our click-through rate is about three times higher than the industry average for a list of

our size speaking of email let's cover strategy number eight insanely personalized outreach if you're like me you get generic email pitches like this all the time unfortunately we're not the only people that get these annoying outreach emails industry studies have found that more people are using outreach now than ever before and as you probably noticed they're doing it all wrong specifically they blast this same exact pitch to hundreds of people that's the bad news the good

news is that it makes your good outreach stand out so what's the secret to getting your outreach emails to stand out personalize every outreach email that you send in fact we recently teamed up with pitchbox to analyze millions of outreach messages and we found that personalized messages got 32 percent more replies than those that used this same generic template let me show you how this works with a real life example so i recently found this broken

link that was on a blog that i wanted to get a link from and i had recently published a post that would be a perfect fit to replace the dead link so i sent that person that ran the site an insanely personalized message and because i didn't just blast out the same exact generic template to a million people they happily added my link to the post and now it's time for our second to last strategy strategy

number nine reply to every comment that comes in now you might have noticed that i get a lot of comments on every post that i publish on my blog so what's my secret first of all i really try to only publish good stuff in other words content that's actually worth commenting on but even more important than that i reply to pretty much every comment that i get especially in the first 24 hours after a post goes

live in fact according to our wordpress data we've gotten 30 000 comments on our blog and 12 000 of those comments are me replying to people that's kind of insane and yeah replying to all those people took a lot of time and effort but those replies show that i actually care about my readers even if that reply is just a simple thank you or thumbs up emoji now it's time for our final strategy strategy number 10

form a blog alliance a blog alliance is where you make friends with other bloggers so why didn't i just call this strategy make friends with other bloggers because forming a blog alliance sounds a lot cooler either way a blog alliance is super important if you want to grow your blog for example in the early days of backlinko i'd go on weekly calls with my good friend brian harris and these calls were super helpful yeah it was

nice to have someone to talk to about writing hiring tools wordpress and launches but more important than that these calls were our opportunity to trade tips and tactics that we can use to get more traffic so if there's another blogger that's at about the same level you are send them a quick message like this let's end this video with a quick bonus strategy publish reader case studies reader case studies were one of the secret weapons that

i used to grow my blog in record time with that here's the step-by-step process first identify a strategy tip or tactic from your blog that you want more people to know about for example back in the day i wanted to get the word out about a strategy that i coined called the skyscraper technique second find a reader that got results from that technique and work with that person to create a super in-depth case study in other

words they send you the details and you write what happened that way it's not a guest post because you're still writing the content in your own voice for example i worked with chris gimmer on this skyscraper technique case study a few years ago and that post did great it brought in 13 486 visitors in the first month and tons of people shared it on social media there you have it 10 strategies that you can use to

get more traffic to your blog if you like this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video also if you want exclusive seo techniques that i only share with subscribers head over to backlinko.com and hop on the newsletter it's free and now i want to turn it over to you what strategy from this video are you going to use first are you going to form

a blog alliance or try insanely personalized outreach let me know by leaving a comment below right now damn oh wow lunch time despite the fact that i it noticeable okay no no oh yeah i was ready to go in fact that was a sound effect right yeah