{"id":4606,"date":"2016-10-04T14:00:47","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/?p=4606"},"modified":"2021-07-16T11:59:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T08:59:01","slug":"how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog: The 8 Most Effective Methods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is your blog<\/a><\/strong> dead? Do you find you have to work hard for every single pageview, only to see it all fall flat when you stop promoting like crazy?<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing…<\/p>\n

Your goal should be to focus on growing your organic search rankings<\/a><\/strong> and then turning that traffic into fanatical recurring readers. This means targeting keywords, building backlinks and setting up effective email capture in prominent places on your site.<\/p>\n

Why isn’t it as simple as writing one viral post that gets shared 10,000 times then converting those visitors into subscribers<\/a><\/strong>? Well, getting eyes on the page in the short term is a perfectly fine goal, but the endgame is to have a large, dedicated readership, right?<\/p>\n

That’s where this guide comes in. This guide will walk you through the process, including every method you need to drive traffic to your blog repeatedly and reliably<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

1. Do keyword research before you write<\/h2>\n

Until you do keyword research<\/strong><\/a>, there’s no way of knowing which topics your target audience<\/strong><\/a> searches for, and which articles you write will bring in heavy amounts of organic traffic when they rank.<\/p>\n

It can be as simple as plugging a few topic ideas into SEMrush<\/a><\/strong> or Long Tail Pro<\/a><\/strong> and picking the results with the best volume to difficulty ratio (high:low), or it can be a more involved process with the initial stages standing in as a kind of market research.<\/p>\n

As a basic rule of thumb, you should always go to the places your target market hangs out and find out the kinds of questions they ask and topics that they’re interested in. From there, you’ll be able to match your cornerstone content (more on that below) with real questions your audience care about.<\/p>\n

Your blog strategy needs to be driven and informed by a master list of keywords, like this one I created for my theoretical green tea blog in a few minutes just by exporting ‘green tea’ from the Ahrefs<\/a><\/strong> keyword tool:<\/p>\n

\"Keyword<\/p>\n

As soon as I have this list, I’m infinitely better informed than I was before.<\/p>\n

A quick tip:<\/strong> If you order keyword list exports by the highest number of words first, then you can get an idea of the natural language your audience uses and find tons of long tail hidden gems with low difficulty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2. Create a strong foundation of cornerstone content<\/h2>\n

What’s your blog really about? What kinds of posts should<\/em> a blog like yours have on it? If you’re a green tea blog, you need to have content covering things like the types of tea, the best ways to brew it, and the health benefits. These posts will be your cornerstone content. They need to be:<\/p>\n