If you are like us, you are always on the lookout for more traffic. And I simply love small changes with a big traffic impact. And there are always some optimizations to your marketing strategy you can make. Or easy to do things you can add for more traffic.
Here are my 11 tips for quick traffic fixes that can easily earn you more traffic to your blog:
1. Create Better Headlines
This may not sound like a quick fix. But it has a huge impact. The headline of your post usually is used to share on social media. And that means it is the main reason why people decide to click, share – or ignore your content.
For social media, this can be a truly quick fix as you can simply use a different text in your tweet, pin or Facebook post than you originally chose as the headline for your article. You don’t always have to change the actual headline of the post.
Before you read on - we have various resources that show you exactly how to use social networks to gain massive traffic and leads. For instance, check out the following:
FREE Step-by-Step Twitter Marketing GuideFREE Pinterest Marketing Ebook
There are proven types of headlines that usually work better than others. Here are some examples::
But the key to getting a ton of people to click on a link you share is to inspire curiosity. Never give away the information of the post in the headline – just hint at it.
Try it out on Twitter: A link that you tweet in combination with a statement will not get as many clicks as a headline that leaves the actual content to guesswork!
2. Optimize Your Tweets
Part of this second point in my list of quick fixes to your marketing strategy was already included in #1. If you have a better headline your results from Twitter will be better.
But there is more you can do with your tweets:
- Make sure that you always include an image in your tweet.
- Use 1 or 2 hashtags that are closely related to the topic of the blog post (and tweet)
- Mention other Twitter users if appropriate – for instance, if you tweet a list of the best email marketers or Twitter accounts you can mention some of them in your tweet.
3. Tweet More
How often are you tweeting? Twice a day? 5 times a day? You better already tweet more than once a week…
Whatever your answer, you should be tweeting far more!
Tweeting once an hour is absolutely not too much on Twitter – social media influencers with a huge Twitter following like Jeff Bullas tweet every 15 minutes. That makes 4 tweets per hour and sums up to an awesome 96 tweets per day.
Hey, before you read on - we have in various FREE in-depth guides on similar topics that you can download. For this post, check out:
FREE workbook: CREATE AWESOME BLOG POSTSFREE Beginner's Guide: START A BLOG
The calculation is straightforward: If you get 10 clicks per tweet on average from Twitter that can easily mean 960 visitors to your blog – just from Twitter. Ok, there will be a point when the clicks per tweet will drop, but that number is not when you tweet once per hour…
Now, I won’t promise you 10 clicks per tweet, because I have no clue how many followers you have and how active your audience is. But whatever your average number of clicks per tweet: Tweeting 10 times as often tomorrow than you did yesterday can easily 10 times your traffic from Twitter. Just like that.
And no, tweeting more is not spamming. As long as you tweet valuable content that is of interest to your target audience – and you won’t be able to tweet thousands of tweets per minute without a tool – and Twitter’s API will forbid tweeting that often anyway 🙂
4. Join LinkedIn (Or Facebook) Groups From Your Niche And Share Your Post
I mentioned LinkedIn Groups in one of my recent posts. They are not a place to share 10 of your posts per day and constantly repeat the same content as you can on some social media channels. Plus, sharing your own content may need a little thought from your end so that you are not regarded as a mindless spammer. But if you use some of your posts as an opener for a discussion or ask for feedback, sometimes this can bring awesome traffic.
Make sure you follow the rules of the group – if promoting your own content is forbidden, you should rather not do it or you risk being thrown out of the group.
5. SEO optimize your blog
For a beginner blogger, this may sound more complicated than it needs to be – of course, there is always something more to optimize. But you can easily start with the basics and get your blog ready for SEO.
If you are on WordPress there are some settings you should consider. And a ton of Plugins are there for you to help you with the most important steps to get ready for SEO.
I don’t want to go into detail here, but check out Jonathan’s article on how to make your blog ready for SEO.
And while installing Google Analytics and Search Console may not have instant effects on your traffic, page speed, UX design and using the best keywords can have exactly that effect.
6. Check Your Meta Descriptions And Optimize
Once your blog is already running for some time and you have a couple of blog posts on your blog. It may be time to check back on your meta descriptions and the keywords you used to optimize your blog posts.
Go into Google Analytics and Search Console. Check which of your articles get a number of impressions. Those are the articles that actually show up in Google search. Now check the CTR. If this is low, here is your potential for optimization. If people see your content in Google search but they don’t click on it one major reason can be that your meta description does not speak to them. Often that happens when you optimized for a keyword that is not the keyword the article is now ranking for. We are no wizards, and sometimes we simply guess the wrong search term.
What you can do now is edit your meta description (which is the text that is shown to searchers in Google.) Use the search term you rank for in Google in your new meta description – if possible use a call to action that makes people click on your content.
A targeted meta description that uses the main keyword that your content ranks for can immensely improve your traffic!
Warning: only do that for keywords that are related to your content. Don’t try to lure people in that are not interested in your content anyway.
7. Pin More
You might feel that I could have put this together with #3 were I suggested that you tweet more. But this one is different. Unlike Twitter, Pinterest has an algorithm that decides whether your pins are shown to your pinners or not. This algorithm will prevent you from „spamming“ anyone’s feed. But at the same time, this algorithm wants you to be active – a lot.
Pinning once a week or when a new post comes out won’t cut it. Rather you will have to pin a couple of pins every day. And while a scheduling tool can help you to pin consistently a couple of pins each day, you need to keep in mind that Pinterest and its algorithm also wants you to be active in person on their platform. That means apart from scheduling some pins you should also develop a routine that makes sure that you pin some pins manually.
8. Follow Tweeps
Ok, there still is the myth floating around that Twitter regards this as spam. But that is not true. You are allowed to connect with people from your niche. And following some people from your niche is a simple and easy way to do that.
The better you target the people you follow the more positive impact will it have on your marketing.
Before you follow people, make sure that your account tweets a ton of value for your target audience! If you do this, following some people from your niche will have the following impact:
- Some of them will check out your account and follow you back
- Some of them will check out your account and click on some of your shared content links
- Some of them will simply ignore you
That does not sound too bad, does it?
Be careful that you don’t get overenthusiastic with this or Twitter might still find your behavior spammy and lock your account. Make sure you don’t follow the same people over and over again. Make sure you target the people you follow very carefully.
Can I prove that this works? Yes! Many of the top social media influencers did that to grow their Twitter account, one of them if Jeff Bullas (and now you know why he follows so many people on Twitter…)
9. Delete Some Pinterest Boards
Ok, I have already mentioned the Pinterest algorithm (called Smart Feed) in #7. But there is more to the smart feed than the activity on your Pinterest account. Similar to the Google algorithm or the Facebook algorithm, there are multiple factors that all go into the decision whether Pinterest shows your pin to other pinners or not. And apart from being active and the number of your followers also the boards and the activity of a board counts. That means that idle boards you may have created ages ago for one purpose or another and then lost interest are hurting your Pinterest success.
An inactive board on Pinterest is bad for your ranking. And it is not enough to make this board a secret board. Even secret boards should be active.
If you still want to keep the pins on the board but don’t want to pin to it anymore, you can archive the board. That means the board with the pins is accessible to you but you can no longer pin to it.
If you don’t need the pins and board anymore, simply delete it.
10. Syndicate Content
There are many platforms like Medium, Quora or LinkedIn publishing where you can easily reach an additional audience for your content. And you don’t even have to create totally new content. You can either rewrite a piece of content for a topic that you believe will do well. OR you can simply use an older post from your blog, change some parts like the introduction and link back to your original post.
11. Research keywords And write an optimized post
While we usually don’t recommend to write content with SEO in mind and overoptimize your content for keywords, you should at the same time not neglect your keyword research. Doing some keyword research for you blog can not only give you some nw ideas what to write about it also gives you an idea what people from your niche are looking for on Google and for which keywords the competition may not yet be overwhelming.
And you know what? While most of our blog posts were not written with Google and search traffic in mind, the few articles that we did write for SEO purposes are the ones that bring the most traffic from Google – so it is totally worth your time!
In case, you need a tool for your keyword research, we recommend that you try Serpstat.
Final Words On Quick Traffic Fixes
I feel as if I have written a post about traffic fixes before. The simple reason is that we still do our marketing ourselves and we still test and optimize a ton of things on our blog. And we continue to learn new stuff. That is how online marketing works. You cannot read about it in a book and then you „know“ it. The best online marketing always comes from trying things out, learning, developing and evolving.
That also means we discover new tips all the time that we want to share with you. So hopefully this will not be the last post on our blog about little changes you can easily do to your marketing that will have a huge impact on your blog traffic.
Did you recently discover a small fix to your marketing that had a significant impact? Please share it with us!
Are you active in social media marketing? Then you are probably looking for traffic from social media to your blog or website.
Do you want to see results fast? Do you want to scale your traffic and grow your business?
That can be a lot easier than you thought.
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Check out “The Social Traffic Code!”
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