The post Will Regular Blogging Help Generate Traffic To YOUR Site? was
originally seen on MDIMS
Blogging. Some people love to write, others hate it. But the question we want to address here is will blogging on a regular basis really help drive traffic to your website? The short answer is Yes. But, you have to do it properly, otherwise you are just putting up content without helping drive visitors to your site. This will more than likely be the first in a series about blogging.
The first thing to make sure that your posts drive traffic is to know how to create engaging content to get people to read and ultimately share your content.
Catchy And Curious Post Titles
The first part of your blog post, and probably the most important is the title. Writing engaging titles that sparks interest with your audience is a must.
One of our favorite tactics for this is making our title a question, such as the title for this post. In our opinion it really helps spark the interest of potential readers, especially to people that are really seeking the information that your blog post is about.
Rizvan Ullah wrote a post on JohnChow.com that can give you some more great ideas as far as how to write great titles to increase click throughs, including another favorite of ours and we should use more often, using numbers:
5 Ways to Write Effective Headlines That Double Your Traffic
Use Numbers
Numbers within your headline are a great way to play the psychological game with your reader. People have been programmed to accept headlines more effectively and it draws people to click through to your content. It works because it indirectly tells people your content isn’t “1” long piece of text and they’ll be able to engage with it better. As a matter of fact, this is the reason numbered lists tend to perform so well with readers and in search engines because it a shorter form of content that can still be of high value. Read The Full Article Here...
Great post from Rizvan. He also covers more about how he uses questions to drive user engagement as well as using superlatives and being to the point. If you are having problems coming up with engaging titles, read the full article.
When it comes to writing the article itself we really like Rizvan's point of being to the point. With some business types or niches, it's even possible to help tell a story. I don't want to get to in depth about how to write, as this post is more about will blogging get you more traffic and how.
Social Media Shares
One of the most important reasons that we want a catchy title is for our next point, sharing and getting your content shared on social media. A lot of local search engine optimization companies skip or don't even address the importance of using social media.
Using social media is part of our core SEO strategies. After all, our objective is to drive more traffic to your site and get more sales. You really don't care where the traffic or sales come from, as long as they come.
So once you have crafted and posted your new article, go ahead and share it on your social media profiles, especially your business profiles (which you should definitely have!). And here is the kicker, ASK people to retweet, share and like your content. Studies show that asking people politely such as "please retweet" or "please like and share" can practically double the amounts of retweets and shares a piece of content gets. We don't think the search engines put a lot of weight on likes but they do on shares, so the more shares the better. For more on likes vs shares, check out this post - "Will Social Media Help With Your SEO?"
So to sum it up with social media, the more shares, the more eyes that will be on your content driving more traffic to your site.
Okay, so we have a good post that is being shared across social media and your site is getting more traffic. However, there are some things that you MUST avoid to keep people from bouncing off or clicking the back button and leaving your site.
Avoid Making These Mistakes!
One of my biggest pet peeves is pop ups. Everyone has seen them. You are looking for some information, a headline gets your attention, you visit the site, and right away you are bombarded with a pop up trying to get you to sign up or buy something. Then sometimes there are multiple pop ups, one right after the other. Sometimes you can't even find the "X" to click out of the darn thing. In those cases, I always hit the back button.
Another turn off and sure way to get someone to leave your site in a hurry is to many ads. Over at ProBlogger, they recently made a post that gives you some excellent tips of things to avoid on your blog that talks more about advertisements:
9 Reasons I Hate Your Blog
Advertisements everywhere
Advertisements make for a spammy, ugly blog. Some bloggers put ads everywhere you can imagine. They might place an ad between paragraphs, inside popups, in the header, on sidebars, or even sugarcoat an ad as “other relevant resources” at the bottom of a post.
The truth is that, yes, there is tons of money to be made with these kinds of strategies.
Scott DeLong, founder of ViralNova, sold his site for $100 million. His site was similar to BuzzFeed and was chock full of advertising. His success (though big part of it depends on how he grew his site traffic, not jamming ads to his site) has sparked ambitious bloggers to build a similar site/blog and maximize the number of ads they can squeeze onto one page. Continue Reading "9 Reasons I Hate Your Blog".
Be sure and read that full article as it really has some great tips as to what to avoid with your blog to help keep people on page and not click the back button.
It's funny that earlier in that article another thing that makes them "hate" a blog is pop ups. I'll give you one more tip with pop ups, because we know that they do work. In my honest opinion, the best place to have them is when someone is getting ready to leave your page. That way they have had the opportunity to absorb your content, and if you did a good job, maybe they will subscribe, or do whatever it is that you want them to.
Final Thoughts
In my honest opinion, if you craft your post correctly with good titles, Yes, they will help generate traffic to your site by getting more clicks in the organic searches as well as getting shared more across the social media networks. More clicks + more shares = MORE TRAFFIC AND MORE SALES!
No comments:
Post a Comment