13 Stupid Simple Ways To Grow Your Blog Traffic

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Have you ever wanted to grow your blog traffic? 10 years ago after I created my first blog I suddenly realised that I had no idea how to drive traffic to my blog.

Have you ever had a similar experience?  Have you been struggling for months and years trying to drum up targeted traffic for your blog that converts?

The truth is the biggest headache, for many entrepreneurs and small businesses, is the lack of enough sales which is a result of insufficient leads.

The only way to get sufficient leads is to get a large number of targeted visitors to see your content or your offers.  You will also need to ensure that you have conversion techniques in place.

In fact, you just need a hungry market with a problem that you can solve. Find it, then supply that solution to them in a way that they can access it.

I spent the last 10 years testing out all sorts of normal and unconventional ways on how to grow your blog traffic.  In this blog post, we will look at 9 unique and simple ways to grow your blog traffic.

Disclosure: Please note that this post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you buy one of my recommended products I get paid a commission for sharing the link at no additional cost to you.  I only recommend products that I have tried myself and have experienced success.

1. Comment on Other Blogs

One of the simplest unpaid ways to grow your blog traffic is by commenting on other people’s blogs.  Although it may sound super simple and straightforward there is a technique that gets the best return on your investment of time.

Initially, it may sound tedious but do this once a day for 20 days a month. You will have achieved 240 links coming back to your blog over a period of 12 months.

Not all blogs are created equal in terms of commenting options.  Some blogs use Disqus functionality, others use ‘Comment Luv’. While others have the standard comment boxes to leave your name, website and email address.

I personally prefer simple comment boxes. It means that I don’t have to log in to a separate app to leave a comment.  It also means that my audience can easily leave comments on my blog as well.

As you can see in the above screenshot the comment box is pretty simple.  You enter your comment, add your name, email and website address. 

What you need to do is ensure that you use this as an opportunity to use this backlink to your site wisely.

Instead of just entering your name you can put in your first name plus your brand name.

For me personally, my brand is Success Unscrambled. So, when I enter my details in the name field it will like something like this; “Alvern @ Success Unscrambled”.

For the website box, you don’t need to always link to your homepage. Feel free to link to your blog or another important page.  Ensure that it is keyword rich and correspond to the matching keyword page or post.

Finally, in the comment box be sure to enter a comment that adds value.  This means you need to read the post and understand how it adds value to you and your business. 

So your comment will thank the blogger and talk about how the post has added value to your life or business.  Comments like “nice post” and “Thanks for sharing” just would not be sufficient.

This will eventually grow your blog traffic over time. One link can be equal to one visitor to your site every single day of the week.

2. Create Fresh Content Regularly

The moment you decided to start blogging is the very moment you made the commitment to create fresh content regularly. 

I know a few people who publish more than one blog post every single day.  I am not asking you to do that as this is a huge commitment.

Writing fresh content can grow your blog traffic when your audience keeps returning for more value.

Ask yourself what rhythm or routine fits best into your schedule.  Once you decide that you are doing this for the next 5-10 years then you will make it a habit.

The good thing about blogging is that it allows you to connect with your audience. It also fulfils a need in your life to share your knowledge with others.

The way that writing fresh content can increase website traffic is that your audience will keep returning for more value for their lives.

The search engines love websites with fresh content on a regular basis. So the spiders can come back often to re-index your site.

You will be seen as the authority in your niche for your focus topic. People will remember that and send referrals your way so that you can grow your audience.

The beauty of publishing content is that you can create it in batches and schedule posts out for 1-3 months at any one time. This frees you up to promote that content soon after it has been published.

3. Share Your Post on Social Media

One of the best ways to promote your post effectively is by using Social Media platforms like; LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and Youtube.

Although, this sounds like a lot of work you can make things simple. By using a social media scheduling tool to automate this process for you. 

I cannot emphasize this enough but there is no need to promote on 5-6 social media platforms all at the same time.

How do you decide the best ones to choose first?  Well, the question you need to answer is where does your audience hang out. 

If you are not 100 per cent sure then it will be a matter of understanding the profile of your audience compared to the people that normally use these platforms.

As an example, if your product or service is focused on a male-only demographic then Pinterest is probably not the best place to promote your blog posts.

Choose 1-2 platforms and grow your following on those two platforms. Then move to another new platform once you have a good-sized following.

4. Grow Your Blog Traffic With the Milo Tree Plugin

Another clever way to grow your blog traffic is by using the Milo Tree plugin. 

This plugin is so flexible that it gives you the ability to grow your social networks. As well as your email list right from within your blog.

This plugin works with Wordpress. It is it has a tiny popup that encourages your website visitors to follow you on social media or join the email list for a freebie.

The plugin comes with a free 30-day trial. After the 30-days are over you can then purchase the plugin for one low monthly fee.

Essentially, it builds your followers, email list and social media presence on autopilot. This gives you and your blog social proof which will grow your blog traffic.

5. Repin Popular Posts on Pinterest

I took a handful of courses on Pinterest. What I came to realise is that the course creators are either not revealing everything. Or there are some things that they do not know or never bothered to explain fully. 

One of those things I discovered is repinning popular posts.

You are probably wondering how you will know which posts are the popular ones.  The quick and obvious answer to that question is to look at your analytics.

Take some time every week to really analyse how your Pinterest business account in performing.

Which boards are getting the most impressions and which pins are receiving the most engagement.

At some point in my Pinterest journey, I noticed those pins that were the popular ones and I started to repin them to different boards or to Group Boards. 

I even reached outside of Pinterest and shared these blog posts on other social media platforms.

Assessing why those pins are popular can help you determine how you can repeat the same virality for other blog posts.  Is it the image, description, colours or keywords?

Here is one of my popular pins just so that you can see a real-life example.

As you can see from the screenshot above I noticed that this pin got 8.2k impressions over a period of time.  This is above average for my niche especially since I did not do a lot of repining on this specific pin.

Upon closer investigation, you can see that this pin appeared 8,200 times over a 4 week period which is a lot.  I only got 37 clicks and 105 saves. 

So I need to give the viewers a call to action enticing them to click through but my image and keywords appear to be getting the needed impressions.

6. Add Click to Tweet Sections

One of the really cool ways to help your readers spread the word about your blog posts is by making it easier for them to share it.  Apart from the usual share buttons you can also add ‘click to tweet’ segments within your blog post.

The Social Warfare plugin gives you the ability to do this quite easily.  Let me demonstrate.

In the above screenshot is the Wordpress WYSIWIG editor and you notice that there is a little blue bird button which is the click to tweet button.

Once you click that button you are presented with the pop-up box as you can see above.  You just need to enter the text up to 257 characters then choose your theme.

As you can see in the above screenshot you have several visual themes to choose from making each segment in your blog post visible, unique and inviting.

It encourages your readers to share with their Twitter audience.  The only thing left to do is for you to create the perfect tweetable bits to share.

6. Use Tailwind Tribes to Grow Your Blog Traffic

The Tailwind App is a certified partner of Pinterest and Instagram giving you the privilege to schedule content to post to your Pinterest account via Pinterest Boards.

One cool feature of the Tailwind App is Tribes which gives you the opportunity to leverage the power of your community to grow your blog traffic.

Depending on your price plan you can join as many tribes as you need with a view to sharing your content and you sharing other people’s content. 

Each tribe has rules that you need to follow so that you can add value and contribute without being spammy.

Here is an example of what a tribe looks like here:

In the above screenshot, you can see the option to select Tribes from the list.

This is an example of the Tribe rules which isn’t to bad just follow the rules and play fair.

In case you are wondering what my return on investment has been from this tribe you can see that my pins received 66 re-shares, 12 repins with a reach of 1.9 million. 

Not too bad for participating in a community where we leverage each other’s Pinterest accounts.

8. Join Pinterest Group Boards + Pinterest Communities

As I already mentioned in previous segments one of the best ways to spread the news about your amazing blog post is by leveraging the time and followers of other people’s blogs. 

One unique way to accomplish this is by collaborating on Pinterest group boards.

In case you don’t know what these are they are very similar to your regular Pinterest boards except this time you have other people collaborating on one group board.

A great group board is one where there are rules that foster a community of ‘playing fair’.

For example, sharing up to 5 pins a day so that you don’t spam the group board.  Another great rule is repining other people’s content to your boards.

Joining great group boards can be a bit of a challenge.  In a future post, I will talk about how you can join a minimum of 5 group boards in 30 days or less so look out for that blog post. 

For best results try to join group boards in your niche with a minimum of 1,000 followers.  If you are not yet using Pinterest for business take advantage of this course here.

Here are two example group boards.

As you can see these are two separate group boards each with their own rules about how to join.  One having 1k+ followers the other 21k+ followers. 

Some joining rules can be quite complex while others are simple and straightforward.  The key is to follow the rules and never give up.

In case you missed it the reason you are joining these Pinterest group boards is so that you can repin your content to these boards. 

Your content will not only be seen by the 21,037 followers on this board but when these collaborators repin your content then this will also help grow your blog traffic.

My Pinterest Communities are:

Blogging tips + tricks

Facebook Marketing

Pinterest Marketing Secrets

Feel free to join my Pinterest Communities for more love and eyeballs on your content.

9. Join FB Group Threads

Yes, another way to leverage the time and network of other bloggers.  You can achieve this by joining Facebook Group Threads which focuses on repinning Pinterest pins.

This work by having a promotion day every week where everyone shares the pin that needs a little bit of love you then need to repin 10 other pins from that post and comment done when completed. 

The trick here is that depending on the group you will be given 24-48 hours to complete the task.  If you don’t you will be warned or even kicked out of the group.

Here are a few to get you started:

Women Winning Online

Blogging for New Bloggers

The Glorious Pinning Pods

Throughout these 9 unique ways to grow your blog traffic, you see a constant theme.

This theme is just to let more people know that your blog exists and in return, you can let more people know of other people’s blog. 

It is a collaborative effort and everybody wins if the rules are followed.

10. Use Board Lists On Tailwind

I know I already mentioned the TailwindApp previously but there are so many sections on Tailwind that help you grow your blog traffic.

As the name suggests a board list is a list of boards, yours or others, that you can schedule your pins to by using interval pinning.

So instead of manually pinning your most popular pins one by one to group boards, you can use board list to schedule them out over a period of one month.

Here is an example of one of my board list in Tailwind.

Just find one of your popular Pinterest pins that were repinned or saved by someone else.

Using the Tailwind extension click the schedule button which will pop-up another browser window as shown below.

Choose an existing board list and check the last pin dates are at least 4 weeks old.

Click the ‘use interval’ button to ensure that there are sufficient gaps between the dates you pin to these groups boards.  You don’t want them all going out on the same day.

Finally, choose your start dates and interval then schedule the pin.

11. Conduct Keyword Research

Everyone hates these three letters, SEO. The truth is that search engine optimisation (SEO) is here to stay.

If you want to get organic traffic from Google on autopilot then you need to spend some time researching the best keywords for your blog.

Just in case you are brand new to SEO then you can take a look at a few of my other blog posts where I go into a little more detail on the topic.

For example, I created a specific post where I covered SEO for mom bloggers where I did a side by side comparison by trimester.

The best approach is to start by taking the easy path to success and find long-tail keywords.

This just means that the keywords are easier to rank compared to short tail or head keywords.

You can start by using a free tool like Ubersuggest which makes it pretty easy to spot those keywords that are easy to rank.

In the example below the keyword searched is ‘blog post’ and as you can see it has an SEO difficulty of 25 which is good.

Here you can also see other suggest terms that are more long-tail as their SEO difficulty is not so high. Blog post format only has an SEO difficulty of 14.

12. Viral Content Bee

One of the best ways to drive more traffic to your blog is to get other people to promote it for free.

Viral Content Bee allows you to do just that via a points-based system. You will be encouraged to share other people’s content in exchange for points or credits.

Once you have accumulated a sufficient amount of credits (I recommend 40 credits) then it is time to create your project.

Each project you create gives you the chance to enter a catchy title, a description, upload an image for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as a pin link so that people can pin to Pinterest.

Pinterest re-pins cost 4 credits, while the others vary between 1-3 credits. You do have the option to buy credits if you so wish.

13. What’s Popular?

One of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your site is by writing blog topics that are popular or seasonal.

The age-old way of finding what topics are popular is by using Buzzsumo for your research.

In this example, I have entered the search term declutter and as you can see there is a lot of social activity both in Facebook and Pinterest for some of the titles.

If you don’t have a great presence on Facebook you can just focus on the ones that have a lot of re-pins on Pinterest.

The key here is to spend some time researching those two examples seeing what you can do to add value and come up with your own version of the post.

You are better off writing on popular topics rather than trying to write on extremely unique ideas.

That’s all I have for today.  I can keep writing of course but you have a lot to do if you decide to take action.  Until next time enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your week. 🙂

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If you need help setting up your profile on Pinterest or you need someone to manage your Pinterest account on a monthly basis you can work with me here.