The blog series based on how to get more blog traffic continues with this second installment by focusing our attention on building relationships. We have heard the saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. As the key content provider for your blog, you will have a greater opportunity in getting more blog traffic when you incorporate both. In addition to your responsibility to provide great value in writing about what you know, you should actively explore the building of new relationships that can be key to your achieving your designated goals.
How to Get More Blog Traffic | Build Relationships
1. Invite Authors to Become Guest Contributors
Do you personally know any other blog authors, who write about similar topics? Please consider connecting with these writers and invite them to become guest contributors to you blog. You could easily schedule a topical series and invite them to consider providing an article or two within the topic. Guest posts provide you added value in their supplying original content to be published on your blog; while at the same time, the friendly gesture provides the authors a platform to share their knowledge and reach, too. For you, you gain access their expertise and online influence when they share the guest post with their audiences. And who knows, your associates may be willing reciprocate the offer and and extend an invitation to contribute content to their websites as well.
2. Establish Link Building Strategies
Perform your due diligence and identify a few key websites that will provide additional value to your readers and figure how to naturally link to these higher authoritative websites from a few of your appropriate articles. You should also consider contacting the website owners and let them know that you have found the information on their websites valuable and that you would like to direct your readers to a specific area that includes the specific information that you find valuable. This exercise will add you to the website owners’ radars with hopes they will return the favor with an genuine, authoritative link back to a specific area on your blog from their resource section. Search engines add more value and rank to websites that establish authentic and authoritative link building strategies.
3. Ways to Increase Blog Traffic with Twitter
Twitter offers a number of relationship opportunities to increase your exposure in order for new readers to easily discover your blog.
- Keywords & phrases. Review Twitter search and determine how others are using your targeted keywords and phrases. If you find a strong relation in the context of your keywords and phrases being used by others, begin to create and schedule your tweets using those same keywords and phrases. This will help Twitter users more easily find your twitter feed that includes a shortened url of your blog. Please make sure the keywords that you use are keywords/phrases that accurately describe the content from the article you are featuring or general keywords that best describe your overall topic(s) of your website or blog.
- Build Twitter Relationships. Identify the top 10-15 bloggers/tweeps who post relatable content to your topics and follow them. They will likely follow you back. From here, you can:
- monitor their tweets & blog posts in order to:
- determine which hashtags they use and in order for you to consider incorporating into our tweets
- review the followers that you should also consider following with hopes they will follow you back
Friendly reminders:
- Forward a genuine “thanks for your follow” direct message back to anyone who follows you
- Within the first couple of weeks of your following new people, periodically review their feeds to determine how you may further @mention or retweet them. Your goal is to legitimately build relationships in order to personally engage potential partners, so they may review and see the value in your materials. They will potentially return the favor and may begin to mention and retweet your blog’s content to their communities as well.
- make plans to follow any guest contributor that you feature on your blog
- identify the top conferences and events that are related to your topic and begin to follow the Twitter feeds. You will likely find some very natural ways to comment and add your own valuable informational to the followers of these official conference hashtags.
- [for a limited time] invite your guest contributors to update their personal email signatures as well as their social media profiles include a link to their article on your blog.
Making friends in the blog space can go a long way to the number of your readers growing. Take your time and work to naturally develop the relationships that must remain mutually beneficial to everyone. The final article within the how to increase your blog traffic series will be coming your way in the coming days, when I will share a few simple ways to create new content for your blog. Part 1: SEO Techniques Part 3: Content Marketing image credit: Creative Commons via http://expertpcz.blogspot.com