When it comes to driving traffic to their blog, every great blogger will encounter problems. As an owner of a blog, you are working hard to create and deliver valuable content. You make it easy and helpful. You consistently post every week. You are proving to yourself and to your followers that you are serious about what you are doing. You truly care about your audience.

But somehow, despite everything you do, you can’t manage to attract fresh followers. This is the moment when doubt appears. You start asking yourself, am I good enough? Is blogging something I can do to earn a living? Am I just wasting my time?

Let’s be clear about something. If you are dedicated and passionate about what you are doing, then you are on the right path. So, the problem is not blogging: it is not doing the things that improve the trust of your audience or not following the proper strategies to drive traffic to your blog.

A while ago, only posting content would be enough to drive high quality, consistent traffic to your pages. And that’s because back then,very few people were doing it. In today’s world, there is a huge number of people that own blogs and wish to advertise them to the world. Therefore, besides a well-written content, you must focus on strategies that draw people to your blog. It would be pretty nice if readers would just magically appear. In the real world that won’t happen. Therefore, we must understand that building a vast audience will take a while.

Before Anything else, You Should Check Your Motives

First of all, in order to decide if you are meant for blogging, you should take a few minutes and think about your true purpose. Think about why you wish to become a blogger. Do you wish to help people? You wish to become a fountain of knowledge, and make a significant change in the world? Or you just want to become famous? 

If popularity is what you’re after, you should quit blogging right now. If your blog is more about you and your problems/ideas that may be one factor that inhibits the development of your blog. Listen to me carefully. People wish that you would talk about them, not about you.  Your role as a blogger should be to help others grow. This is the only way of becoming popular and worthy to read.

So, let’s take a look at 9 tested tips researched by bloggers from Rush My Essay that will help you attract followers to your blog:

1. Start Networking with Others on Facebook and Twitter

Regarding Facebook: Join as many groups as possible and promote your blog out there. Facebook is a great tool to gather followers, so make sure you don’t skip this opportunity of drawing Facebook traffic to your blog. It may seem complicated but in time you will get the hang of it. There is a particular group that may help you in the beginning named Everything About Blogging.

Regarding Twitter: One way of driving traffic to your blog through Twitter is by following top bloggers relevant to your niche. Make sure to follow their followers as well. The next step is tweeting your posts and asking your followers to retweet them.

2. Write in Depth Articles

Bringing traffic to your blog is already a hard task. Imagine doing it without a well-written content to back it up. In order to become successful, you must distinguish yourself from others. How to do that?

First of all, you should focus on creating valuable and unique content. Short and concise content is usually what people are looking for. Writing 500 words posts is a great way of maintaining your follower's attention, but in order to become great, you must focus on writing detailed articles with 1200+ words. Having well-researched articles with a lot of interesting facts is extremely demanded if you wish to become an authority in your particular field and domain. You may write one in-depth article once a week. If you are not a full-time blogger, try to write detailed articles at least once a month.

Through these detailed posts, you’re building authority by displaying the fact that you don’t shy away from including relevant and impressive details. The effect goes on, as many websites and blogs within your niche will start sharing your content as a resource for their own website visitors.

3. Don’t Forget About SEO

Most blogging amateurs say that SEO(Search Engine Optimization) shouldn’t be a priority when you are just starting out. This is far from the truth. This is one of the most stupid suggestions one can give you. Knowing what keywords are and knowing how to use them efficiently throughout your articles is extremely important. Through this process, you will drive free organic traffic to your blog. Not taking advantage of your SEO optimization is a common mistake done by many bloggers.

Nevertheless, you should make sure not to overload your article with keywords, making it hard to read and digest for your followers. Before you start adding keywords to your posts, make sure to do an in-depth research about which keywords are the best fit for your niche. Proceed by embedding them in your articles.

4. Make Your Posts Visual

Most people wish to see more visual posts than long written content. The average human attention span in 2015 was 8.25 second. We can see that this is true because people are drawn to platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Even if they would be interested in reading detailed posts, most people, because of their lack of time enjoy looking at memes, videos or infographics. So, offering this kind of content is definitely in your advantage. You may use tools like Canva and Vine in order to create you posts.

5. Make Sure You Analyze the Headlines Before Publishing

Writing great headlines is extremely useful when you are trying to drive traffic to your blog. Therefore, I advise you to use CoSchedule. This tool will let you know how efficient your headline is by giving it a score. Once you wrote your headline, test it with this tool. The report generated by CoSchedulewill divide your headline into common and uncommon words, emotional words, and power words. Your headline also receives a grade regarding its readability and grammar. You can use this tool to enhance your headline in just a few minutes.

6. Build Up Your Reputation on Quora

Building up your reputation by answering questions on Quora is a great way of driving free traffic to your blog. There are 1,5 million monthly visitors that may see your answers! Make sure to give valuable answers to each question you answer. If for example, your field of knowledge is history, try to answer as many questions related to history. Remember to follow related topics as well. Join conversations that are relevant to your topic and give people solutions. This is another great way of driving free traffic to your blog. Remember to use it!

7. Respond to Your Blog Comments Attentively

You should know that by responding to comments, you encourage people to ask more questions and to develop a stronger relationship with your brand. Another perk of responding to your comments is that the number of words on your blog grows. This is a great thing from an SEO perspective. Communicating with your followers will turn your blog into an authority sooner or later. People will look you up, and that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Whenever you respond to somebody, you may direct your traffic to a certain page by adding a URL in the comment.

8. Accept Guest Posts

Accepting posts from other bloggers is a great way of establishing new relationships. More than that, new posts written by other bloggers will freshen up your blog. And in return, you may ask them to write on their blog as well. Through guest blogging, you get the opportunity to spread your brand to a lot of new people. Nevertheless, this is a great way of earning references back to your blog.

9. Publish on a Regular Schedule

You already know that publishing valuable content is a must before everything else. Having a publishing schedule is also important if you wish for loyal subscribers. You should post at least once a week. Posting daily might be better in the beginning. But if you don’t have enough time, stick to an article a week. If your followers expect a new blog post, let’s say every Friday, they will look for it. This way, every time they visit your blog, they will be welcomed with a new post.

Conclusion

As you can see, driving traffic to your blog is not such a hard task after all. It definitely takes time but if done right, your blog will slowly become an authority. As a blogger, you should never give up on your dream of sharing knowledge with other people. The purpose of every blogger is so beautifully described by George Siemens:

 “Where the Internet is about the availability of information, blogging is about making information creation available to anyone.”

Brandon is interested in marketing, writing and editing. He writes on different topics related to writer’s skills and language learning. He really loves playing the piano and collecting unique books. He is also a contributor to RushMyEssay. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.