A Ton Of Traffic Strategies For Blog Owners

Currently I'm in the middle of doing the live Blog Marketing Kickstart Workshop. We've only got one more day left, and today (Day 4) we're talking about how to drive traffic using your blog.

We've talked about a lot of different blog marketing tactics, but I wanted to devote an entire day just to the traffic tactics you can use when you have a blog.

As I was creating a resource for my students I was thinking I wanted to have a page where I could list what I covered, but also have a page that I could continually update. You can't update a PDF document on the fly, but you can a blog post. So I decided to give them all the below strategies in a nice little PDF document and then directed them here to get the updates I'll be doing.

And since I love all my people (even those of you who didn't join this workshop… I see you. 🙂  ) I'm even giving you access.

So here are the strategies I've taught so far. Some will make sense to you if you haven't gone through the workshop, but some to understand you'll need to have gone through the workshop. You can get access to the workshop by clicking here.

So take a look, use what you can, and I'll update this as I add more strategies.

Enjoy!

1. SEO – This is a BIG time consuming strategy that I only use on small niche sites. If it's not easy to rank in the search engines for keywords then I don't put a lot of time or effort into SEO. It's too risky for my tastes, BUT if you're not scared to lose the traffic from all of your work this is a strategy that DOES work.

2. Social Marketing – This is by far my favorite marketing strategy when it comes to your blog. Create great content, post it to your social media accounts. That's easy. The hard part is building a following on each of these networks. It can be done though and it's worth the time and effort. Plus… It's fun.

3. Share Buttons – Adding share buttons to your blog is quick and easy with a plugin and a great way to get more traffic to your content. Get people to share your content on their favorite social media network and get traffic from their efforts.

4. Guest Blogging – Writing for other blogs in your niche is a great way to get traffic from those blogs. Search for blogs in your niche, see if they accept guest bloggers, if not inquire, create great content, they publish it, you get traffic. There's a lot more that goes into this, but this strategy is worth the effort!

5. Interacting – Interacting where the people in your niche “hangout” online is a great way to get traffic to your site. Most places your people are hanging out allow you to have some kind of profile. Make sure you're linking to your blog in your profile so people can find it if they go searching for more information about you.

Forums, Facebook groups, Reddit, (other social media networks) Quora, etc are all great places to get started, but constantly be on the lookout for places where the people in your niche hangout.

6. Blog About Others – This is a great tactic that can do many different things for you including getting traffic. You simply pick a topic related to your niche, find blog posts related to that topic (5-10 posts are all you need) that are REALLY good, and create a blog post on your blog pointing to these posts.

Many people have “alerts” that tell them when their blog is mentioned on another blog and/or they have Google alerts for their name and will see when you do this.

However you should go the extra mile and contact them personally to let them know. You can do that via email or social media. When I have done this in the past I will post a link to the blog post on Facebook and tag those I've featured. That works AWESOME!

Use this tactic sparingly though. You can wear it out fast.

7. Pay To Play – There are many ways to pay for advertising for your blog posts. There are services out there like Blog Pros, banner advertising, solo ads, and even using social media paid advertising will get traffic to your blog posts QUICKLY!

I recommend taking a post that has proven to get interaction (comments, feedback, lots of views, etc.) and use paid advertising to take it even further.

8. Contests – Contests have been used to drive traffic almost since the Internet began. Now with all the technology to do these you have a lot of options. I highly recommend you do your own research on the best tools to run a contest, and then host a “share contest” with your people to get a piece of content shared everywhere. This will bring in quite a bit of traffic.

Here's an example I'm about to do…

I have a great blog post showcasing email templates people can buy to use in their email marketing. I plan to have a share contest and will randomly pick someone who shares the post as the winner. The winner will get every resource on the page for free as their prize.

That example is the most basic contest you can run and it works REALLY well! As I said you have a lot of options when it comes to using contests. Do your research, see what others are doing, investigate tools, and start using contests on your blog to drive traffic.

9. Viral Posts – Getting a post to go viral isn't the easiest thing in the world, but it can be done. The content for this tactic must be phenomenal and generally it needs to be a tutorial or a step-by-step process to get something done. Using an infographic to SHOW the process is a huge key too. People LOVE infographics and they share them A LOT.

There are other types of content that can go viral too, but it's hit or miss with this tactic. If you can get something to go viral though you can get A LOT of traffic!

More tactics are coming soon…

Liz

My Content Marketing Strategy Revealed!

Let's talk about traffic!  Yay!

I just heard all of your eye balls get bigger. 🙂

I kid…

Okay so my second biggest traffic strategy is… CONTENT MARKETING!

I have used it for years and it has always held steady as my second biggest traffic getter, so I wanted to take just a few minutes today and share it with you.

Below you will find two things. An infographic showing the entire strategy and a video explaining the infographic.  It's a short and simple strategy, but there are a lot of steps and know how for each step.

Create content, distribute it, get traffic.

That's the simplest way to explain it, but you still need to…

1. Find out what kind of and topic of content your target audience wants.

2. Know how to create the content.

3. Know what distribution channels you can and want to use.

4. Have things that make you money.

I'm doing a workshop called the Content Marketing Kickstart Workshop and I teach all of this and more in it. You can grab your seat for that workshop at https://www.LearningIM.com/content-marketing-kickstart-workshop

Okay so here is the “birds eye view” of my content marketing strategy, and the video explaining it. If you have questions please leave them in the comments below. 🙂

How I Use Content Marketing In My Business To Get Traffic

So before the term “content marketing” was being thrown around the Internet so much I was using it and not even knowing it was a “thing“. It just made since to me to create content, put it in front of people, and bring them to my site with a call to action.

And that's basically what content marketing is…

Create content that your niche wants to know about, make sure that somewhere in the content there is a call to action to come to your site, and put it in front of them…

Easy right?

Well… It IS, but there are some things you need to know…

1. You've got to create content that people actually want to read/consume. If no one wants to read your content then why create it? They're not going to read it and come to your site, so why waste your time? There are lots of ways to find out what the people in your niche want to know about.

SIDE NOTE: My good friend Arun Chandran has created a guide with 12 different resources you can use to find topics YOUR niche really wants to know about. It's called the Content Creation Formula and you can see it at http://www.IMWithLiz.com/ProductCreationFormula

2. Your content has to be really really really… Did I say really? GOOD! You cannot just throw something together throw it out into the Interwebs and think people are going to crawl over themselves to view it.

You've got to grab their attention with a good headline, a cool graphic, a cool video intro (depending on what kind of content you're creating), and then keep them consuming your content by keeping them engaged. If you're not good at this find a professional to do it for you!

3. Have a strategy! If you create killer content and then just throw it on you blog again… People are not going to come running just to see what you've got for them. Ypu've got to have a strategy!

Example: I have a squeeze page at http://imwithliz.com/sp/ultimate-list If I want to use content marketing to get traffic to that page I need to sit down create 5-10 topics my niche wants to read about, decide what kind of content I want to create (blog posts, articles, graphics, videos, etc) for each of those topics, put a call to action in each piece of content, and then decide how I will distribut my content. I could put it on my blog and tweet about it, share it to Facebook (I have a lot of friends in my niche), use Facebook ads, upload it to YouTube (if it's a video), upload it to graphics sites (if it's a graphic), and the list goes on and on.

So all of this should give you a better understanding of content marketing, and the example above is exactly how I use it in my business. I'll be talking more about creating killer content and how I distribute it in future posts, but for now you should have a better understanding of how it all works and what you need to do so that it actually works for you.

No crap content…

Have a call to action in ALL of your content…

Get it out there…

That's it!

If you have comments or questions please leave them below…

Liz

P.S. Creating content that people actually want to know about and will actually consume is your first step. I mentioned above a killer resource called the Content Creation Formula from my friend Arun. It's got 12 resources in it that you can use to find topics to create any kind of content around that you want. That's where you need to start so make sure you pick this guide up before moving forward! >>> IMWithLiz.com/ProductCreationFormula

Content Creation Formula Is Live!

This week we're talking about content marketing!

If you're not using content in your business to promote your affiliate links, your own products, your programs, etc you need to stop what you're doing and listen up!

Creating content about my niche and putting it in front of my audience brings in LOADS of traffic for me, and we're going to be talking about how I do it this week…

But… I run into a big problem with it ALL the time.

The problem?

Finding topics in my niches that people actually want to KNOW about.

If you just throw content out there people may or may not read it. But if you put content out there people WANT to read they will and then you can get your “stuff” in front of them.

If no one reads the content you're NOT going to make any-money. Plain and simple…

So today I picked up Arun Chandran's Content Creation Formula guide to help me with this issue.

http://www.IMWithLiz.com/ProductCreationFormula

Inside this guide he gives you 12 different ways to generate ideas for content that people actually want.

Just the very first one I was blown away by and had never heard of. I used it and got 6 different ideas for content I can create right now and use in my marketing.

If you're struggling to find content that people actually want to read so you can promote your business to those people then I highly recommend you grab Arun's guide, download it, and start using the resources he's telling you about.

I just did and now have enough content ideas to use to create all the content I need this week for the topic I'll be covering. 🙂 So easy!

Okay… That's it for now. This week as I said I'm going to be talking to you about how to use content to promote your stuff, so make sure you grab the Content Creation Formula Guide so you'll be able to have all your ideas for topics and can use what I'm going to be teaching you!

http://www.IMWithLiz.com/ProductCreationFormula

Talk soon!

Liz