Content is not king: 5 ways to get traffic to your blog

Photo credit: Viktor Hanacek

We often hear stories about how some bloggers were able to make a living online by writing very high quality content on their blogs. Unfortunately, it rarely works out that way. You won’t get many visitors just by having quality content alone. Even if your articles were the best out there, it won’t bring much traffic without promotion.

The truth is promoting content is way harder than writing it, which is why many writers work for someone else rather than on their own blog. It’s a harsh truth for those who have been spending their whole lives learning how to write. Although high quality content is required, promotion is king.

For startups, promotion is where many fail. They can have great content, but lack skills to gain a following, or they simply overlooked promotion—which is quite common. Here are five practical ways to acquire traffic and build that email list of yours.

Buzzfeed

Buzzfeed is a great platform for creating viral content. The site generates 7 billion page views per month, with about 70 percent of them being mobile traffic.

Many people associate Buzzfeed with clickbait articles—and many hate it—but we must acknowledge that clickbaiting is what makes it effective. The platform allows you to create listicles and quizzes with ease. Unlike other platforms, you can increase user engagement by having polls or quizzes within your articles.

Now, you might realize that the purpose of Buzzfeed’s articles is to entertain, and you might be in an industry that’s boring or not very riveting. But, as Neil Patel once put, “There are no boring industries, just bad writers who aren’t creative.”

Just take a look at this article on “10 Car Accessories That You Never Knew You Needed.” If insurance companies can have great success on Buzzfeed, so can you.

In order to get the most out of Buzzfeed, your aim should be to have your post community featured. This is where the editors decide to promote it on the homepage or inner pages of Buzzfeed, giving it a lot of traffic and link juice for SEO. Getting community featured can be quite difficult, but if you are successful, expect anywhere between 100,000 to 400,000 views.

In order to maximize your chance of success, focus on writing better titles, have shorter paragraphs, and remove passive sentences.

Try asking questions which nobody wants to know.

Before all this, however, you going to need to know what to write about. Many people take this the wrong way and try to come up with things that people want to know about (e.g “top 8 drama movies of all time” or “top 8 healthy foods”). This type of content usually doesn’t work because it is already answered all over the internet.

Instead, try asking questions which nobody wants to know. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it allows you to come up with topics which nobody has written before. For example, “6 Great Actors Who Were Tricked Into Bad Movies,” an article featured on Cracked.

After writing your article, do as much promotion as possible to give it the initial boost it needs for editors to recognize its worth. Share it on social media and use the following methods for promotion. Even if you fail to get your post community featured, it can still generate thousands of viral views.

LinkedIn Pulse

Reddit

Low competition SEO

Twitter strategy

Conclusion