Increase Blog Traffic Through Effective Audience Engagement

The primary purpose of a blog is to serve the audience within the niche of that blog. I often tell people and co-bloggers that you must be passionate enough to meet the need of people before they look in your direction.

Of what use is visiting a blog when there is nothing to gain from it. Even search engine need your best service in order to serve her clients better.

To desire continuous increase in blog traffic is to be ready to do more work and research in ensuring customers and visitors are satisfied. How can we achieve this in the face of growing and stiff competition from over hundreds of million blogs/websites?

Below are tips to help us increase blog traffic by specifically engaging audience effectively.

1. Write or publish more ‘how to’ posts. What are ‘how to’ posts. These are posts that teach visitors special skills on a particular subject. Learn how to make plantain chips or how to create a free blog are good examples.

Be explicit and deliver total package when writing these types of posts. With this, target audience are engaged most especially those who have been longing to learn that particular subject matter.

The beauty of this type of post is that they are season less and could form part of the foundational elements of your blog if the topic treated is within the blog niche.

Engaging audience this way would lend credence, trust and credibility to your blog business and enhances the pull of traffic for sales.

2. Interact with audience in writing. Whenever I write a blog post, I always picture myself standing in front of a large hall filled with people delivery lecture on a topic I’m passionate about ensuring they understand it before I’m fulfilled.

So, I’ll do my best to make them understand my teaching and give room for questions and opinions.

It is imperative to talk with visitors and not talk at them. Absorb and saturate yourself with the topic you want to write about and position yourself as if you are before a novice intended to be transformed to an expert.

Give supportive examples; stage a joke where necessary for analogy, use images or graph to further illustrate your point and so on.

3. Content tag. Content tag or page description is as important to visitors as much as it is search engine spiders. It gives visitor an idea of what the content is all about.

So also is the URL formation culled out from page title. Content marketing in blog business should start from page title. Let your content tag attract visitors’ attention.

4. Voice branding. When writing, you voice trend should trail your pattern and style throughout the pages of your blog except a guest post.

Even a guest post should jointly be agreed upon to be edited by you before publishing. Haphazard writing style underscore visitors flow of understanding and this may hamper smooth engagement.

5. Brand equivalence relation. What is the relationship between the total concept of your blog and content on site pages? Have you deviated from the original niche?

The theme of this blog is branded around marketing strategies in blog business for business growth. The focus must always be within this niche while writing pages to pages with different post titles.

The distinction of pages should reflect one another while preserving the originality of the blog. Don’t be surprise to see your blog optimized for your main keyword because, by this you’ve built relevancy – a tool needed by search engine algorithm. Also, this could unconsciously build brand presence on the mind of visitors.

6. Contextual linking. This is about satisfying visitors with necessary information and research materials as much as you can. Contextual links are links to related information or post either within your blog or from other sites.

Rich and unique content should have enough necessary links.

This effort would be rewarded by trust and confidence your audience will repose on your blog as truly a destination for your niche supplies. Ensure broken or dead links are updated.

It would be a disservice to click on a link and arrive at a wrong destination or greeted by error 404 that has not been branded.

7. On-site experience. Page navigation provided must be user friendly. Category formation and page layout should be simple to understand and trace. I should not find myself lost in the midst of pages navigated before or after been fed with the information I need.

Pages should be neatly spread out on blog layout in the form of category. The inclusion of Google site map is necessary for SEO.

8. Blog Design. How beautiful is your blog? What is the site architectural design you employ that reveals your superiority and professionalism. The way you are dressed is the way you will be address, goes an adage.

Though, the beauty of a blog does not guarantee good content or user friendliness, but you would have provided the first trick of attracting and making visitors stick and sniff around.

Imagine having good content to compliment this effort. I guess you like good things, so also the expected visitors. Check successful blogs in your niche to see the standard that has been set and do more to beat the set standard, but don’t go below. Dare to be unique. Blog business is all about branding.

9. Insert image on post. Sometimes, images help to explain or covey unspoken thoughts and imagination we cannot express. Matching images can present our content better than when it is just text only.

Compelling images help to ignite interest in reading through pages apart from the beauty it add to the entire blog structure.

However, images should not be too much on posts so as not to affect page load time. JPEG, PNG or GIF images are preferred.

For me, I always use one image per post except on rare occasions where I could be compelled to use more images to explain cogent points. This is about content marketing. You can get free images on freedigitalphoto and other image selling websites.

10. Comments on other blogs. Often times when I visit other blogs I always read through comments to see what the majority are saying about the post in one hand and on the other hand, evaluate the most thought-out comments from the author and general point of view.

I therefore tend to follow through on the blogger I perceived has the best and engaging comment because, I adjudge the blogger as been experienced.

The comment could even be in form of question. So also, other people might do likewise. Read other blogs within your niche and leave thought provoking comment as a way of engaging both the author and other bloggers. In the same vein, always respond quickly to comments on your blog.

Blogging is a two way thing- action and reaction. Yet, not all comments need reply.

What do you think?

Image Credit: Blogmarketingbook