The Simple 5 Growth Hacks To Boost Blog Traffic

Growth hacking has become a pretty popular concept over the past few years and it’s for a good reason, it works. If you’re not exactly sure what “growth hacking” is don’t worry too much, we’re going to review a few concepts and ideas to help anyone with a blog reach more readers and thus more potential customers by getting more traffic using… you guessed it, growth hacks!

Hacking as a general concept has both a negative connotation and a positive one associated with it. Though they’re both correct in their own way the things we’ll be covering here in this article today will be strictly ethical and highly effective. I’m sure ideas of a savvy computer programmer sipping his highly-caffeinated beverage as he slaves away behind a screen and keyboard enter the imagination, and to be honest you’re not far off with that. The difference is that instead of performing feats of technological wizardry with a mouse and keyboard you get more blog traffic by hard work and effective strategies. This is the aim of growth hacking, using your skills and marketing savvy to increase traffic to your blog so you can grow your customer base and profits.

1. Advertise Your Blog With Online Forums

There are two methods to this, free and not free advertising. Let’s take the ever popular Warrior forum for example. This is by far the most popular forum surrounding the topic of internet marketing and advertising on the entire internet. If you were to approach just about anyone who has even the slightest clue on the subject and ask them about this forum they’d more than likely know what you were talking about and that’s a good thing for anyone who wants to reach out to this niche.

The warrior forum and any subsequent forum like it undoubtedly offer some form of on-site advertising you could take advantage of. This option is usually not cheap but if you’ve got your ads lines up just right it can be extremely effective in a very short period of time. You’ll want to shop around these various forums, check out their stats like how many users do they have, you can usually see this figure posted somewhere at the bottom of most online forums. Take a look inside the threads of these forums and look at the recent activity; does it seem like a popular place with plenty of people visiting daily? If it is then you’ve found a potential winner!

The other method is of course simply becoming an active participant in these forums and doing things like posting a short link back to your forum within your signature or under the allowed spaces within your profile. I know that it might seem like a pointless activity to use things like a forum Bio and the ‘About Me’ sections but it’s really not pointless at all. In fact, if you post plenty of helpful and even just interesting things that are on topic within these forums you will get people checking you out. I get on average 100 to 200 visits to my warrior forum profile a month just off of my general posting activity and that does result in traffic back to my blog and web pages.

2. Post Blog Articles More Regularly

Posting to a blog with steady regularity takes more work than just posting periodically. That said however it’s no secret that more blog posts will typically lead to more traffic, roughly 300% more in fact. Posting to a blog with a frequency of one post per week will typically show decent results. However, if you were to double that or even triple that output you would probably increase blog traffic exponentially in tandem with content production. This means that posting three or four times a week instead of one will ultimately tend to yield three to four times the traffic, simple right?

It is true that this kind of output is hard work but there are ways to achieve it with things like outsourcing work and using tools such as WordPress to help keep content creation streamlined and organized.

3. Optimize Your Headlines For Search & Comprehension

Your headline is basically the most important piece of your entire article. It needs to be precise and pretty much as close to perfect as you can get it while also containing your desired keyword(s) in it. Most people will decide if they’ll take the time to look at your blog articles based on just the title alone so it’s a good idea to take special care when constructing a solid headline. Coming up with multiple headlines and picking what seems to be the best one is not a bad idea, even if it does take some extra time and effort. If you use WordPress to manage your blog then you can look into plugins that might help you with picking the best headline for your posts. There is one in particular which is pretty neat and it’s called ‘Title Experiments’ there is a basic version which is offered for free if you wish to give it a try. It will basically take a bunch of variations and A/B split test them with your actual readers and people who visit your blog to see which one of your headlines is most popular and gets the most clicks.

4. Use Cross-Linking To Relevant Posts Within Your Blog

Anytime you post a new article to your blog you should always be looking for opportunities to insert relevant links back to other posts. This encourages the click through from your readers on top of helping your SEO score with Google since it takes internal links into consideration when indexing your pages.

A few specific things you can do to help with proper cross linking is of course finding relevant posts made in the past to link to. It is a good idea to use some of your more popular and better performing past content when possible. When writing your posts you may want to keep an eye on solid keywords used to convert into anchor text. Using keywords as anchor text when linking back to previous related posts is the absolute best way to go about this. However you choose to go about cross linking always keep in mind that this is used with the intention of boosting your SEO scores so getting it done right is more helpful than just going about it half-heartedly.

5. Use Email Campaigns To Promote Your Blog

Email marketing is still a very high converting method to reach out to customers and readers to get attention back to your blog, boosting that traffic and raising your ROI.

Studies suggest that a traffic yield from email campaigns rival alternative methods of advertising by a very large amount, we’re talking in the hundreds here. Given figures like that it’s no wonder email campaigns are still going strong in the affiliate marketing scene and many of its subsequent niches.

There are a few ways to help you build a list if you don’t have one right now. It’s kind of hard to start sending emails out if you don’t have an actual list to send them to, right? Here are some of the most popular methods for list building using your own blog… and these are popular for a very good reason, they work!

–Pop ups: Some think they’re annoying and I guess you’d be right about that. They are however also very highly effective and if used sparingly in combination with a nice enticing offer to your reader you stand a darn good chance of getting those sign-ups from this single method alone! But we’ve got more you can try out anyway because that’s just what we do here.

–Samples, Free Trials & Incentives: Yup, you guessed it. This is the free stuff you could offer in your Pop Ups to help get those sign ups from your blog readers. If you have a blog in a niche where things like informational products are the norm then you can easily take advantage of this. Offering your readers something like a free trial to a premium newsletter work really well in many cases. Perhaps you have an eBook that’s packed with value your readers would love to get their hands on. Maybe you have a nifty check list of resources you’ve compiled that you find useful and know your readers would also enjoy having. Just about anything that could be seen as valuable by someone in your respective niche could work really well as a freebie for this purpose.

–Subscription Forms: This one is really simple. If you offer a subscription to your readers for something like a weekly or even monthly newsletter you’ll find that a lot of people will sign up; especially if it’s free. On top of that you could imply there will be exclusive bonus material that only subscribers will have access to and things of this nature. It works like a charm

If you don’t yet have an email client or an auto-responder set up you may want to look at Aweber, they offer a top notch service which will get you going in the right direction. They offer an entire 30 Day Free Trial to anyone who wants to check it out.

6. Facebook Pages & Ads

I wanted to throw in this little bonus because the fact of the matter is… Facebook is a powerhouse when it comes to reaching your customer and reader base. There are entire training courses made strictly around how to use the different features Facebook offers to gain the maximum coverage of your blogs and using just one of these things even decently could yield you incredible results!

From Facebook Pages to groups and even Facebook own native ads, you’ve got options. One way to get the ball rolling on this would be to create a Facebook page and publish snippets from your blog posts onto your page which then lead back to your blog via a link or even using the clickable images that post directly to your Facebook wall. If you can get a bunch of people to like and share your Facebook content around then you’ll begin to see a viral effect take place which could potentially create a landslide of traffic to your blogs.

One other powerhouse you may wish to look into for more detailed info on affiliate marketing and advertising is the Powerhouse Affiliate premium training and forum. It offers excellent training on its premium membership which will take you from where you are now to where you want to be and way beyond.