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Whether you're a book review blogger, a travel blogger, a lifestyle blogger, or some other type of blogger, these three easy steps will help you drive traffic to your blog.
The three areas to think about when it comes to driving traffic to your blog are relevancy, connections, and shareability.
1. Drive traffic to your blog by demonstrating relevance with strategic keywords.
When someone makes a query using a search engine--for example, they type "book reviews" into the search bar of Google--the search engine will then search for websites that are relevant. The search engine bases its determination about relevancy on the existence of the search term (i.e. "book reviews") in the title, url, metadata, content, and alternate text of images.
If you plant too many keywords in each blog post, you'll dilute the effectiveness. To drive traffic, you should choose one keyword or phrase to repeat throughout your content, and this keyword should also appear in the URL and title for that blog post. Most blogs also have an application for adding a description and other metadata, such as a list of tags and the alternate text for any images you use. You don't want to use your keyword so frequently that it becomes annoying to readers. Using it once per every one hundred words should be sufficient. Most search engine optimization experts recommend that each blog post be at least 300 words long.
You may have noticed that my main keyword in this post is "drive traffic," and my secondary keyword is "blog." These terms will be added to my desciption and metadata to help search engines match my post to those people looking for ways to drive traffic to blogs.
To see another post in which I use the keyword "book reviews," go here.
2. Drive traffic to your blog by establishing connections.
A search engine will give priority to relevant results that are highly connected over those pages that sit in isolation. To help search engines recognize your blog as a highly connected site, you need to include both internal and external hyperlinks. Create internal hyperlinks by linking your blog post to other pages/posts on your site. Create external hyperlinks by linking your blog post to other websites.
Your site will appear more highly connected if other sites are also connected to your blog. One way to achieve this is to include links to all your social media platforms while also incorporating a link to your blog in your social media profiles. If Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Linked in, and other sites link to your blog from your profile (and other social media posts), your blog will appear more highly connected to search engines than blogs that aren't linked from those sites.
If you're primarily a book review blog, you should link each review to that same review on Goodreads, Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, etc. And when you leave your review at Goodreads, etc., link back to your blog post.
Participating in blog hops and blog tours will also make your site more connected, as would writing guest posts and hosting them, with links back to one another's blogs.
3. Drive traffic to your blog by creating shareable content.
If you create content that is meant to be read and enjoyed by you and you alone, your posts may not get much visibility. However, if you create content that is useful to others and is easy to read, the opposite will happen. As you compose your blog posts, think about your readers. How can you make it easy for them to consume and utilize your content?
Make it easy for them to share your content by including share buttons. At the bottom of my post, you'll see buttons for sharing this content to Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in. There's also an option to copy the link to share at other places. Since the Twitter button doesn't provide much more than a title and link, I sometimes create "Click to Tweet" options using the free version of "Click to Tweet." Here's an example:
Include a call to action at the end of each post, asking others to share. And, it goes without saying that you should use those very buttons to share your own posts on all platforms.
So, there you have it. Three ways to drive traffic to your blog by focusing on relevance, connections, and shareability. I hope you found this useful! If so, please share!
Btw, if you don't already own The Bookworm Bible--my fifty-page comprehensive guide for book lovers compiled from articles I've written over the years on topics such as "How to Overcome a Reading Slump" and "How to Write Easy Peasy Book Reviews" with free resources such as a printable reading log, review templates, and an online reading journal--grab your free copy here.