When it comes to keeping a blog or a website, a lot of industry experts follow a 10/90 rule. The 10/90 rule is a ratio interpreted to mean you should spend 10% of your time creating and 90% of your time promoting. This should let you know, no matter how far you get in internet marketing, traffic and a lot of it will always be in demand.
If we think about cost efficiency, the 10/90 ratio makes a lot of sense when we think about how many people are online at any given time. No matter how many posts you write, if people do not see it, literally it is worth nothing more than a waste of time.
The quickest way to get visitors to your site, of course, is to have an advertising budget. With an advertising budget, you can target a market on Facebook or you can bid on keywords that you want to rank for using Google AdWords, however, after shelling out the money it is costing you to run your site, are you ready for another expense?
There are certain things you can do both before and after you publish a blog post that will increase the odds of you getting traffic to your site. When you first start out, your momentum is going to be driven by referrals, but if you follow these tips, organic traffic from the search engines will eventually follow.
Organic Traffic From On Page SEO
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the science of optimizing a website or a blog for the search engines. The algorithm Google uses to rank websites is awfully sophisticated. There was a time when you jam whatever keywords you wanted into your metadata and your page or post would be indexed and ranked in no time. Now, it isn’t that easy. In order for your page to be ranked properly, your keywords have to match the content and your content has to match both the inbound and the outbound links and the quality of those links are also taken into consideration.
With that said, there is a lot of information on the web about on page SEO. While in the very beginning it will not help out too much, in the long run, as your site or blog begins gaining momentum in the search engines based on other factors, organic traffic from your on page SEO efforts will start to come through. You want to be in an optimal position to capture organic traffic from the search engine because they tend to convert better as they were looking for the keyword you ranked on the first page for.
Link Building
On page SEO formulas are technical, where as link building techniques are unorthodox in comparison and fall under the umbrella of off page SEO techniques. What they both have in common, though is neither of the two happen over night.
Link building is pretty advanced and it requires personal attention. Most times, bloggers and those with websites don’t start link building until after they have gained some ground in the industry. However, beginning to build relationships long before you are ready to execute a full fledged link building strategy will make link building a walk in the park.
When it comes to search engine optimization, the Google algorithm, as mentioned, takes into account the amount and quality of links you connect to as well as the amount and quality of links connecting to you. For example, if you have 5 sites linking to one of your blog posts but each of those sites only gets 15 new visits a day and the site is so new it isn’t even indexed, Google won’t see you as an authority. However if you have 1 site linking to one of your blog posts and the site sees over 10,000 new visits a day, then you have a fighting chance of ranking for whatever keyword linked that big site to your post.
In the same respect, if you do a blog post and link to a site that Google doesn’t know, Google isn’t going to think you know what you are talking about when it comes to that particular keyword. However, if you link to a site that is an authority in the field and you are using them as a reference, Google trusts them and so Google’s algorithm will begin to trust you.
Link building strategies involve a lot of outreach. It’s said you should have a list of about 100 bloggers that you are to email to ask if they would be willing to Tweet one of your posts to your followers. The goal is to guest post on their site, but when it comes to link building strategies, building relationships will give you leverage and that is something you can start long before you start shooting off those 100 emails.
As you slowly build your blog, be sure to visit other blogs in your niche and spend weeks or even months, genuinely commenting on posts. Now, when you are ready to ask for a promotional favor, you are already a friend of the site and it will be really hard to say “No”.
Social Media Networks and Bookmarking Sites
As soon as you publish a blog post or webpage, be sure to share it with your social media networks and ask your friends if they can share it. If you are active in any groups on any of your networks be sure to share it in your groups as well and ask that they share it on their personal timelines.
Bookmarking sites are really important. The biggest one is Reddit. If you have never used Reddit, just know the Reddit audience is trained to follow links so you will be able to get traffic referred to your site, although keeping them on your site will be another story. Any search in Google for bookmarking site will bring up lists of them that you can chose from.
Images
In everything you do online, you want to make sure you have high quality images. Not only will it make your blog posts or site look clean, good pictures also make a site look sophisticated. There are plenty of stock photo sites to choose from which will be better than grabbing images directly from Google images and using them without citing a source.
There are a lot of studies that show, images in a post will increase engagement by over 20 percent. For that reason, you want to make sure you have pictures in all of your posts and in the event you have a really long post, use relevant images to keep the reader going.
Ping Your Site
There are so many websites popping up every single day, how is Google supposed to keep track? The Google algorithm does a pretty good job, but even still, after every post, you should ping your site. Pinging your site or your post is a way to let the search engines know that you updated your site or that you have a new post.
A Google search for sites that will ping your URL will bring up dozens of lists. Pick about 3 or 4 of the services and enter your link.
Instagram is a social site so it could have been included in a previous category. However, promoting your blog on Instagram is totally different. First, you edit your profile to include a link to your website or blog. If it is too long, use a link shortener like TinyUrl to shorten your link.
Take a screen shot of your blog post that includes the title or you can use a graphic design editing suit (Gimp is free) to add the title as a text overlay to a photo featured in the blog post or a picture of your sites logo. Share this picture on Instagram. The trick is to use all the relevant hashtags of your target audience and include the hashtag linkinbio.
Not only will you drive a little traffic to your blog, the Instagram audience is engaged so you may even get a comment or two.
Blog Commenting
Not only is blog commenting a great way to get recognized by established bloggers which will put you in a position in the future to effectively execute a link building strategy, it will also send traffic back to your site. People read comments all of the time and people often engage with comments. For that reason, you want to find blogs in your niche and blogs where your target market hangs out and you want to comment on those posts. The quicker you are to comment on a new post, the more likely you are to receive traffic back to your site.
Targeting Your Audience
You have to think really hard and really long about who your target market is. You also have to make sure that your target market is composed of people you can get to. If you want to sell items, but you are targeting people who need money then it isn’t going to work. If you have a way for people to make money and you target people who don’t have any, then you may be in business.
A huge mistake a lot of people make when they are first starting out is they do not know what to say to secure an audience. As ambitious as you may feel, if you spend time speaking to your target market about what they want to hear, you will have all of the opportunity in the world to speak to them about what you want them to hear and they will be happy to listen.
Once you know your target market, the first thing on your agenda should be to get them to like you. Use inspirational and motivational posts. Posts that will tell them how to solve a problem that isn’t a business opportunity but a post that lets them know you are relatable and you understand what they are going through.
Before you set off to learn how to advertise, do A/B testing on your advertisements, figure out Google AdWords and how to use the Keyword Planner, try the techniques outlined for you and experience a spike in traffic and increasing traffic over time.
