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9 Successful Blogging Strategies to Get More Visitors in 2019

Last modified on 8th January, 2019

How to start a successful blog?Successful blogging strategies to double your traffic. Discover the best blog plan, marketing and content strategy for long-term growth. #blogging #contentstrategy #blogplan #blogstrategy

By implementing a few successful blogging strategies!

If I had a blog content and blogging strategy for marketing my blog from early on when I started blogging in 2006, my story would be different today.

At that time, my other online businesses were doing quite well so I decided to switch my focus. I abandoned Sabahan.com in 2012.

In June 2018 I decided to revive this blog.

Now, I don’t want other bloggers to make the same mistakes as I did.

So in this post, I shared what I’ve learned and distill them into actionable blogging strategies which you can implement yourself.

I hope these successful blogging strategies will help you grow your blog faster, get more visitors and make more money blogging.

This is a monster post containing over 6000+ words. Don’t let the word count discourage you though as I truly believe you’ll learn a lot of blogging tips and tricks from this post.

Related: 9 Quick SEO Tips and Tricks For Blogs (Updated for 2019)

 

Why Successful Blogging Strategies?

When it comes to blog content strategy, there has been an increasing focus towards creating more quality content rather than quantity.

As the Internet is getting more saturated with content, to stand out you’ll need to create the best content possible, not as much content as possible.

But a blog content strategy is just part of the equation. You need to have blogging strategies for marketing and a blog plan template that you can execute to move your blog forward.

Let’s get started with blogging strategy number #1.

 

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Step #1: Start With Keyword Research

When it comes to writing blog posts, throwing spaghetti on the wall and hope it sticks can be one’s blogging strategy (albeit not a good one)  when the Internet was a smaller place.

Today, before you even sit down and start writing, it’s important to understand beforehand if there’s an actual demand for the topic.

While you can wait and hope that Google will crawl your content and rank them on the first search results pages, there’s no guarantee it will happen.

To get traffic from the Google, your content has to contain certain search terms that real people are searching for.

So this begs the question, “What exactly are real people searching for?”

The answer boils down to doing keyword research.

A keyword research involves finding a series of keywords that people are actually searching for based around your blog niche.

It helps you research your target market and matches it with what you have to offer.

Without conducting any keyword research, you risk using keywords or write about topics that may be interesting to you but have little to zero interest to users.

So it doesn’t matter how epic and valuable your blog post is, or how hard you work for it, if there’s no one searching for it, you’ll still get zero traffic from Google.

It doesn't matter how epic and valuable your blog post is, or how hard you work for it, if there's no one searching for it, you'll still get zero traffic from Google.Click To Tweet

Secondly, while writing about popular topics is good, if the topic is highly competitive, you may still end up with little to no traffic from Google.

The top 10 search results are likely to be dominated by highly authoritative domains leaving little space for a newcomer.

Now, a good starting off point to finding great keywords is to look for these three main ingredients:

  1. Good search volume – potentially more traffic for you
  2. Low competition – so that you have a good chance for ranking
  3. Have commercial intent – is the keyword profitable?

By finding keywords that have all three of these main ingredients you will not only be able to get more visitors, but you will also have keywords that can sell and attract advertisers which means more money for you.

If you are just getting started in keyword research, try to focus on more long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are simply longer keywords containing 3 or more words. They are often more targeted and less competitive.

For example, instead of targeting “wood flooring“, go for “which wood flooring is most durable“.

There are many free and paid keyword research tools to help you with this first successful blogging strategy. Here are a few:

Google Keyword Planner

This is a great starting point for doing keyword research. It’s a free keyword research tool from Google which allows you to see the keyword popularity and gauge the competition.

It also gives you the bid price for the keyword. The higher the price, the more profitable the keyword can be.

google keyword planner

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is another free tool you can add to your keyword research arsenal and blogging strategies for marketing your blog.

The idea is to visualize and map keyword suggestions/prediction that you see when you perform a google search. These are the questions people search most on the Internet.

For example, if you entered “wood flooring”, the keyword is expanded and returned related results for:

  • Questions (127) – can wood flooring go over tile?
  • Prepositions (140) – wood flooring suppliers near me
  • Comparisons (90) – wood flooring and carpet
  • Alphabeticals (508) – wood flooring adhesive, wood flooring Belfast, wood flooring cost etc.

Here’s how the keyword mapping looks visually.

answer the public

Paired these keywords with a keyword research tool (such as the KeySearch tool below) to see how competitive and profitable they are.

KeySearch

KeySearch is a paid tool and one of the cheaper option at that. While other tools can cost up to $70 monthly for their cheapest option, KeySearch cheapest plan only cost $17 per month.

keysearch keyword research tool

I am personally using this tool to perform my own in-depth keyword research. With a quick search, I could find

  • The keyword search volume – how many searches it gets each month
  • How competitive it is to rank on the first page of Google for the keyword
  • The profitability of the keyword. This is actually the CPC (cost per click) which shows how much advertisers are bidding to get their ad shown on Google. You can use this data to target keywords which pay more per click in AdSense or target profitable products if you are doing affiliate marketing.

For me, using KeySearch has been an eye-opener. I can ‘spy’ how some blogs are driving easy traffic from Google by targeting less competitive keywords which I could easily target myself.

It’s a quick way to find a target market for my content.

As if that’s not enough, KeySearch also gives you access to a free SEO Crash Course where it teaches SEO from the ground up, step-by-step.

They did a good job including loads of SEO tips, tricks and techniques that can help get your site moving faster up the rankings. This course is suitable for any SEO skill and knowledge level.

If you decide to buy KeySearch, use the coupon code below to get a 20% discount. Instead of paying $17 monthly, you’ll only pay $13.60 monthly until you cancel or upgrade your plan.

I doubt you could find a cheaper keyword research tool  offering similar features anywhere.

I’m not sure how long this coupon code will last though so be quick if you want to use it.

KSDISC

Use KeySearch to find easy-to-rank, long tail keywords without too much work.

 

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Step #2: Optimize Your Blog Post for SEO

If you don’t know this already, SEO is short for search engine optimisation.

It’s the things you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

It’s often about making small adjustments to parts of your website. These changes may be small if viewed individually, but when combined with other optimizations, they could  improve the user experience and increase your rankings in organic search results.

To rank on the first page search results, your content has to be considered relevant and authoritative to the user’s query.

There are a few blog optimisation strategies you can do to improve your rankings. In this section, I’ll teach you how to properly include your keywords in your blog posts.

You may also want to read my SEO tips for beginners and Quick SEO tips and tricks where I share the tools and strategies you can implement to improve your blog SEO.

SEO should be a major part of your content marketing strategy right from the start.

Include Your Keywords In the Right Places

Now that you found your target keywords, it’s important to sprinkle them throughout your post nicely.

optimize title meta description

Here are some places to include your keywords:

  • Post/page title – this is, in fact, the most important place to put your keywords in. Google will show this in the search results pages so it’s important to optimize this for search and relevance to improve click-through rate.
  • Meta description – this provides a summary of what your post is about. You can include your main keywords here too.
  • Headlines – this is often the headline that appears at the top of your blog post. Use your keywords here but also optimize it for the human readers.
  • Subheadings – structure your post by dividing it into several sections. Include your primary and secondary keywords in the <h2> and <h3> tags.
  • URL – use short URL eg: https://www.website.com/my-target-keyword
  • Alt tags – this is the text used to provide a description for your images. Instead of leaving it empty, try to include relevant keywords here for all your images. Just don’t overdo it.
  • Body – sprinkle your keywords throughout the blog post.

If this sounds like too much work, don’t worry because you can install the Yoast SEO plugin to help you implement these on-page SEO best practice quickly.

yoast seo plugin

Don’t worry about trying to get a perfect score though.

Certain suggestions like always place your target keywords at the beginning of your title or in the first paragraph of the copy are unnecessary and impractical.

important places seo keyword optimization

Do everything in moderation and avoid stuffing keywords unnecessarily or Google will penalize you. It’s also important to ensure your sentences flow naturally and not sound robotic.

 

Step #3: Write an Awesome Blog Post

Here are a few successful blogging strategies you can use to create an awesome blog post.

Create a Long-Form Post

Research shows that the average length of articles that rank on page one of Google search results or get the most social shares has a minimum of 1500 words.

Creating long-form content should be part of your blog content strategy.

Here are some benefits of writing long-form content and why you need to write long blog posts to stand out from the crowd.

However, there’s no point in writing long blog posts only to fill them with fluff. Also, not all topics warrant a long post. Think celebrity gossip or news event.

Your goal should be to write the best content than the next guy for your target keywords.

Having long posts means you’ll experience some readers drop off. Not everyone will read your entire long blog post from start to finish. Some people like to skip to the sections that they are interested in.

For that purpose, I’d recommend installing two plugins to help your readers navigate your content and to reduce drop off.

Easy Table of Contents

This plugin allows you to automatically generate a table of contents for your posts and pages. The TOC provides a sequential list of your post organizational structure.

In addition, adding a TOC allows you to have your target keywords appear multiple times in your copy. Once in the TOC itself and another one in the section header.

To Top

To Top plugin adds a floating scroll up box at the bottom right side (by default) of the page when scrolled down and, when clicked, rolls smoothly to the top. You can see it in action on this post.

This is convenient when you have a long page, and you want to give your visitors an easy way to get back to the top.

Combine this plugin with the Easy Table of Contents to make it easier for your visitors to navigate your content.

If you can’t come up with a long blog post, the next best thing you can do is encourage comments on the post.

Imagine having 10 people leaving 50 words comments, that’s an extra 500 words of free user-generated content on your page. Your own replies will also increase your total word count, so try to respond to all user comments.

Include Lots of White Space

You can format your blog post so that it is easier to read by including lots of white space.

A quick way to create more white space is to use shorter paragraphs. I personally write 2-3 sentence paragraphs.

I even create a one-sentence paragraph like this.

Remember that more and more people are accessing the Internet using their mobile phones. So your readers will thank you for breaking your text into smaller chunks.

Some other writing strategies you can implement to create more white space are:

  • Use bulleted and numbered lists like this
  • Use subheadings – make use of the H2, H3 subheadings
  • Bold important key phrases or sentences

Hook Your Readers With a Compelling Introduction

To encourage the readers to read your post you need a hook. Each sentence in your post should entice the person to want to keep reading.

Some hooks that you can use to start your blog post:

  • Tell a story – using personal story can pique the reader’s interest immediately. If you don’t have a personal story to share, a fictional one can also help lead into your post.
  • Ask a question to arouse curiosity – your first sentence could be a question about the problem your post is addressing. If they want to find out the answer, they’ll need to stick around.
  • Present fact and statistic – include charts, infographics or reference to interesting facts. The information should make people want to know more what you are writing about.

Use Images to Make Your Post More Appealing

This is particularly useful if you create long-form posts.

Research shows that people often scan and not read a web page. Images can interrupt the scanning process and draw them into the content.

If you are reviewing a tool or resource, capture a screenshot using the Windows Snipping Tool and include them in your post.

You can also find related images from the free stock websites like Pixabay, Pexel, Unsplash and PhotoPin. Click here to get free stock photos you can use for your blog.

I personally use the Windows Snipping tool for screen captures (or the keyboard Print Screen key), then I export them to Photoshop, add arrows, text and drop down shadow to make them stand out more and be more helpful.

End Your Post With a Call-to-Action

A call-to-action is an action you are requesting your readers to perform. Typically, they are placed at the end (sometimes throughout) of your blog post.

Having calls to action are essential in guiding your readers to the next step they need to do for successful blogging strategies.

Don’t assume that your readers automatically know what is expected of them.

You can ask your readers to do one or more of the following actions:

  • Sign up for your email list
  • Leave a comment
  • Share your blog post
  • Follow you on the social media channels
  • Recommend related posts for further reading
  • Try or buy a product or service
  • Whatever action of the sales funnel

Here’s an example of a call to action within a blog post!

Checklist blogging strategies

Bonus: Quick Checklist

Download the step-by-step blogging strategies checklist that will help you improve your blog FAST.

You're also subscribing to the Sabahan.com email list. Unsubscribe any time.

You can scroll down to my Conclusion below to see my call-to-action in action. Even this line is a call-to-action  🙂

 

Step #4: Capture Your Visitor’s Emails

Why do you need to collect your visitors’ email address you may ask?

Because you don’t want to rely on Google or the social media platforms for traffic.

If Facebook were to close your account for whatever reason, or Google changed their ranking algorithm (which happens quite often), your blog traffic could disappear overnight.

The visitors from the search engines and social media are transient. When they discovered your blog, they may read a post or two.

Some may bookmark your blog and come back later to check what’s new. Unfortunately, a large majority won’t return because they’ll forget about you.

With their email addresses safely in your hands, you can remind them to come back anytime you publish a new post.

Related: How to Start an Email List for Free Right Now

 

Step #5: Create a Landing Page for Your Lead Capture Form

To improve your email signup conversation rates, consider creating a landing page specifically for your lead capture form.

Landing pages are the most efficient way to get your visitors to sign up for your email list.

Why?

Because a landing page focuses on achieving a single goal. It’s free of distraction and encourages your visitors to take action.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be an expert to create high-converting landing pages.

If you are using WordPress (which I presume you are), you can use tools like Thrive Architect.

It comes with dozens of ready-made, highly optimized landing page templates that you can use to present your offers and grow your mailing list quickly.

It’s the tool that I’m using at Sabahan.com to create my own landing pages.

 

Step #6: Promote Your Post Like Crazy

Creating an amazing blog post is great, but all your effort will go to waste if no one is reading your post.

A top blogging strategy should involve spending more time on promotion than on creating content.

Sadly, the build it and they will come mentality won’t work today. There are millions of other articles competing for the same eyeballs and if you don’t pro-actively promote your content, you’ll never get discovered.

Ideally, you should be spending 80% of your time on promotion and 20% of your time on the actual writing.

Personally, for me I try spending 30% of my time on writing and the rest on promotion. As my goal is to create good quality long-form content, spending any less on writing could compromise the quality and length of my posts.

Here some blogging strategies for marketing your blog as soon as you hit the publish button.

Send an Email to Your Mailing List

Since the people in your email list has explicitly opted to receive emails from you, they are more loyal to you than the visitors from the search engines or social media platforms.

Send a broadcast to your email list to let them know about your latest post. Since these are people who already love you and your content, they’ll more likely to click the links and response to your offer.

Having an email list means your control your own traffic. You’ll have the ability at your disposal to drive traffic to any of your posts instantly. What could be better than that?

Promote Your Post on Facebook Groups and Page

I personally find promoting my posts on Facebook groups very effective. It gives the much needed initial boost in traffic the day after I hit the publish button.

Unfortunately, the engagement on Facebook page isn’t as good. But that shouldn’t stop you from announcing your new posts. You may have some loyal followers waiting for your latest and greatest content there.

If you think the post has a potential to go viral or you just want to get more exposure, consider spending some money to boost your post.

Later I’ll teach you how to reduce your advertising cost and improve your conversion rates by using Facebook pixel to target people who have already shown interest in your content using Facebook ads.

Facebook groups, on the other hand, are where the cool kids hang out. Since Facebook groups are not subjected to the same treatment as Facebook pages, your post will get more views and engagements.

Instead of dropping your links and run away, I’ve found that by including a highly relevant link when answering a question, you’ll get better engagement and click-through.

Bear in mind that Facebook spam detection won’t allow you to post links too often too quickly. So space out your link posting several hours apart if it triggers their spam prevention system.

Also, participating in blog commenting threads can give your blog some social proof. As new visitors check out your blog post and they see it has comments, likes and shares, they are more likely to do the same.

I’ve dedicated an entire post to teach people how to use Facebook groups to increase traffic and drive engagement to their blog. Check it out.

Share Your post on Twitter

If you don’t have large Twitter followers to begin with (like yours truly), Twitter will bring you little to no traffic. But hear me out, you need to get on Twitter.

For most bloggers, they only tweet their latest post once and then forget about it. Then, they wonder why their posts never gained traction on Twitter.

To be honest, I was guilty of doing the same thing!

Then recently it occurred to me I was doing it all wrong. I was expecting Twitter to work like Google where people would come back to search for information and will discover my old tweets.

While that may be technically true, it’s not how people use Twitter.

What most people do is get on Twitter at certain times and scroll through their timeline, scanning and reading only the tweets that catch their attention.

As to how many tweets they see depends on many factors. Suffice to say only a small fraction of people will notice each time you tweet.

You see, each tweet comes and goes very quickly. On average, a single tweet has an average half-life of just 24 minutes. If you are not on Twitter when a tweet is published, you may probably never see it. This is especially true if you are following many people.

So what should you do to get your tweets seen by more people?

To get your tweets seen by more people, just tweet more and at targeted times when your audience is likely on Twitter.

To get your tweets seen by more people, just tweet more and at targeted times when your audience is likely on Twitter.Click To Tweet

Once you published a post, tweet it immediately. Then write several more tweets about your new post and schedule them to be published sequentially in the future. It’s a strategy I just started using recently.

Dedicate some time to write updates for all your important posts. Then use a social media automation tool to help you publish them at specific times in the future.

I am using Recurpost to help me with the scheduling. The free plan allows 3 social media accounts and 100 scheduled content.

Recurpost might be your best option if:

  • You want to test recycling social media posts
  • You don’t have a lot of content you want to automate
  • You don’t want to spend money yet on social media automation tool

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll soon notice that for each post from my blog, I use a slightly varied description so that I can promote the same post over and over again at different times without sounding too repetitive.

In fact, due to Twitter’s policy changes, you cannot post the same Tweet more than once on Twitter.

recurpost twitter social media automation

You can register with Recurpost here.

In addition to Recurpost, I also use Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule my tweets and Facebook page/group posts. So far the free plans have worked well for my needs.

Here’s another trick you can use. Turn on Twitter Analytics. It’s an incredibly useful tool to track your tweets impressions and engagements.

twitter analytics

You can find your top tweets and discover the best time to tweet, the tweets that got the most attention, hashtag and so on.

Using these social media automation tools will save you time and is the best blogging strategies for marketing your blog effectively.

Get on the Pinterest Action

I dabbled in Pinterest marketing in early July. From what I read, I knew it can bring tons of traffic much quicker to a blog compare to other sources like Google (and for free too).

In fact, some say Pinterest is the secret weapon for some of the most successful bloggers. Well, I’m letting the cat out of the bag as I’m coming to see what the fuss is all about.

So I’ve decided to make it one of my main focus in driving traffic to my blog before the organic traffic from Google starts to kick in.

If you don’t know this already, Pinterest is actually a search engine and not a social media platform like many may have thought.

Like Facebook and Twitter, you can follow people but people go to Pinterest mainly to search for information and not to connect with other users.

While Google will index your new post automatically, Pinterest will not unless you pin (submit) your post to them.

Notice the vertical image near the top of this article? That’s a pin which anyone with a Pinterest account can pin on their Pinterest boards.

So far traffic from Pinterest has been very promising for me. I started pinning actively on 1st August 2018. In less than two weeks my pinned has reached 10833 viewers.

pinterest traffic views analytics

But here’s the thing, that’s not the most important metric for me. What I really wanted to know is the number of Pinterest users who actually clicked on my pins and landed on my blog.

While the number of viewers can be large, it does not equate to the actual visits I’ve received.

Most new bloggers may hide this fact for concern that the achievement may sound less impressive. Spoiler alert, I am here to be real, not to impress 🙂

From 1st August till 14th August 2018, Pinterest has sent me a total of 147 visitors (sessions).

pinterest marketing

Here’s how the daily visits from Pinterest look like:

pinterest daily visitors

While that traffic may not be huge,  I still think this is a very promising development because:

  • At the time of this writing, I had only 11 articles to promote on Pinterest.
  • Google has yet to sent me that much daily traffic (if you read my previous post, I set all my old posts to no-follow literally removing them from the Google index).
  • The average Pinterest visitor stays much longer (10 minutes on average) on my site compare to the visitors from other social networks.
  • The average Pinterest visitor views more pages on my blog.
  • I’m only getting started!

Update

It has been 30 days since I started to actively test Pinterest (3 weeks after I published the stats above). My pins are now getting 40,000 views.

Pinterest views growth

 

When it comes to getting organic traffic to your blog, it’s unrealistic to expect thousands of visitors to suddenly turn up on my doorstep overnight. Things take time to build up.

The best part was I only spent an hour or two on the weekends to schedule my pins and let them run automatically for the whole week pulling traffic from Pinterest.

Here’s what I did to get started with Pinterest:

  • Optimising my profile, boards for my chosen keywords i.e. “blogging tips, “increase blog traffic”, “grow email subscribers” etc
  • Joining group boards – these are collaborative boards where multiple users can pin their stuff for free. Visit pingroupie.com, type in your keyword to find relevant groups for your niche.
  • I checked which other group boards the influencers and popular bloggers have joined. Then I email the board owners if I can collaborate.

How do you find the board owner?

The owner is usually the first person that appears on the member list next to the board title.

how to join pinterest boards

Here’s an email template I use when asking to participate in a group board.

Pinterest board request email template

Hi [Board Owner’s First Name],

My name is [Your Name] of [Your Blog] where I share [What You Offer].

I would absolutely love to join your [Board Name].

I’m following you and your board!

My Pinterest profile: [Your Pinterest URL]

My Pinterest email: [make sure to use the email registered with Pinterest here]

Thanks,

[Your Name]

Now to automate my Pinterest pinning process, I use Tailwind.

Tailwind scheduled pins

Get your feet wet by signing up with the free plan. It lets you schedule and publishes up to 100 Pinterest pins per month, as long as you want.

You’ll soon find out how it will save you time, grow your traffic and help you make more money from your blog!

I’ve only scratched the surface with Pinterest here. I could talk about:

  • Optimizing your Pinterest profile and boards
  • How to design pins that get clicks
  • How to schedule your pins using Tailwind the right way
  • And more…

But I’ll leave those topics in my future posts, otherwise, this section will become too long.

I’ll continue to experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t. If you like to see how I am progressing, be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

Email Everyone Mentioned in Your Post

You may have linked to or mentioned someone in your blog post if so, try to shoot them an email or tweet that person to let him/her know.

I did this when I wrote the Facebook groups post and that person was happy enough she tweeted the post to her followers driving some traffic and followers on my way.

It’s a win-win arrangement, free publicity for both parties. Just keep in mind that not everyone you mentioned will be flattered by your move so don’t take it personally if you don’t get the response you wanted.

 

Checklist blogging strategies

Bonus: Quick Checklist

Download the step-by-step blogging strategies checklist that will help you improve your blog FAST.

You're also subscribing to the Sabahan.com email list. Unsubscribe any time.

 

Step #7: Get Backlinks to Your Post

One of the major ranking factors of Google is how many links a page has from other authoritative sites.

How do you get people linking to your post or blog?

Guest Blogging Strategies

Guest blogging is when you write an article for another blog and linking back to your blog. It’s one of the top blogging strategies you can utilise to get instant exposure to your blog.

Guest posting strategies are effective to:

  • Get backlinks to your site
  • Get in front of a new target audience
  • Show your expertise in a topic
  • Generate traffic to your site

When you guest blog, you may be allowed to link back to your blog from within the article itself but that’s not always the case. Typically, you are allowed an author bio. It’s where you can link back to your blog.

author bio

You can link to your blog homepage, to any free offer, social media profile or blog posts that you want more exposure to. This is how you get your backlinks.

However, some say the links from this guest blogging strategies may not have as much link juice than if it was unsolicited backlink from a third party. Since Google knows that you ‘created’ that backlink yourself.

Nonetheless, using this guest blogging strategy is still a powerful way to generate more backlinks to your blog. So it’s still very valuable for your SEO ranking.

That said, if you guest blog on a small website, you may see little to no traffic. Still, you are in this for the long-term, aren’t you?

As the blog you’re guest blogging at improves its domain authority, so does the importance of that backlink to your blog.

Contributing to other highly authoritative blogs gives you a chance to prove your credibility as a trustworthy and credible source of information. This makes it easier to convert your target audience into loyal subscribers or paying customers.

Let me give you an example…

The other day I was looking to learn about Pinterest marketing. After all, some say it’s the secret weapon for many bloggers. So I scoured the Internet looking for resources to help me get started quickly.

I came across many ebooks and online courses claiming to provide the answer to the secrets of Pinterest traffic. In the end, I decided to go for one particular course.

Why?

Because the author had several guest posts published in high authority blogs that I followed which include Huffington Post, OptinMonster, Blogging Wizard and a few others. This provided the social proof for me in that she knows what she’s talking about and the information she provided is credible.

She is now making around $6000 a month, grew her list to 7000 subscribers from a blog started barely a year ago. The convincing sales page coupled with her guest blog strategy nudged me in her direction and she got my money.

Linking Internally

If getting links using the guest blogging strategies are too much work, the easier way is by linking internally on your own blog.

Most people tend to link to their older posts from the new post. You can do the other way around too.

How?

Go back to your older blog posts and place a link from them to your current blog post. Since older blog posts should have higher page authority, passing the SEO juice to your new posts can help then to rank quicker.

 

Step #8 Retargeting With Facebook Ads/Google Ads

Have you ever noticed how some ads on Facebook appear to be related to the websites you have just visited?

For example, if you’ve just visited a product page on Amazon, all of a sudden an ad showing the same product appears in your Facebook feed.

How did Facebook know you visited that product page earlier?

It’s not coincident. In digital marketing, the practice is called retargeting or remarketing. The cool thing is you can do the same thing for your blog too.

The idea is to show ads on Facebook or Google only to people who have visited your blog.

how does retargeting work

Image credit

Retargeting is often the most efficient way to do Facebook ad campaigns. Retargeting warm prospects improve your ads click-through rates and lower the cost per click.

Only 2% of visitors take action on their first visit to a website. Retargeting allows you to reach the other 98% who left your website without taking action.

As I mentioned before, most of your visitors from the social media or Google search will never return. However, these people already visited your website which means they have shown some initial interest in your content.

Rather than trying to entice first-time visitors, who may less likely to convert, retargeting aims to get repeat visitors who are more likely to convert.

Your conversion goal may be to generate more sales, increase brand awareness quicker but for our purpose, it is to get people to sign up for our newsletter.

How to Install Facebook Pixel on WordPress for Retargeting

There are several ad networks like Google, Bing, AdRoll that allow retargeted ads. I want to start with Facebook Pixel because it’s one of the more popular options among bloggers.

Even if you do not have any plan to run a retargeting campaign now, you should install Facebook Pixel now to start collecting data immediately.

Once installed, leave the tracking pixel on your blog for a few months to start building your pool of retargetable users. When you decide to actually start your retargeting campaign, you’ll have a larger pool to target.

Here’s how to install Facebook pixel for WordPress:

  1. Go to Facebook Event Manager > Partner Integration or click here.
    installing facebook pixel wordpress
  2. Just follow the online instructions and download the plugin for Facebook pixel in the next page.
    facebook pixel installation instruction
  3. Once installed, the Facebook pixel WordPress plugin settings look like the following:That’s it. You are done! You are now collecting user data automatically for your future retargeting campaigns.
    facebook pixel wordpress plugin

How to Check If Facebook Pixel Is Actually Working?

During the setup process, you can send test traffic to your pixel to check whether it is working or not.

remarketing retargeting ads

You can also install the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension.

Once you have the Chrome extension activated, visit your blog to verify your pixel is working properly. If it does, you should see something like the following:

check facebook pixel working

If you opt-out of interest-based advertising, the related events won’t be processed. Don’t worry about it. If there’s no other warnings or errors, your pixel should work properly.

 

Step #9 Update Your Best Performing Posts

The date when your blog post is published gives an indication as to the freshness and relevance of your content.

Top blogging strategies include writing an evergreen content but you know that’s not always possible because things move so fast online and your post can become outdated quickly.

One easy way to make a blog post seems relevant again is by displaying newer comments at the top of each page.

Here’s how you do it…

Show Recent Comments at the Top

When people see recent comments appear at the top, that tells them the post is still thriving and relevant since people are still engaging with it.

So they are more like to leave a comment or share the post too.

To show recent comment at the top, go to your WordPress dashboard then Settings > Discussion.

Under the Other comment settings, make sure to set Comments should be displayed with the newer comments at the top of each page.

blogging strategies for marketing blog

Optimize Your Old Posts

You can look at your top 10 popular posts every now and then and see what you can do to make them better.

Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to BEHAVIOUR > Site Content > All Pages

how to optimize old blog post

Find a post you want to improve and do any of the followings:

  • Add new content by writing a paragraph or two. Expand an existing section or add another picture, video or other media. If it’s a list post, add another item or two into the list.
  • Check if you can create additional internal links to other relevant posts especially the new ones that are relevant to the post. This serves two purposes – it passes some SEO juice to the new posts helping them to rank while making the old post more relevant.
  • Reply to comments or edit existing ones to expand your point. This will increase the word count of your article which helps in ranking.
  • See if you can do some off-page backlinks as well. Email other bloggers and tell them about your awesome blog post.
  • If it’s an affiliate post, make sure that the affiliate links are optimized.
  • Create linkable assets. Create or hire someone to create an infographic from your post. Then do some blogger outreach and send emails to influencers in your niche so that they’ll link to and share your content.

Use Google Search Console to Improve Your Content

You’d want to make your post as thorough as possible based on what other people are already searching for.

To do this, log in to Google Search Console

Take all the keywords that you are getting impressions for but haven’t been ranked properly and start adding them to your copy.

google search console

However, you don’t want to just shove them in and have your content be keyword-rich.

As people landed on your pages and read your keyword rich page, they will bounce off immediately if your article does not flow naturally. So your writing has to flow naturally and add more value.

Click here to learn how to use Google Search Console.

 

Conclusion

I know this is a lot of information to absorb in one sitting.

You may want to bookmark this page, return later and implement one or two at a time into your own blog plan template or content strategy.

Are you using these successful blogging strategies to get more visitors to your blog? Let me know in the comments!

Victor
 

An engineer by training, Victor has been working full-time online as an Internet marketer, a programmer and an app developer since 2001. He has been blogging at Sabahan.com since 2006 sharing his experience and teaching people how to make money online. Click here to join his private Facebook Group for bloggers.

  • What if you are unsure what your niche is? I want my blog to encompass all aspects of my traveling life whether it’s the how to’s, budgeting, disasters on the road, travel hacking, etc. I’m concerned that by doing everything I’ll slip through the cracks and won’t be noticed.

    • Victor says:

      As long as the topics are related to travelling I think you should be fine. I think it’s important to create the right categories that group certain related topics together.

  • Stacy Mojica says:

    TONS of useful resources here – thank you! Thanks for the coupon code for KeySearch too 😉

  • Mark says:

    This is one of the best posts I have seen on marketing my blog. Going to bookmark for later.

    • Victor says:

      Glad you like it Mark! I try to publish once a week (but this week wasn’t able to lol) so you’ll get more posts like this so, do come back!

  • Mat Drat says:

    Thanks for sharing this useful info n tips

  • Christine says:

    GREAT info! Really informative, keep it up!

  • Phil Cobb says:

    This is the most impressive list I’ve ever seen.

  • Jay Safdar says:

    Wow! What an informative blog! Found this extremely useful and will be applying tips from here that I have not been using. Thank you for this. Will be saving this. 😊

  • Nikki says:

    Thank you so much! Beginning to blog can be totally overwhelming and these tips are great to point you in the right direction.

    • Gaman says:

      It was indeed. There seems to be a million thing a newbie need to do. But following a proven strategy is one way to head into the fight direction. Thanks for the comment Nikki.

  • bettie says:

    Thank you so much for this post

  • michelle says:

    pinning this to read later. thank you

  • Mel says:

    Great read! I will definitely be applying these tips to help boost my blog 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

  • Marina says:

    There is so much information here! Thank you so much for sharing, I am new to blogging and struggling with gaining an audience so I will defienetely be trying some of these tips!

    • Gaman says:

      Glad you find the blogging strategies helpful Marina. I’ll publish more tips and tricks in my future post so, please stay tuned!

  • Ye Chen says:

    This is, without a doubt, the best article on blogging strategy with clear step by step tutorials. Amazing post!

    • Gaman says:

      Thanks for the kind words Ye Chen. I tried to make each tip, each strategy actionable and infused them with my own experience so I hope it’s helpful to my readers.

  • Hi Gamman,

    This is one of the best articles I’ve read about blogging strategies. Thank you for mentioning Pinterest as a great traffic source. Not a lot of bloggers are aware of that. I use Pinterest a lot, especially when I am launching new pieces of content. It works pretty well for me. It also helps me drive quality traffic to my blog and it is well-monetized.

    Thanks again for sharing!

    • Gaman says:

      Thanks for the kind words Stefan. I agree, more blogger should get on Pinterest. However, some may find placing the vertical pin image on their blog may not aligned with their blogging plan. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth trying especially for new bloggers.

  • Thanks so much for sharing all of this info! Your article was super thorough and helpful!

    • Gaman says:

      Thanks Erika! I Tried to share blogging strategies from my own perspective and experience to make the post unique. Glad you find it helpful!

  • Heather says:

    It’s really nice to see a guide that’s actually offering useful promotion tools and ideas to bloggers for a change – and not just saying use pinterest! Pinning this to my blog promotion links board so others can find it 🙂

    • Gaman says:

      Thanks for the kind words Heather. Glad you find the post useful. I’ll be writing more about various promotion and blogging strategies in addition to Pinterest. So stay tuned!

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