I’ve been blogging for a few years now, but I mostly concentrated on Instagram and kind of neglected my blog.  But with all the problems and glitches I’ve seen on Instagram, I decided 2019 was going to be the year I worked on my blog and increase my blog traffic.

My blog traffic has been pretty steady at about 2,000 to 5,000 page views per month. But I managed to grow that traffic to 20,000 to 25,000 in just 2 short  months. I’m going to share my secrets and strategies with you on how you can do the same to grow the traffic for your blog! Here are the exact steps I took to grow my blog page views by 900% in just two months!

SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is one of the reasons traffic to my site increased so dramatically in such a short time frame.  For each post I concentrate on writing not only toward one keyword phrase but also related keywords and phrases.  

My very first blog posts had no SEO traffic at all!  But in April this year over 6,000 views on my blog came from Google.  I could go into great detail about this, but there’s a smarter guy out there that pretty much knows everything there is about SEO.  Sure you could buy a course on SEO, but Neil Patel is literally giving it away for free.  I basically have read everything there is on his website and even went to his free webinar.  

 All the information Neil gives is spot on and easy to read, so do yourself a favor and check out his articles on SEO.

Neil even offers a FREE Keyword tool that gives you search volume and how competitive a keyword is, access it here.  I almost bought a keyword tool like KeySearch or KWFinder, but I find Neil’s tool very good.  KWFinder used to give you 5 free searches a day, but I guess they got too popular and now they’ve gotten rid of that, that’s why I switched to Neil’s tool.

LSI Keywords

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is another component of SEO I garnered from Neil that has really helped the SEO on my site.  The concept is to use related keywords and phrases to the keyword you are trying to rank for. It’s those LSI keywords that are helping visitors find my page.  As humans we write in a certain way and we use the same words over and over. This does not necessarily benefit your SEO. Many times I have a hard time thinking of different phrases my audience could use to find my post.  So I use an LSI tool, also recommended by Neil, access it here.  Every time I come up with a topic, I’ll run my main keyword through there, then try to work in all the phrases the tool gives me into my post.

Ask Questions in Your Post

When I start putting together a blog article, I’ll try to come up with a list of questions someone would type into Google to get an answer for.  This can also help Google index your post.

Post Lots of Pictures to Rank Better in Google

A picture is worth a thousand words right?  But that’s not the only reason to post relevant and good pictures on your blog post.  This goes back to SEO! With each picture you add another opportunity for you to rank in Google.

You can add what’s called Alt Text to your picture when you add it to a post.  Alt text basically tells Google what your image is. This is great for SEO because if you’ll notice, Google has an image search tab.  So your image could rank all on it’s own. Some of my posts may not rank but most of my images do rank!

Alt text is not the only important factor though.  You also need to name your file something SEO friendly because Google can rank the file name as well.  Instead of “DCS1123” for the image name, put something like “how to increase blog traffic.” This is exactly how Green Wedding Shoes found my blog and featured one of my pictures on their site.

Use Tailwind Tribes for Free to Drive Blog Traffic from Pinterest

I’ve used Pinterest for quite a while now to drive traffic to my blog.  But after joining and using a few Tribes on Tailwind, my Pinterest views and my blog traffic have both steadily increased.  The best part Tailwind Tribes is a completely free service.

What is Tailwind?

Tailwind is a tool to help you schedule pins on Pinterest.  You can sign up for a free trial of 100 pins. I personally only use it for the Tribes aspect, but I know many bloggers that use it successfully. 

What is Tailwind Tribes?

Tailwind Tribes are basically groups where bloggers share each others’ pins.  You join a tribe and share relevant pins. Others in that tribe will share your pins if it’s a good match.  It’s not only a great way to increase your own exposure, but also a great way to find new pins! Each tribe will have rules on how many pins you have to share from others before you can drop a pin of your own.  

Usually the ratio is 1 to 1 but I’ve seen 1 to 2 as well, meaning for every pin you share you have to pin two.

How do you use Tailwind Tribes for free after your Tailwind trial is over?

Tailwind offers a free trial of 100 scheduled pins.  But if you are like me and already have a Pinterest tool you like, and only need the Tribes aspect you can use Tribes for free.  

 After you have scheduled your free 100 pins, you can continue to pin from Tailwind Tribes using the same procedure as scheduling.  Your pins will all be under the Publisher Tab, under Scheduled Pins. Here Tailwind will tell you that you are out of free scheduled pins.  But not to worry from here you can just manually pin the pins that you “scheduled” from Tribes. You just can’t schedule them by you can pin in real time.  

Grow Blog Traffic by Republishing Old Posts

Not all of your posts have to be new and fresh, honestly some of my best content is a year or 2 old!  The secret to increasing traffic with old posts is to update it with new content and republish it with a new date!  

I’ve done this with several of my most popular seasonal posts.  I continue to update these with the latest information and new pictures as well.  

This also helps keep your content fresh without having to write completely new blog posts, especially if your old one is good!

Easy things to update are things on dates of events, weather conditions for particular events, pictures, especially the featured image that shows up on social media when you post a link, titles and meta descriptions.  I also like to go through and improve my SEO and retarget keywords.

Once you finish revamping your article simply republish the article with a new date.

Write Posts on the Same Topic

I have written quite a few posts on the same topic while varying the locations and details.  If you look at my blog I have at least 3 posts on cherry blossoms which feature the same locations, but with some variation.

I am able to target different keywords for each of the posts.  These are easy to write because they are mostly the same with just some slight differences, but I use different keywords for each post.

Post Often

This almost goes without saying.  Post often! In the first quarter of this year, I was posting at least once a week, sometimes new content sometimes just revamped old content.  I’ve never posted this much. Sometimes I would only post once a month. But because I posted so much on my blog I had a lot more to share throughout social media and on Facebook. 

I order to drive traffic do your blog, you have to have something to share!

How to use Facebook to Grow Blog Traffic

Facebook is probably a third largest contributor to my traffic growth.  Honestly I bought a $200+ Facebook course from Moolah Marketing, thinking it would work.  It does not! It does not work for bloggers that blog about more than one destination. I’ve actually done a search in the Moolah marketing Facebook Group and others have said the same, the strategies do not work for travel bloggers.

And in all honesty, I think Facebook Pages are dead unless you are creating viral videos.  I just don’t have the time to make these viral videos.  

What I do have time for is sharing my already created content and pictures in FACEBOOK GROUPS.  Facebook Groups are the 3rd largest driver of traffic to my site!

So join some Facebook Groups and start sharing.  

Most Facebook Groups though don’t allow you to share links, wanna know how I get around this rule and what kind of Facebook Groups to join?  Subscribe below to get my free guide on how to use Facebook Groups to get traffic to your site!