You run a blog, perhaps for yourself, as a freelancer, or for your business. But traffic has flatlined lately.
It happens to the best bloggers, but it can quickly become a serious problem if you rely on blog visitors to make money from your blog.
If traffic has flatlined recently on your blog, these four tips will help jump-start your blog and help you get back on track.
Redefine your goals
It’s possible that when you started your blog, you were aiming for a few posts a month that might drive some extra traffic to your business website or make some money from placed ads.
Perhaps you achieved this goal and now traffic has flatlined. That means it’s time to reassess and redefine your goals.
Great blogs grow over time and draw in a wider readership. Think about what you want to blog about now and who you want to attract to your blog. It could be time to broader your blog’s goals.
Optimize your website
You can promote your blog on social media all you like, but if your website isn’t optimized for SEO, you’ll miss out on organic search visitors. If SEO has never crossed your mind when creating your blog, it’s definitely time to optimize your website.
One of the best and most effective ways to optimize your website is to hire a company that provides digital marketing audit services. They will give you a report on your website’s current optimization and can advise how you can improve it. There are also plenty of SEO guides online, but if you’re not confident with SEO, hiring outside help could offer a quick fix for your blog traffic problems.
Refresh your content
Are you posting the same humdrum content? Do you have old posts that could be refreshed and reposted? A blog’s traffic is only as good as its content, so if it’s flatlined that probably means your content has flatlined too.
Start by looking at old posts and seeing if they could be updated and pushed through your social media and email channels again. After that, make a new content plan for your blog that will provide regular, unique, and interesting content, with at least three ideas for new topics.
You could also shake up your content by creating different types of content. Visual and video content is growing in popularity and adding a variety of media types to your blog could bring in a whole new audience.
Collaborate with other bloggers
Sometimes, the best thing you could do for your blog is to blog somewhere else. It might sound counterintuitive, but guest blog posts can bring in new visitors to your blog, get your name out there, and even offer some inspiration.
Use social media groups and forums to find other bloggers with shared interests and check out articles like this one on ways to collaborate with other bloggers for ideas. Guest posts are one of many ways you can get your content out there. You can also ask other bloggers to guest post on your blog and then promote via their own marketing channels – the possibilities for blog collaboration are endless.