How To Get Traffic Your Blog Needs without Google?
In Part 1 of this article, I’ve shared 4 ways on how to get more blog visitors through social channels like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora in order to earn money online.
To successfully drive traffic through these channels, you must create compelling bio, consistently engage with the community and share high quality in-depth topics that can add value and solve their problem, before even thinking about driving traffic to your blog.
What I mean is you must build their trust before asking them to do anything for you – in this case is to get them to visit your blog.
In Part 2 of “Get More Blog Visitors (without Google), I will share with you the remaining 4 ways to drive traffic to your blog.
The next 4 channel-based traffic strategies are
- Guest blogging
- Influencer
- Offline materials
Here’s Part 1 of this article if you have yet to read.
Get More Blog Visitors with Email Marketing
Email marketing is very powerful and ranks as the number one method to boost organic traffic to your blog.
When do correctly, it not only improves traffic to your blog but also increase your brand awareness, social presence and ultimately build yourself as an authority in your niche.
Before this can happen, you will need to collect emails.
But how?
There are many ways you can convince people to give you their email address, you just need to be creative.
One way is to provide them with offers that are valuable to them, something that they can use when they sign-up.
I give away 55-pages free eBook on Beginner’s Guide to Blogging Success, providing content about how newbie can create a blog.
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You could also give out perhaps a video tutorial, list of resources, discount coupons, free software or get them to subscribe to your newsletter so they get regular content updates from you.
Once you have a compelling offer, next is to create a landing page (sign-up page) and find an email marketing tool that you can use.
I am currently using Aweber as my email marketing tool. It is a very reliable and simple to use for new to intermediate marketers. You can try out free for 30 days, thereafter at a small fee.
To create landing page, I use Profit Builder . It is very affordable yet is a powerful drag and drop landing page builder.
Other than creating sign-up page, you can also use it to create your blog homepage, sales page, webinar page and product review pages (this is how I use).
When your visitors subscribe to receive content updates from you, you will be able to send them your affiliate offers (learn how beginners can to start affiliate marketing) or latest article, thus made them visit your blog to read the content if they find it interesting.
You are able to create a domino effect when your subscribers clicked on the link in your newsletter.
This means once they clicked on it, your blog visitors will increase, shares to social channels will increase, backlinks can be potentially created, and finally google ranking will improved.
But how?
Return visitors are mostly satisfied and engaged visitors. They are likely to share your content and comment on your blog.
Based on algorithmic features and data collection, one factor to get good SEO ranking is “satisfaction”.
This means customer satisfaction increases the overall SEO value of your blog.
When you send out email about a new post, satisfied subscribers will visit your blog. They will share your post on social networks and their friends will read and share too.
Your blog will gain additional clicks from social sharing and this helps your article spread farther.
Subscribers or anyone who find your article valuable will potentially link to your blog post from theirs.
This means, the more email subscribers you have, the more shares, backlinks and on-site engagement will be created, and ultimately your blog will be perceived as an authority by Google.
It all builds up, and organic traffic gradually increases. This is a domino CYCLE!
Guest Blogging to Build Authority
Another way that can effectively drive traffic to your blog is through guest blogging. What you do here is to blog on another person’s blog.
If done well, it can potentially improve your search rankings and drive targeted traffic that is ready to buy from you.
Let’s take a look at how to accomplish this.
I would say the most important is to set a topic and start your research.
You need to spend time reading several articles of your topic, read comments and find out which content was greatly discussed recently or has more shares.
Then find any gap that you can leverage on to start writing your masterpiece that is going to enhance value of your chosen topic.
Once these are done, is time to start finding the perfect blog you can guest post.
Some blogs allow you to submit an article as guest post but some want you to sign up as contributor before they can accept your submission.
Both ways are fine and won’t have much impact on you.
Make sure you submit good image (preferably a person doing something relevant to the topic) together with your article. This will attract better response and readership from blog visitors.
Not only that, Google will like it as well.
Immediately after your guest post goes live, share and boost the post on social networks.
If your guest post topic is targeting B2B, I would suggest you to boost on LinkedIn. For B2C, boosting the post on Facebook is a must.
I am not saying just sharing the link on your page.
What I mean is you need to pay for advertisement to boost the post because that’s how you are able to target specified audience who might be interested in your topic.
Many do not know that guest posting can indirectly impact SEO rankings when the right strategy is used.
So how does it works?
Most blogs will allow you to post link, either on your author bio page or the content itself. Either one, you will get a link back to your blog.
If you can get a link in the content of the guest post, I suggest you to include an anchor key phrase or similar phrase you are targeting to rank, then link to the article of your own blog.
This can indirectly improve your SEO ranking.
One of the hardest parts of guest blogging is finding the right blogs to guest post on. If you are new to guest blogging, then here is a list of reputable blogs that accept guest bloggings.
Do read the terms and conditions before starting with them so you can have better chances of success.
But if you prefer to get paid writing for others, you can try to write for Textbroker or Listverse, the former is suitable for new writers and the latter for experienced writers.
More ways to earn money online writing can be found here.
Influencer Marketing to Get Backlinks
Influencer marketing is a strategy whereby businesses partner with social media users or bloggers who have large, engaged audience to promote their products.
Influencer marketing has been gaining popularity with marketers over recent years and it is continuously growing.
In fact, many big brands are willing to pay influencers a bigger chunk of their marketing campaign for their brands to be seen.
If you too want to earn money as influencer, here’s how you can start with becoming Instagram influencer.
From a distance, it may seem like influencer marketing is an expensive way to market your products or services.
But the truth is that it's one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, just like email marketing as it is highly targeted.
One thing you can be sure working with influencers is your product will definitely reach targeted people that is not within your company’s ability to reach.
But as a new blogger with limited budget, how can you get influencers to promote your brand?
Here I am going to share with you tactics you can use to get influencers to promote your post link with minimal fee or best without the need to pay them anything.
To be successful in influencer marketing, the first thing you need to do is to find the right influencers.
I know you are new and might not have more to buy tools.
To help you get started with influencer marketing, you can make use of free platforms like Influence.co to conduct your influencer search or a more popular platform like BuzzSumo that comes with 7 days free trial.
If you are a new blogger, I suggest you to best work with micro-influencers. They are minor celebrities with social media followings of specific niches.
Despite not having millions of followers, they still can help you engage your audience.
According to research conducted by Bloglovin, most micro influencers will charge not more than $250 per Instagram post.
Ok, I just mentioned that you can even get influencers to promote your brand without paying them right?
This takes a longer journey but once you get it right, the results can be really amazing.
First, you must engage with your influencers and get them familiarize with you or your brand. There are few ways you can get noticed.
One way is to engage (either like, share or comment) with them on their page (blog and social networks) regularly. When I say regularly, what I mean is at least with a frequency of 4 to 5 times a week.
Make your conversation interesting and hopefully they will respond to you. Remember, your objective is to make them remember you.
Once they already know you, then produce at least 5 blog posts that regularly mention them and create a link to their blog or social account.
In your post, you must introduce them as the authority in their own niche, quote their success or share know-how.
You must either become their subscriber or customer so you can explain on how you benefit from their content or the product.
If it is a physical product that you bought, demonstrate how to use the product and embed a video onto your blog.
Of course, you must truly trust them before sharing anything on your blog.
Remember, being authentic is the most important thing you must have in building trust in any relationship.
So, be authentic.
Once you have done this, then is time to send them an email informing them about you mentioning them in your blog post, hopefully they will reciprocate with a link back to your blog.
Do not give up if they didn’t reply your first email. You can follow up with the second and third email.
Influencers received many emails a day so it is common if they missed one or two. With consistence and patience, I am sure you will definitely get their reply.
Replicate this method on other influencers to increase your chances of success.
Offline Materials to Get Blog Visitors
Boosting traffic offline is often overlooked. But when utilizing offline channels effectively, it can have huge impact on your blog traffic.
I am sure you realized that many consumers like me and you will make online purchase decision after receiving influence from offline channels, eg: from friends.
Therefore, promoting your blog using tangible, real-world physical objects can be highly effective to get blog visitors.
One way is to offer free giveaways. It can be something useful like reusable bags, mugs, bookmark, pens, notebook, and many more.
But make sure the money you are planning to spend can bring you greater return.
Flyers and brochures might give you an “old-fashioned” feeling. Yet, you will be surprised that distributing these with links consisting bonuses or discounts to your products can get more people to visit your blog.
Another good channel is to try print ads. When you're crafting your ad, other than your blog link, make sure you include relevant keywords and persuasive call to action.
Again, some kind of incentives will do the tricks.
One last promotion material that every blogger must have is business card. You can either have a physical or digital business card.
Having a digital card is cool but not having a physical card is going to make you lose potential opportunities to get blog visitors.
Whatever card you are using, remember to include a concise, but powerful description of your brand. Best if you can include persuasive call-to-action or any phrase that can add value to people you give the card to.
Bring your business card when attending events. With a creatively designed business card, it helps to start a conversation with your future prospect.
Use this opportunity to impact others in the physical space and drive more traffic to your site.
My Best Strategy to Get Blog Visitors
Despite I’ve shared with you 8 ways to drive visitors to your blog (Part 1 can be found here), my best traffic generation method is still search marketing, the type that drives free traffic with SEO strategies.
I did not start my online business with too complicated stuffs. I use all free traffic strategies.
What I did other than finding a unique niche and building a blog, is to apply 4 tactics.
- Craft SEO optimized headlines
- Create high quality content with powerful call-to-action
- Insert long-tail keywords into each content to get ranked on Google
- Immediately share on social networks after each post is published
You too can sign up for free training here if you want to learn how to monetize and earn 5 to 6 figure income blogging with free traffic strategies.
Here are some income testimonials from bloggers that I know, including mine.
To recap, here are 8 channel-based traffic strategies that I’ve covered in both Part 1 & 2 of this article.
- YouTube
- Quora
- Guest blog
- Influencer
- Offline materials
I hope I’ve provided useful knowledge and resources for you to have better understanding on how to get more blog visitors without relying on Google.
p/s: if you like this post, please share on your Facebook too.
Do leave me a comment if there’s any topic about earn money online that you want me to share on my blog or alternatively if you want to get personalized advice from me, you can connect with me here.