It is an effective way of getting information out and engaging audiences, which is why blogging evolved from being an online personal journal to one of the main tools in digital marketing used to boost SEO, get leads and drive conversions.

It all starts with capturing people’s interests by having answers to their queries or search intent. Blogs could be about any niche or topic like fashion, beauty, family, business, technology, and the like. It could be more specific, too, like homeschooling under family/education, or cybersecurity under technology/business.

In the internet’s plethora of content, there is such a wide-open market to blog. Starting a blog is easier now with platforms like WordPress. There are different WordPress trends to guide you if you want to start your own. But once it is up and running, the next major challenge is to drive more traffic to your blog or website.

You do not have to be a marketing guru to put bring exposure to your blog. Here are ten ways to increase your blog traffic like a professional marketer.

10 Ways to Increase and Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

1. Write Good Content

To attract readers with your blog, the writer—whether it is you or somebody else in your team—must be knowledgeable and proficient in what they are writing about. People will read content that they find valuable to them and share it with others, thinking it will find value to others as well.

Even if it is a technical blog, the readers need to feel they are “conversing” with a real individual who is adept in the topic. Blogs like this tend to have more following because people do not just follow a blog; they follow people.

Even if you are a big brand, readers want to feel the human side of your brand or the people behind it. A blog is a great way to do that.

2. Find Your Niche and Become an Expert in It

It is better to write in your niche as well. You cannot be an expert on every subject or a Jack-of-all-trades. Even if you try, people go for expertise because they want their needs met well.

You are selling yourself cheap when you spread yourself thinly on different niches. Boost your credibility as a writer by concentrating on one or two niche-specific expertise and publish engaging content on those subject matters consistently.

3. Write Strategically to Meet Your Readers’ Needs

Writing to improve blog traffic means you are writing strategically. Blog traffic increases when you rank on SERP (Search Engines Result Page). To rank in SERP, your content needs to hit SEO (Search Engine Optimization) factors that search engines look for. Search engines respond to people’s search intent, which means the content you are writing must meet a specific need.

You can also find more ideas in forums like Quora, or even use Buzzsumo to learn about what articles have been written about your intended topic, and make something better or something that has not been covered yet.

4. Write Consistently

The more you write blogs and write consistently, the more your blog traffic increases. Google prioritizes sites that release fresh content consistently.

Whether you publish a blog weekly or twice a week, you need to be consistent about it. Consistency is a trust factor that readers look for.

5. Use Attention-Grabbing Headlines

Headlines need to be attention-grabbing so that readers will want to click on your link on SERP or whatever platform you used to promote your blog. A good title is not only persuasive but also gives the reader a clear idea of what to expect in your blog.

If your title is bland or vague, readers will skim through it on search engines and will hardly take a second look. It prevents you from being discovered, opposite of what you want if you are aiming to drive more traffic to your site. So, your headlines, titles, even meta descriptions must pack a punch.

6. Include Evergreen Content in Your Blog

Write content that is evergreen, SEO content that is continually relevant, and stays “fresh” for readers. Evergreen content is the kind of content that can remain on the web forever and will not be obsolete even over time.

For instance, writing about “Hot SEO Topics this 2020” may not be as hot in 2021, but if you create a topic like “5 Reasons You Should Boost Your SEO Strategy,” it can live longer on the web. Writing about what is fashionable for 2020 will become less relevant at the turn of the year while writing about strategies to power-dressing can stay relevant even as fashion trends come and go.

HubSpot suggests that writers should write with the right balance of timelessness and sustainability. Most “How To” guides are evergreen content. “How to create stunning images for the web” is evergreen, while “How to upload images from your mobile device to Facebook” may not be. But if the guide is updated to when mobile technology or Facebook changes, then it can become evergreen content.

7. Determine Consumer Avatars or Profiles to Write Relevant Content

Before creating content, you need to understand whom you are writing for. A writer must understand the target audience, what problems do they have that you can help solve, what kind of content interests them, and how how they would typically try to find the answers to their questions?

Also, determine the demographic of your target audience, like age, occupation, education level, expertise on the subject matter, and even level of tech-savviness.

Create 3 to 4 buyer personas so you can cover as much of your target audience as much as possible. Here is an example of a consumer avatar.

8. Find Where Your Target Audience Is

You need to promote your content on social media. But you need to know where your target audience is. Each social media platform specializes in a specific demographic.

Facebook and YouTube cover more in terms of age, location, gender, interests, and hobbies, and the like. Instagram and Twitter cater to younger millennials and Generation X, while TikTok and Snapchat cater to Gen X to Y.

Although, recently, due to the pandemic, TikTok has become the leading social media platform, so much so that brand promotion on TikTok is a trending strategy among bloggers, websites, and different brands.

9. Create Long-Form Content

Long-form content performs better in search results compared to thin content or short posts. It is a high-word-count post that provides in-depth detail on a subject, to the greater satisfaction of readers.

Content that is in long-form content helps drive more traffic and higher SEO ranking. Longer posts are richer in keywords, and key phrases will tend to be evergreen, and appear in SERP for long-tail keyword searches, which improves and drive more traffic to your blog.

10. Create Engaging Content With Images and Videos

Your blog cannot just be all text. About 43% of readers simply skim through content. They will only dwell on the blog if it is useful for them or at least engaging and entertaining.

Adding images and videos attracts more readers to your blog, and makes your blog even more share-worthy. Both are critical ingredients for driving your blog traffic.

Readers consume content in an F-shape pattern and read about 20% of your content. Optimize that by giving readers a better glimpse of your content thru impactful titles, headings, and bullet points, and of course, images and videos.

Your posts have more chances of being shared if it has images and videos. Social media users tend to prioritize clicking through content that has more engaging content, so make sure you use original media content in high-quality.

Videos in your blog content can bring a 72% improvement in conversion rates. You can make original blog images like a pro with user-friendly photo-editing apps even right in your mobile phone.

Using an app can help you churn content with images and videos faster for your blog and social media accounts for clickthrough options for those who get curious about your content.

Conclusion: Write with Passion and Purpose

There are other ways to drive more traffic to your blog, but these ten tips are sure to give you a great headstart. In all this, write with passion and purpose every time.

It means that you will not write content just because you want to trend, get more leads, and drive conversions. Those things are essential, of course, but that the heart of every content should be a purpose to help answer people’s needs and bring value to their lives.

You can have all the right ingredients search engines look for, but it takes skill and insight to create a blog that will be appealing and engaging for people. Not everyone can be a chef, but everyone can appreciate food. Not everybody can be a talented writer, but a good writer can touch people’s hearts, grab their attention, and cause them to consume your content with gusto.

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Still, there are songs of resounding victory of those earning 6-digit figures annually only from blogging. The successes and the failures of starting a blog all go down to the principle basics the blogger initiated before and during the blog setup.

When searching out ‘how to start a blog,’ you usually find technical terms and jargon which more or less discourages a multitude from getting in the gig. You would think it’s rocket science only to realize it’s as easy as taking a long pee – you just need to be focused and dedicated enough to the last drop.

Therefore, we have decided to compile a simplified step-by-step guide on how to start an actual career in blogging with WordPress and see yourself making it big time.

If you are a gambler used to the novoline games and are hoping to start a get-rich-quick kind of a Ponzi scheme. We are quite apologetic for turning down your high hopes. Some virtues of getting you started include PATIENCE, hard work and a handful of passion.

Laying the Ground Rules to Start a Blog

Perhaps you are wondering this early why our choice is to blog on WordPress as the best of them all. WordPress has been around for a long time. Grown in the market, and has diversified to cater to a broad clientele.

You might be surprised to find out that while you can start a free blog post under WordPress, the New York Times and the likes of the Washington Post and CNN.com are all sites sponsored by WordPress.

With their longevity in the market, friendly deals and capability for expansion, no other site beats WordPress at their game!

Purposeful Passion

As promised above, we will show you how to set up a blog without complicating it any more than it already has been. Like with any other venture, you need to ask yourself some questions which can form the basis of your ‘business plan’.

After all, there is this African proverb that refers to the river and its source and goes something like: ‘you cannot know where it is you are headed to if you are oblivious to where it is you are coming from.’

Are you in it for the fun of writing? Or are you aiming to make a couple of dollars from it? What’s your passion level?

Once your purpose is clearly defined, then you can proceed to identify a need or a market gap. This simply entails finding and realizing a blogging topic which you will be rotating around. This could be something as diverse as food, photography, or even something as intimate as relationships and counseling or still something more outgoing like sports and workout sessions.

It’s at this point that we’ll give you the next spoiler alert: we might give you some sleek ideas to kick you off in the right direction on a blog to start, but we would never directly tell you to try this or that out. This decision is fully yours to make, and you need to make it wisely.

What to consider to start a blog on WordPress

Purposeful passion is all about finding out what you love doing. It’s about finding purpose in your work, which will make it fun for you. Still, you can self-analyze yourself and define your potential and strengths. Combining what you love with something you are good at, or finding a balance will form a fundamental basis that will be the beginning of your successful blogs.

Carry Out a Market Analysis

Products are usually tested before given a chance for mass production. This is basically to see how the consumer reacts to the product and the general acceptance. It’s straightforward to test your product (blog ideas) on the internet. Google now offers a plethora of tools to assist in such activities.

For instance, Google Trends enables you to explore and find out precisely what the entire universe is searching for on Google. This will also give you the upper hand when deciding how to structure your posts and what titles to give to your blog.

Also, if torn between two particular ideas – say travel and fashion. Google Trends will also help you see which makes more searches daily. Whatever you choose, be original!

Setting Up the WordPress Blogging Platform

From this part, it might get a little bit technical since this is the main part, but we’ll break it down as best as we can. Your blog needs to be simplified for a start so that you can get a grasp of things before you can think of employing more expensive tools to fashion your site.

The beauty with WordPress is that it allows you to scale up your blog site as time goes by with powerful plugins and tools.

Once you have decided on the purpose and what will be the main feature in your blog. Then come up with a domain name. This is essentially how people will be reaching out to you. It’s more or less similar to the user name on Facebook or Instagram or your phone number in WhatsApp.

Examples of common domain names include CNN.com, certifiedprince.wordpress.com, and Wikipedia.com. You can form this from a catchy headline with which you want your readers to recognize you by – a brand name of sorts.

Otherwise, you can also use your name or initials to come up with this. A strong point to remember is that the domain name should be easy for your readers and other visitors to remember and even recommend.

Get Hosted

To put this in plain terms. You need to ‘rent a house online where users will get easy access to your data, products, and information.’ This is the simplest definition of a server host website. You pay a few bucks each month and they, in turn, ensure that there’s always a space in their servers where your content can be accessed by the general public.

Here, you have plenty of online options including Kinsta, DigitalOcean, DreamHost and SiteGround. Nevertheless, if you are looking for convenience, flexibility, and assurance, we would recommend you to BlueHost servers.

You will follow a certain process depending on the host you will choose for your blog. Then you will choose the monthly or yearly plan you can afford – the list of features to be enjoyed will be displayed. Once finished, open the WordPress domain name using your selected host.

Furnishing Your Blog Site

There’s still a lot to be done. Remember, the goal here is to attain the height of successful blogs. This means you should also be well-acquainted with what other successful bloggers are doing and their writing techniques.

This doesn’t mean you need to copy anything but you can still borrow a lot since you are just getting started. Learn from their experience to avoid making some silly mistakes.

WordPress offers you the opportunity of setting up customizable themes. Some of these are available for free while others come in a premium package. Choose a theme that suits your blog niche. On the blog setup section, create the number of pages you may desire for your site.

While still furnishing your blog pages, you can make use of free WordPress plugins or still opt to use the premium ones.

What Should I Write About?

Now you have a blank page staring at you, and you are probably wondering, what next! This is where SEO techniques come in handy. Make use of keyword search tools such as Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner to find out exactly what people want to know in that particular area.

Also, while still following your passion. You can replicate content from other successful bloggers in your niche as you pick ideas on what to write about.

Blog Promotion and Blog Making Money

We had to save the best for last. Since the hassle has to go on, consider the following means to not only promote your work but also keep you in the limelight and draw attention and dough to yourself:

1. Remain present on social media platforms and strive to associate with other bloggers on sincere grounds.
2. Leave regular honest comments to other blogs, which may lead to email conversations and eventually help you take part in guest posts. You might also end up in podcast interviews – stay open.
3. Take part in active forums as well as question and answer sessions as this draws attention to you.
4. Consider getting paid to write sincere reviews on different products.
5. Take part in affiliate sales and advertising revenues such as Google AdSense.
6. Last and most important, have your own product to sell!

Conclusion

Let’s hope we’ve helped water down your previous fears of starting a blog. A slow but sure step by step is the name of the game. If you do not lose sight of the goal, you will eventually attain it. You won’t be weighed down by the sweat you had to shed to accomplish it.

Train yourself to enjoy and celebrate the small victories you make. If by now you’ve been able to get started on your blog, let’s raise a glass to that! Have you managed this fete or are you stranded somewhere in-between? Share below and receive all the help you need.

The post How to Start a Blog That Makes Money Using WordPress appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Blog Designer makes your blog section more intuitive with no coding skills. You can save valuable time for blog designing and blog development. It’s straightforward to manage for both a beginner to a website developer.

The #1 Blog Designer Plugin for WordPress

The Blog Designer, Pro blog layout plugin, is bundled with precisely designed 35+ default blog templates with 100+ option combinations for various categories. It can filter your posts category and tag wise. The plugin contains multiple layouts to create your posts in your desired way. It gives you new edges to your blogging site and fantastic experience, too.

If you are looking for category/tag archive design, then Blog Designer is the best solution for you that you have never seen above. Every single blog template contains several options to manage your blog style and design, like colors, font-style, font-family, etc.

Blog Designer helps your visitors to treat with an excellent reading experience. It’s a balance between visual design and compelling content presentation. This allows you to grab users’ attention on posts very quickly. Its great layouts and color combinations present your blog images with the perfect edge. It has a wonderful block section, which improves your text visibilities.

Add unlimited blog & archive layouts. You can also use those blog layouts on your site with different-different pages or use it with any single page via layout shortcodes. You can change blog page design easily anytime with our favorite design collections, show/hide post meta, social share, and much more.

The blog designer plugin also provides a unique and global design for the Author page. The post date(archive) page will be displayed the same as Author Page.

Blog Designer Pro Features

• Beautify Your Post Design
• Fully Responsive
• Multiple Browser Compatibility
• Multilingual Translation Ready
• Fully Customizable Admin Interface
• 35+ Different and Unique Blog Templates
• Import & Export Layout
• Duplicate Layout
• Support of Single Post Design
• Multiple Theme Support
• Reorganize Your Blog Page
• Custom Post Type Support
• Live Preview
• Show/Hide Post Meta
• Google Font Support
• Template with Two, Three, and Four Columns
• 5+ Grid layout templates
• 3 Slider Layouts
• Color Customization Options
• Custom CSS

We are sure that it will get your visitors to fall in love with your blogging site for the first time. Check out the demos for more inspiration. So, let’s embark on your blogging journey with Blog Designer Pro WordPress Plugin now.

The post Blog Designer Pro – The Perfect WordPress Blog Layout Plugin appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Blogs are a strong communication tool for people and business owners to communicate their thoughts and ideas to millions of visitors and viewers. They use it for affiliate marketing, searching information, providing business and products information, SEO, social networking and others. It has also become a crucial tool for businesses to reach to their target customers. The companies even hire developers to develop and design Blogs for their business. Useful quality contents can attract large numbers of loyal visitors, customers, and subscribers.

There are also certain ways that can make your Blog popular among target visitors and audience. You can follow given steps to attract large visitors to your writings:

1. Set a Goal

Blogging has become a craze among people these days. Many write for communicating their ideas and information to a larger audience, but they forget that Blogs are created to serve a purpose, and it must be useful to visitors. If they are created without any goal, readers may show some interest in the beginning and read your writings, but after a while, they may not find your story appealing and will not visit your writings.

If there are no visitors, you will have no alternative except to shut down. This is also one of the reasons why new blogs are launched and many shut down.

You can avoid closing down if you create a blog that appeals to a specific section of people or general audience and serves their purpose. Your goal must be to attract your target people through writings that are useful to your visitors. You must also generate their continuous interest in your writing by sticking to your topic and broadening it with related information.

2. Deliver Values

Mostly people visit Blogs depending upon their interest. Their motive is to get information or gain knowledge on a topic or field. If your blog correlates to their interest, they will read your writings, but if your contents do not provide the required information, they may shift over to other blogs to get what they want. So, you must remember that people visit your writings if they deliver value to them.

For example, if your writings are based on college education, you must be sure that it has contents that offer valuable information on different aspects of college education. The same readers may again visit your writings to get additional information, and in return, you gain a loyal follower.

3. Provide Share Links

A successful Blog has a large number of loyal followers and visitors. You can attract these visitors to writing by linking your contents to different social networking sites. You can provide share links for popular networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. You can have large viewers from networking sites if visitors share your post on their network.

4. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is also an important way to make you and your blog popular among the audience. There are many top ranked Article Directories like Ezine Articles and others that have hundreds and thousands of visitors and subscribers. They also invite authors to write for their site as a guest author and allow these authors to include one or two links on their contents targeting their blog.

The only criteria for writing in these directories is to follow their strict guidelines related to quality, grammar, the length of the article and other guidelines. One can post contents on these directories and direct large visitors and subscribers to the blog through inserted links.

5. SEO-friendly Contents

Make your content SEO-friendly to increase traffic to your blog. Today, all popular blogs are very specific about Search Engine Optimization because SEO is the best way to attract target visitors and subscribers. You can insert keywords and links into the title or body of the content. Such keywords improve your Google ranking. If anybody searches any information related to your topic, your ranking in Google will immediately bring your blog to the notice of the visitors.

6. Reader Friendly Contents

If you want visitors to read your writings, you should write reader-friendly contents. The visitors come to your blog in search of information, but if your writings have complex and long sentences that are difficult to understand, and if content is filled with unnecessary information, the readers may skip and switch to other sites. To make your content more reader-friendly, you must write quality contents with short and simple sentences. You must also avoid filling it with unnecessary details to make it monotonous.

If there are long sentences, you must break them and write short sentences. You must also use the title, summary, categories, tags, and date of the post, and insert research and study links of survey agencies to show that all your information are true and obtained from reliable research agencies. The reader will also be assured that he/she is getting genuine information. These visitors will also come back again to your blog for additional information.

 7. Comments on Related Posts

Many related sites have posts that have Comments and link insertion sections. You can post comments on these contents and insert your links. This is also a way to increase traffic to your blog.

A Blog is only successful if it can attract a large audience and loyal followers. It must also serve the purpose for which it is created. The visitors must also keep coming back to your writings and share, and to make it happen; you can follow these given ways to draw visitors and subscribers.

Author Bio

Wendy Tan holds expertise in WordPress website development. Having worked with many reputed firms in the past, she can build you an intelligent website based on your business needs. She directly deals with hire the expert WordPress professionals the clients and helping them from her team. She feels that customer satisfaction is of utmost importance and she delivers the best to the clients.

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