How to Increase Your website Audience
You can have the wittiest, most useful content on the web, but it does not matter if nobody can see it. Increasing your website audience is essential to the longevity and profitability of any blog, but you cannot simply magic new visitors out of thin air. You need a concerted strategy on getting new people to your site, which means utilising every out-of-the-box idea you can come up with.
Here are just unconventional ideas on increasing your blog audience and creating a community that will increase organically.
1 – Create (or co-opt) your target community
If you have created a cookery blog, then the most fool proof way of directing visitors to your site is participating in the online cookery community. Find websites, blogs, forums and chat rooms where people who love cookery like to visit, and start networking. There is a whole lot of subtly to the art of networking: do not be that annoying spammer who tries and fails to casually name-drop their blog twenty times over. Instead, make actual friends. Get to know your target audience on a personal level. It takes time, but if you make a name for yourself then people will naturally start checking you out and looking at your own blog. This is a time investment, but it is the best way to get visitors who will keep on coming back.
2 – Bribe some love: free downloads, giveaways and content
Ideally you should be getting visitors because your primary content is awesome, but in the meantime you can always bribe some love for your website. By creating fresh content for downloading such as a short Kindle e-book, graphics or how-to videos, you can encourage people to return to your website (and share it with your friends) because of the material gains.
3 – Going social
Going social isn’t as easy as it sounds, but in general it is easier to get someone to like you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter than it is to make a dedicated website visitor. Trying building a dedicated social network following is tough, but it is a great step to take if you want to get a following for your website. By following the right people and getting them to follow you back, you can share your most SEO friendly content and hopefully get it retweeted or shared to a new audience.
4 – Make the right connections
One high-profile visitor from your particular blogosphere is better than one hundred visitors are not. Getting just one other high-profile blog to notice you can drive an intense amount of traffic to your blog. If you know that a high-profile blogger likes your website, then try arrange a guest post or a shout-out. It’s not what you know, it is who you know.
5 – Get your white-hat on!
Making sure that you are ranking high for the right search terms is visitor gold, so get your white-hat on and make sure your SEO tactics are up to scratch. Make sure your blog is properly optimised and get some organic link-building done. You’ll soon be ranking high and pulling in visitors in no time!
