At one time or another, bloggers go through a period of ‘blogging drought’ where there is a lull in blogging and readers are scarce.

For instance, you may have published an epic, well-written post, and you expected (or rather, hoped for) thousands of others to see it, read it, and possibly share and comment on it.

But all you got instead was crickets.

Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us. There are times when we feel like no one in the world is paying attention to our blog, let alone reading articles and sharing them. Luckily, there are easy ways to deal with the blogging drought phenomenon no matter what niche or industry you’re in.

Admittedly, the competition has grown fierce over the past few years, with tons of awesome new content creators popping up each and every day.

But, if you make use of the tips and tricks outlined in this post, you will be able to stand out from your competition and serve your readers with exceptional content that invites engagement.

6 Tried And Tested Ways To Attract Relevant And Targeted Blog Traffic

1. Link To Influencers In Your Content

Despite what most people think, links to other sites don’t impact your rankings in the search engines directly.

But having said that, it’s still important to link out to other content written by influencers in your industry as this can be a huge factor in getting your content shared.

This is a tactic that smart marketers have been using for years, and it’s great for increasing the conversion rate of your outreach emails.

This is a technique that you can employ to build relationships with influencers in your niche, where you can then proceed to line up guest-blogging opportunities, work on co-marketing campaigns together, and other stuff like that.

Use the following process to get the best results:

• Come up with a list of influencers relevant to the content you’re creating
• Search for specific resources created by each influencer on your list
• Collect contact information for each of them (email addresses, social media accounts, etc.)
• Publish your new content with the links to the influencers’ resources
• Reach out to everyone whose content you linked to in your post and let them know that they were featured
• Mention them in tweets with links to the content, or tag them within images in the tweets

Just by following this simple process, you significantly increase the likelihood that other people will share your content.

2. Build An Asset That Is Linkable

If your goal is to rank for competitive keywords, then links are still the most vital thing to have.

There is a huge positive correlation between a URL’s back-links and the amount of organic traffic that it generates. This is true even for massive authority sites. Back-links still matter a lot even for sites with loads of links that point to their domain.

To rank well, they still have to earn links to each piece of content.

The main issue faced by bloggers is that earning back-links can prove to be quite difficult. One way of ranking for more competitive terms is by building out assets for your own site that are highly linkable.

Make sure those resources are either aimed at ranking for a particular keyword, or passing internal links to another piece of content you’re trying to rank.

Use the following three steps to create your asset:

Step #1: Before you start creating this asset, ask yourself: Who would link to you?

You don’t want to waste your time creating a useless infographic that has no relevance to your brand whatsoever. So take some time to consider who would possibly want to link to the content you want to create.

In most cases, this won’t actually be your customer avatar or buyer persona, unless your buyers happen to have the linking ability – that is if they have websites and would actually mention and link to your content – in which case, you would get even better results for your effort.

But in most cases, the people who link to you will likely be a bit different than the ones who buy from you.

The big links that you want will typically come from publishers of both blogs and editorial publications. Just remember to manage your expectations here.

Don’t set yourself tough goals such as trying to get links from the Wall Street Journal first time around. To start off with, set the bar a bit lower and then move up from there.

Step #2: The next part of the process involves conceptualizing an idea

To start this process, look at the kinds of ideas that are already working well within your own industry.

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to help you find the most popular content in your niche. Sift through the top performing content to get an idea of a specific angle that you can take.

It will also show you how you can format your own content.

Before deciding on the format, make sure you already have a good idea. You can’t start your idea process by saying something like, ‘I want to design an infographic’. That isn’t an idea – creating infographics is a format.

Step #3: Decide on the format you’re going to use

A simple way of differentiating your idea from others is to format it a little differently.

Just be careful to ensure that you’re still appealing to the type of people that will be linking to your content.

There are many different content formats you can explore including the following options:

• Infographics
• Text Articles
• Videos
• Interactive Guides
• Mobile or web apps
• Tools or software
• E-books
• Quizzes or surveys
• White papers
• ReviewsMemes
• Charts
• FAQs
• Lists
• Interviews
• Case studies
• Checklists
• Tutorials
• Illustrations
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Bookmarklets
• Browser extensions

Important Note:

Make sure that your content solves a problem.

When creating something like this, you should always ask yourself if you’re actually solving a real problem that the person you want to link to you has, otherwise your content will be worthless for attracting links.

3. Make Use Of Expert Roundups

These seem to be all over the internet these days – and with good reason.

They are great tools for building relationships with the influencers in your industry. Granted, they can be a little annoying because a lot of the time the responses are from readers who aren’t very knowledgeable on the particular topic, but expert roundups do get shared a lot on social media.

It’s mostly the individuals who contributed to the post who share it with their network, but that’s alright because instead of using expert roundups for driving social engagement, links, and leads, you can use it for the purpose of building relationships.

For instance, say you want your content shared or linked to by an influencer in your field.

Simply sending a cold outreach email asking them to do that isn’t likely to result in a high conversion rate, but if you already have a relationship with that influencer, then odds are you will see better results.

This tactic is particularly great for getting guest posting opportunities.

Use the following process to get the best results:

• Come up with a list of influencers that you want to form relationships with
• Get in touch with them and ask them to take part in your expert roundup by simply answering one question
• When the post is live, email them to notify them and ask them if you can get in touch with future projects
• A few weeks later, contact them again and ask what you really want (guest blogging opportunity, etc.), and thank them again for their contribution to your previous expert roundup

4. Create Topic Clusters Around Your Content

A topic cluster is basically a collection of semantically relevant pieces of content that, while covering small themes individually, have an overarching topic.

For example, let’s say your main topic revolves around Internet Marketing.

Within your site, you have many different articles that could fall under this topic cluster – for example:

• 8 SEO Trends To Watch Out For In 2019
• How Blog Monetization Works
• How To Write Compelling Headlines To Increase Blog Traffic
• How To Launch A New Blog And Generate Income In Just 3 Months
• And so on…

By having many groups of content all revolving around the same main topic, you build more relevance around those keywords and phrases that you want to rank for, which makes it a lot easier for Google to associate the content you create with certain topics.

In addition to that, it also makes it a lot easier for you to interlink between your pieces of content, which helps you create more internal links across your site.

The process of building topic clusters inside your domain is growing more and more essential from an SEO viewpoint.

This means that when you build out your editorial calendars, you have to ensure that you’re building relevance towards each of your core topics.

By using this simple approach, you will boost your ability to rank for many highly relevant terms that will bring tons of relevant targeted traffic to your website.

5. Seeding Promotion For Big Content

When planning for the launch of your big pieces of content, don’t make the mistake of relying too heavily on your content’s quality to earn coverage organically.

This is something that most people do, and in truth, it hardly ever works out that way no matter how awesome your content is.

Before launching your content, make sure that you’re seeding the promotion yourself to give it the best chance of performing well organically.

You can do this by aligning the launch of your content with a few guest posts to some relevant websites so that you can drive a huge amount of relevant traffic to the content, and also some relevant links.

This has a huge impact on the content’s organic amplification and means that even if the content doesn’t perform as well as you hope it will organically, you will still have something to show for it with regards to ROI.

Here is a simple example to explain this concept:

Say you put together a massive blog post outlining an email marketing strategy that you implemented on a site that you run.

Before going live with the post, you write up a case study around the same project, and lean heavily on the information that you explain within your blog post, and publish this as a guest post in one of the authority blogs in your niche.

This will not only give your blog post a second influx of valuable traffic, but it will also help the content to gain lots of social shares and high-value links.

As a result of such a method, your blog post has the chance to rank for those highly competitive terms from early on and it will continue to bring lots of targeted traffic to your blog (as well as new links) each month.

6. Use Influencer Platforms To Get Product Reviews

If you’re marketing products, then you might want to make use of influencer platforms to find and connect with bloggers that can promote your business.

You can use influencer platforms like Tomoson and Famebit to help you find people to work with.

You can team up with bloggers to get video or photo content produced and published, which could generate tons of traffic for your blog.

The price on these platforms can vary depending on the level of influence that the person you want to work with has, but you could pay as little as a hundred bucks for a campaign.

Of course, you could also spend way more than that, but that’s the great thing about these platforms – there’s such a diverse range of people that you can partner with which means that anyone can find one that fits their price range and campaign goals.

In Conclusion

These traffic generation methods have been tried, tested, and proven to work.

While they may seem like a lot of work in the beginning, the rewards are massive and well worth the time and effort spent on implementing them on your blog.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published October 26th 2018