How to Get More Traffic From the Blog Posts You Write
One of my biggest frustrations with online marketing is how the rules keep shifting.
It can start to feel like you’re on a treadmill where every 60 seconds the speed automatically increases 0.1 mph.
A brisk walk turns into a steady jog which turns into an all-out sprint—and all this just to stay in one place!
This is *especially* true when it comes to getting traffic to your website.
10 years ago, you could just write good blog posts and the interwebz would bestow gushes of traffic upon you.
Now you have to write *amazing* blog posts, then hustle your butt off to get people to read them.
Reader Paras is wondering if I have any good tips for this:
I have few contents/posts already shared in my social media pages, now I want to promote my past posts even more so that it can reach more people.
Can you give some examples of websites like Reddit, Quora where I can promote my posts and help my audience benefit from it.
The first thing I’ll say on this is:
Most people don’t promote NEARLY enough on their social media channels.
In the last couple of years, Facebook, Twitter and most other social media sites have started “curating” content based on arbitrary and ever-shifting algorithms.
As a result most your followers won’t see 95-98% of what you publish.
So instead of just sharing a blog post once or twice, you can use a tool like MeetEdgar.com to create an few evergreen tweets or Facebook posts that will get published again and again every few weeks.
Here are a few other sites and “platforms” I’ve experimented with:
Medium – In addition republishing these emails to my blog, I also have my nimble-fingered assistant Aaron post them on Medium every week.
Results have been pretty “meh.”
Medium is another one of those “curated” platforms. Supposedly if you write stuff people read and share, they’ll give you more exposure. Readers seem to like my articles, but I don’t get much love from Medium. Might work better for your niche though.
Quora – In addition to republishing on Medium, I *also* post these as a blog on Quora.
The results from this are hilariously inconsistent. Some posts get less than 10 views, others get several thousand.
Regardless, I’m getting more traction here than on Medium.
LinkedIn Pulse – Every week I have Aaron pick the most viewed post from Medium and publish it as an article on LinkedIn.
Note that this is different from *sharing* an article on LinkedIn—the full text of your post appears on LinkedIn, and your followers get a push notification that you’ve published something new.
I have around 1,000 connections on LinkedIn, and most of my articles get anywhere from 5-15 views—not earthshattering, but still worth doing.
News aggregator sites – These vary by niche. For marketing, there’s inbound.org. For programming, there’s Hacker News, DZone, and a few others.
These are usually fickle. Sometimes you can hit a grand slam and get thousands of visitors, other times you get nothing.
One of the biggest news aggregator sites is:
Reddit – I don’t publish on Reddit very often, because when you do you’re playing with fire.
It’s really easy to get yourself banned. They’re particularly mean about it when they ban you, because you usually can’t tell. You can log in and post as normal, but nobody sees anything you’re doing. It’s like you don’t exist.
There is a way to use Reddit to get a lot of traffic without getting banned.
It does take some hustle though.
Here’s a good article about it: