Are you thinking about starting your own blog? If you have interests you want to share with other people, a blog offers you an opportunity to make an income out of your passion in life.

Starting your own website is a thrilling experience, and it's not as challenging as you think. Platforms like the WordPress CMS allow you to build a blog for free. There are plenty of web-builders like WIX that are ideal for creating a blog with no budget.

If you want your blog to succeed, you have to drive traffic to your posts. It's no good writing great content if no-one ever sees it, right?

Expert marketers understand that building a readership for a blog is as challenging as building an eCommerce store or any other online venture.

If you want to get more qualified traffic to your website and boost your page views, you need a traffic strategy that delivers results.

Traffic is the lifeblood of your new blog, and there are various ranking factors and strategies you can use to increase your daily visitor count. Let's unpack the methodology of getting your website more traffic.

Do you know your ideal reader persona?

Every small business has an ideal customer persona that they want to market to – and it's the same with your blog. You might think that you're a blogger, not a business owner, and that's okay.

The reality is that you're going to need to monetize your blog eventually – that's the point of building organic search traffic and a targeted audience to your blog.

Do you know the characteristics and demographics of your readers? Spend some time understanding your readership's average age, income, interests, and lifestyle, and use that data to create your ideal reader persona.

If you're having trouble identifying your reader persona, ask yourself the following questions.

• Who is the target audience?
• What issues do they experience in their life that your blog content can solve?
• What type of content do they like to read and engage with online?
• How would your readers find that content?

You can take this process a step further by adding other questions to uncover your readership's demographics.

• How old are your readers?
• What do they do for a living?
• What kind of educational background do they have?
• What experience do they have with the content you discuss on your blog?

Identifying the answers to these questions helps you build your reader persona. That data is critical when completing your keyword research.

It all starts with keyword research

Your blog needs to target specific keywords in your niche to catch the attention of the search engines. Keywords are the search terms your readers are using when they search for your content.

For instance, you might be talking about travel items to take with you on your trip. Looking for top-ranking long-tail keyword phrases in travel can help you identify keywords relating to your blog or content topics.

There are plenty of web tools out there like Ahrefs and SEMrush that assist you with your keyword research.

Keyword research is the most critical part of your digital marketing and SEO strategy. If you target the wrong keywords, it will attract the wrong type of traffic to your blog.

Many newbies to internet marketing don't put a lot of time into the keyword research phase because they don't understand its importance in their content strategy.

Keyword research might be time-consuming, but it gives you the foundation you need to build a successful blog.

Related: Guide to choosing keywords for your website's SEO strategy

Design your content marketing strategy

Bill Gates coined the phrase, "On the internet, content is king." And he is right. Some 15+ years after the internet started gaining traction, content is still the number-one traffic attraction to your blog.

If your blog has dray, rubbish content that no-one wants to read, you'll never get any traffic. Every piece of new content you publish needs to excite your readership.

If you find you're struggling with finding great content ideas, use web tools to help you find topics. Tools like BuzzSumo show you current trending content topics across social media platforms.

Use that data to build high-quality content that's relevant and engaging. Don't limit yourself to one style of content. Using video and infographics in your blogs is a great way to spice up your content.

The structure of your content matters as much as the information you give the reader. They need short sentences and paragraphs to keep their attention. Using this strategy also helps the search engines promote snippets from your blogs for SERP results in search.

Related: 12 exciting content ideas for your business blog in 2020

Enhance on-page SEO and website speed

We live in the age of instant gratification. When your prospects open their phone and check on their social media accounts or open email, they expect instant resolution from the platform.

The same applies to your blog. If your blog loads slowly, it costs you search traffic. Sure, you may think it's only five seconds of loading time, but that's a lifetime online.

By the time it gets to three seconds, your prospective reader is already clicking back to the Google search results.

On-page search engine optimization (SEO) strategies help you improve your site loading speed by fixing your website's errors like broken links, 404-pages, and other issues slowing your blog's performance.

Related: How to fix slow websites

Map out a backlinking strategy

Your backlinking strategy is one of the core aspects of building traffic to your site. Backlinking involves connecting your blog to other domain authority sites in your niche.

It's vital that you always "reach up" with your backlinking strategy. Make sure you're only creating backlinks with other sites that have a better ranking than your blog. Use a web tool like Moz to identify top ranking sites in your niche.

To connect your site with authorities, reach out to the other website's editorial or marketing department. Find out if they accept guest posts on their blog, and ask for a rate card to see what they charge for leaving as a guest blog on their site.

Most authority sites offer guest blogging opportunities for prices between $10 to $10, depending on their ranking. Top authority domains might charge you hundreds or thousands of dollars for a guest post.

When creating your guest post, you'll leave a hyperlink to your blog embedded in the content. When readers visit the guest post and find your link, they'll click on the link if they think it takes them somewhere interesting.

For instance, you could be running a lifestyle blog talking about travel tips. Find a travel website with a decent ranking authority, and ask to post a guest post with a permanent link.

In the post, you can talk about the top 10 travel destinations for honeymoons. In the post, you link to your blog about the top 10 travel tips for international vacations. When the reader sees your hyperlinked text, the CTA says, "check out these ten travel tips.

When the reader clicks the hyperlink, they open your new blog post.

Guest blogging is an excellent way to build organic traffic to your site. It's a vital part of your link building strategy to get more click-through traffic to your content and boost your ranking with the search engines.

If you keep up the linking strategy, you could build thousands of links to domain authority sites over the years, creating a constant flow of referral traffic to your blog.

Related: How to create backlinks to build your online business

Build your email list with landing pages

Landing pages and lead magnets are the best methods of building traffic to your blog. When the traffic opens your landing page, they'll see your value offer and a CTA asking them to subscribe to your blog.

If your offer is compelling, new visitors click the CTA and leave their contact information on your opt-in form. This data goes to your sales funnel, where you can start the email marketing process to convert them from a potential customer into a paying client.

Your subscribers are the foundation of your business. It would help if you did everything you can to grow your email list and capture their information for marketing purposes. The best blogs integrate with CRM solutions and other marketing features like Mailchimp and other software that automates your sales process and marketing duties.

Social media, forums, Q&A sites, and Influencer marketing

Social media is dominating modern culture and communications. All your prospects are online, and the vast majority of them are using social media to stay plugged into the digital world.

Even seniors use Facebook groups to communicate with family members and friends. The point is, your customers are online, and you can use social media strategies to drive them to your blog.

If you get your content onto the front page of Reddit, it could result in millions of views. Learning how to leverage these platforms to get social shares can dramatically improve your monthly visitor count.

Other platforms like LinkedIn are excellent social networks for sharing professional content. If you're a lawyer, accountant, or architect, publishing your blog content through your LinkedIn page and groups will net you plenty of social shares.

Q&A platforms like Quora also make for great Segway's to drive traffic to your blog. If you're writing a blog on a topic, research common FAQs on Quora. Answer as many questions as you can, and leave a link to your blog with a CTA like, "I wrote a blog on this; check it out here."

Influencer marketing involves reaching out to people with followings of between 10,000 to 25,000 users. These influencers are willing to promote your blog and content to their user base for a small fee.

Keeping it to micro-influencers with followings of this size ensures you don't have to spend huge amounts on your influencer marketing budget.

Track traffic and user engagement with Google Analytics

When traffic arrives on your website, you need to know where it's coming from. Understanding your traffic sources and what that traffic is doing on your site is paramount to improving your current strategy.

Google Analytics offers you the most powerful and comprehensive analytics web tool available. With Google Analytics data, you can track your traffic sources, with useful reports on what your visitors do on your site, the pages they visit, and how long they spend viewing your content.

Google Analytics is a critical component of your traffic strategy, and you'll need to integrate it into your website build. Search on YouTube for a step-by-step tutorial on how to install Google Analytics plugins into your WordPress CMS.

Related: How to use Google Analytics

Work with B12 for optimized blogs that attract qualified traffic

The development, launch, and maintenance of your blog is a challenge for most people new to the online world. Unless you have experience with HTML and other coding languages, you're going to need to hire a professional to assist you with your website design and SEO strategy.

There are millions of blogs out there in every niche you can imagine. To make your blog stand out and build traffic to your content, you need B12 to optimize your blog.

Typically, it costs you thousands of dollars to build a blogging website and hundreds of dollars to maintain it every month. Some bloggers make the mistake of using web-builders like WIX and SquareSpace, and then wonder why traffic never visits their blog.

The reality is, you need a professional to assist you. If your car breaks down, do you try and fix it yourself, or do you take it to the shop? So, why try to build a website if you know anything about the subject?

If it's cost holding you back, visit the B12 website right now. B12 offer a subscription package covering your site development and management for an affordable monthly fee.

Visit the B12 website, and request your free AI-assisted template design. B12 issue you with your template draft in less than 5-minutes; give it a try!