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Welcome back to another Swift 6. This week I’m going to be talking to you about how you can get more traffic to your blog.So first off social media ads. So what I mean by this is adverts that run on either Facebook or Twitter. There are some other social platforms as well – there’s LinkedIn, Google + and there’s some other ones besides that – but the main ones I’m going to be discussing here are Facebook and Twitter.

So my advice here is to promote your blog posts to people who they are aimed at. Primarily your blog posts should be aimed at your current customers because you have an understanding of the needs and concerns of your current customers. Your blog posts are meant to address those needs. But don’t forget your customers won’t be the only people who have these needs and concerns. Think about the type of audience they are. The type of segment they are. Are the business owners based in London? Are they, for example, hairdressers based in the north of England?

If you use social ads, you can reach other users that have the same profile as your customers and you can target your blog posts at those users. So you can go into Facebook and you can target people who are based in the north of England and are hairdressers. If you’ve created a blog post which is right for your customers who are based in the north of England, then why not promote that blog post on facebook to exactly the same users. It’s something that we use on 123-reg and find that it works really well.

So the second thing is to send your blog posts to influencers and ask them to comment on it. So every market, every audience has experts and influencers. People who are looked to for advice, for thought leadership. Identify who these influencers are. There are a variety of ways to do this and I won’t go into the details on this post but there will be another one. Identify who these influencers are and then email them your blog post or tweet them your blog post. Try to get them to interact and read your content and if possible comment on it. Because if they comment on it, especially on social media, then others will follow their advice and will come along and read your blog post too.

So the third thing is to comment on other people’s blogs. This works really well especially if there is a question raised in the blog that you are commenting on. And if there is a question raised, and your blog post answers that question, then leave a comment, add something to the conversation there and refer those users to your blog post where that question is answered.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be a question. It might be that your post is a continuation of a debate or conversation or a point that the original post is making. So get involved, leave a comment, and share a link to your blog posts where people can read more, or read in more depth, or can find out more about that topic.
So the fourth thing is to build an email list of subscribers to your blog. This is probably one of the easiest things you can do. Add the option on your blog for people to subscribe for updates. There are lots of easy forms you can get on the web or plugins for WordPress that you can use on your site. This is different from asking people to sign up to your main brand website or to buy something from you. This is just a simple email subscription to your blog and then every time you have a blog post make sure those users are sent a link to it. Or if you are posting a lot send them a round up every week or every month. If they want to subscribe to your blog then they are clearly interested in what you have to say and it’s a great way to drive additional traffic to each blog post.

The fifth thing is something called guest posting – and what this is – is writing blog posts or articles that are then posted on other people’s sites. So what you need to do here is to create useful and interesting and shareable advice – advice that other blogs would be prepared to publish. And think about how you can include your brand or blog links either within the article that you post on someone else’s site or within your biography. Because every blog post really needs a biography about the author, about the person who wrote it. However if you do link to your website and your blog from within your biography and you are doing a lot of guest posting, be sure to mix up your biography to make sure you aren’t using the same one every time because that can look spammy for Google.

And the final thing is make each of your blog posts really easy to share. And that can be something about the formatting of the post. So for example give the post a great headline. Use great images. Use mark-up within the code of the site or use something called twitter cards so that the media on your posts gets surfaced really effectively on twitter along with images. But also add great sharing buttons on your site. Make those buttons attractive and there’s lots of free buttons out there on the web which you can download and add to your site. So entice your readers to share your content. Make that content look great when it does get shared and of course don’t forget to ask your readers to share your content as well.

So that was six ways that you can get more traffic to your blog and I’ll see you next time.