How To Get Traffic as a New Blogger – 8 Proven Strategies

If you’re wondering how to get traffic as a new blogger, look no further. In this post, we’re breaking down eight proven strategies for generating traffic for your new blog that you can put into action today.

With the digital world offering endless opportunities to help bloggers be successful, the sky’s the limit. Now, you can easily get recognized as a thought leader on a subject, launch a business, or become an influencer, letting you have control over your career and financial potential.
 
But where to start?

The countless free tools available for new bloggers can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed, maybe tempting you to give up before you ever reap the benefits.

As content creators produce more and more, the competition to grab your audience’s attention is fierce. You might worry that throwing money at ads is the only solution, but there are plenty of other ways to get traffic as a new blogger for free.

In this post we share insights into beginner friendly options for generating blog traffic.

Getting Traffic To a New Blog - What it Takes

As a new blogger it can all seem so overwhelming: content creation, posting, sharing, coming up with content, beating established blogs in the SERPs (search engine results pages), and it goes on and on. 

So...

How do you get traffic as a new blogger? There are eight proven strategies to get traffic to a new blog: Networking, strategic content creation, social media traffic, guest posting, email marketing, SEO, blog post syndication, and automated blog sharing.

Each of these strategies can be done for free and are highly effective even for a new blog just starting out...

But they require dedication, attention to detail, and consistency. 

So grab some coffee and let's dive in!

Side note: if you're just getting started with blogging and looking for ways to learn how to start a blog that makes money, there are quite a few ways to get started. There is so much to learn that going it alone can take months and years before you see success. Learning SEO, backlinking, keyword research, outreach strategies, and more can get super overwhelming. Here's a few of the best ways to start a blog: you can purchase a course like Blog Growth Engine by Adam Enfroy, watch YouTube tutorials for free, or even buy a book. 

1. Hit Your Network: Ask Friends and Family to Review and Share Your Site

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit that gives you an initial blogger traffic booster.

Think about your networks. You have family, friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances you can tap.

This is an easy way to spread the word, but you need to do it right. Sure, you’re technically asking them to do you a solid by reviewing and sharing your content, but you don’t want to make it all about you.

Instead, illustrate the value you’ll serve your audience and show your excitement to help others. Put a little something extra into your personalized outreach messages so it doesn’t feel spammy, and they’ll likely be more than happy to show their support.

To make it easier for them, craft a post they can share with their networks. If all it requires is a simple copy, paste, tweak, and post, you’ll have more people willing to share.

Consider crafting copy that works for the following channels:

• Email
• LinkedIn updates
• LinkedIn InMails
• Personal social media feeds
• Business- or brand-based social media feeds (for contacts whose audience is similar and can benefit from your blog)

Here's an example of a message you can share with your networks: 

2. Create Content That Solves Problems (Answer Questions)

A surefire way to ensure your content is seen is to create content that answers your audience’s burning questions and solves their problems. 

You want to start with the end user in mind. 

Your content needs to be for your reader, not for you. 

A good practice is to chat with people to get a sense of what they’re struggling with.

To go further, perform keyword searches on search engines and Pinterest to discover top search terms.

Identifying these terms are an essential part of a strategy for getting traffic as a new blogger.

SEO Basics

Implementing a targeted SEO strategy improves the discoverability of your content and can increase blog traffic fast. 

Rather than spending a ton of money on ads to boost your rank, tap into users’ search habits so your content shows up higher in results for free. 

To make the most of your SEO, consider what you want to be ranked for. Thinking about your ideal audience, identify their search intent and the content they’re looking for.

Pro tip: If you’re a newer site, consider long-tail keywords. This will be more focused and will likely have less competition. Once you’ve figured out your keywords, leverage them throughout the content you’re creating. 

Also, make sure you’re focused on quality so more people are likely to link back to your content, giving it an additional boost.

Start With The End User in Mind

Focusing on the end user when creating content will give you much better results than journal-style blogging. 

For example, consider the benefits and popularity of self-help or DIY blogs. Writing this way not only directly addresses the problems your audience has, but it gives them the tools and knowledge to empower them to take action. 

This will resonate so much more and build trust with them than if you were to write a blog that felt like a monologue with no one else in mind but yourself.

Remember: everything you produce needs to solve their problems.

Related resource: How To Write a Blog Post (The Ultimate Guide)

Keyword Strategy

Before you assume you know what your audience is looking for, ask them questions to truly understand their search intent. (This is where things like Facebook Groups come into play - more on that later.) 

Uncovering how they search and the terms they’re using might differ from how you market your content. 

Content Calendar

Quality is important, but so is consistency. 

In building a blog, you’re making a promise to your audience. You’re setting up an expectation that they can learn from you and will get the most up-to-date strategies and information. 

You can’t go hard in the beginning, posting multiple times a week, only to lose steam a few months later and start posting sporadically.

Consistency in posting isn’t the only thing you need to be mindful of. You also need to consider consistency in the actual content. Figuring out core topics you’ll cover and/or seeing if there’s an opportunity to build a series of content will ensure consistency too.

A content calendar is incredibly helpful for creating consistency in post frequency and topic coverage. There are plenty of tools out there to help you plot your editorial content calendar. However, you can easily start small by getting a physical or digital calendar and plugging in your schedule and blog topics. 

Consider how often you want to post, which topics you want to post more about versus others, when you have big events happening (i.e., new service launch, campaigns, holiday specials, etc.), and what content you already have established. 

Taking a few hours to plan your quarterly (or even annual) content will save you a ton of time in the long run, allowing you to focus on your blogging strategy so you can produce better content more consistently.

3. Social Media Traffic Strategies for New Bloggers 

Social media is a tricky thing. Over the last few years, the rules have changed. How social media is leveraged changes regularly when the services constantly reevaluate their algorithms and how to monetize their platforms.

The truth is, you don’t own your social media audiences and your organic reach could change dramatically overnight. This is why considering the following channels and strategies might be worthwhile.

Build Your Tribe Through Facebook Groups

Facebook’s algorithms and platform will continue to change, making it difficult to guess the right strategies for organic reach. Yet, Facebook Groups are still a strong source for engaging your audience. 

Building your tribe through Groups builds trust, provides value, and converts people into buyers. 

Groups are proven to have better organic reach than Pages, allowing your content to be seen more frequently. 

Additionally, you can engage your audience and get feedback in real-time, providing you with information to produce targeted content based on their wants and needs. 

Pin your top content to accelerate your call-to-action, set up polls, promote exclusive offerings, and be sure to connect with your audience. 

As a blog and/or a business, this channel is strong for conversions when you use it as a community-building tool.

Get Blog Traffic With Pinterest

Something to clarify: 

Pinterest is not just a social media platform. Essentially, it’s a search engine. 

You don’t need thousands of followers to get discovered, you just need to consider the best approach for leveraging keywords. 

Similar to how you research SEO and keywords for search engines, you’ll want to do the same for Pinterest.

By crafting pins that have the right keyword terms in the title and caption, you can reach a greater number of people organically. The other good thing about Pinterest is that pins posted weeks or even months ago can suddenly take off. 

It’s not like other timeline-driven social media channels where your posts will get lost in the shuffle after a few days. As a blogger, Pinterest can make a huge difference in discoverability.

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Get Blog Traffic With YouTube

YouTube is not only a great channel to provide value to your audience, giving them another format to consume your content (in case they aren’t able to read or prefer audio/video over text), but it can also drive traffic to your blog. 

In fact, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, which means there’s a ton of opportunity to get free traffic for your blog. 

Get Blog Traffic From Forums and Question/Answer Sites

Forum sites like Quora are an opportunity to provide real-time relevant value. Spend time each week looking for questions that your developed content can address. 

By providing a friendly, approachable response with a link to your detailed content, the poster and other people who have similar questions down the line will be driven to your site.

If you’re quick about content creation, you can also use these sites for new content ideas. Look at recent popular questions relevant to your focus, craft a post that specifically answers that question, and post the link in the comments. 

Timely and super targeted content for responses can easily drive traffic to your blog while the topic is still top of mind and active.

4. Hijack Other Bloggers Traffic Sources With Guest Posting

When you’re just getting started, offering to write for other blogs is a good way to build credibility and authority with your audience.

By finding blogs that have very similar audiences to your own, your guest blog can provide more reach, help you build awareness, and can make you appear more trustworthy since the post is coming from a site/person they already know and deem credible.

How To Find Guest Posting Opportunities

First, you’ll want to look at blogs relevant to your niche or industry and audience. 

Be sure to research their traffic and exposure. 

You can use tools like SimilarWeb to check out website traffic and even discover other related sites through the “top referrals” and “competitor & similar sites” sections.

Next, check out how engaged the audience is on the site’s social media profiles and see if the owner of the site is active and engaged too. 

After you identify your top choices, send the owner (or the preferred contact - see the guest blogging FAQs if the site has it) your pitch including why their audience would find value in your post and any relevant content of yours that highlights your quality and voice.

5. Grow Your Email List

Your email list is the most important channel to have. 

Unlike social media, you have much more control over who sees the content you’re producing, making your reach and influence much greater. 

However, to build a quality email list, you need to provide value to convince people it’s worth opting in and then continually deliver that value once you’ve gotten them to join.

To set expectations on the type of content and value you’ll exclusively provide your email list, create a targeted lead magnet to whet their appetite.

Create A Targeted Lead Magnet For Your Blog

A lead magnet is a long-form resource you’ll offer in exchange for your prospective subscriber’s coveted email address. 

This can be anything from podcasts or videos, contests, guides, courses, a checklist, a cheat sheet, an ebook, and so on.

When creating a lead magnet, consider your ideal customer. 

What are their pain points? What are they searching for (check out your SEO and keyword research for ideas)? How can your content help them and also show them you’d be the person for the job if they invest in your product and service? What content medium do they prefer to have information served to them?

Once you create your lead magnet, establish a compelling landing page that will make them click on your call-to-action without hesitation. But once you deliver the content, don’t stop there! 

Set up a welcome sequence for your new subscribers to introduce yourself, provide additional resources, talk a bit about your offer, and set up expectations of when they’ll hear from you.

6. Start Getting Backlinks

Backlinks (or inbound links) are important for your SEO strategy. When other websites link to yours as a resource, it shows that you’re a credible source. 

Earning these links, especially from trusted and popular sites, are very valuable. By getting these backlinks, your site will rank higher on search engines. 

Consider it almost as if credible sources are “up voting” your content. The more you have, the higher up you’ll go, which is another great way to get more traffic as a new blogger for free.

Email outreach is a strategic approach to getting backlinks from other websites by sending personalized emails and forming relationships with bloggers and influencers in your niche.

Using an email verification software helps ensure that your outreach emails are reaching the right recipients, allowing you to maximize your success rate and make sure your efforts are not wasted on invalid addresses.

Use Help A Reporter Out (HARO) For Backlinks

When building up your network and credibility, one easy source to help you get high-quality backlinks is Help A Reporter Out (HARO). 

Journalists use this online service to get feedback from the public and gather expert advice on relevant topics they’re reporting on. 

Each day, you’ll get queries from reporters related to whatever your interests are. Many require short responses (about 100-200 words) where you can showcase your knowledge. 

If chosen, your name, company name (and URL), and response will be shared on reporting sites, helping you build a following through the backlinks.

7. Blog Post Syndication

Even with all the best SEO, guest blogging, and backlinks in the world, you need to syndicate your content to be effective. 

The world is full of content. It’s noisy. People are overwhelmed. Only posting on your blog isn’t enough to reach your audience. 

In fact, you’ll need to work towards The Rule of 7 to even really see interest and engagement. 

8. Automate Blog Post Sharing

Leverage tools to help you and your audience automate blog post sharing.

This will extend your reach and awareness while reducing time spent manually sharing your content. 

When you're just starting out, it's not a huge chore to manually share your content, but as the months and years go by it can become a massive task... so do yourself a favor and find ways to automate content sharing sooner, rather than later. 

Final Thoughts

Did you find some new tactics for getting traffic to your new blog?

All of these tactics are how to get traffic as a new blogger for free or nearly nothing. 

By leveraging these options as part of your overall content strategy, you’ll not only create relevant content that will delight your audience, but you’ll accelerate your discoverability too.

Let us know in the comments which tactics you plan on trying, and what kind of results came of your efforts!