It is practically every blogger’s dream to be able to grow their blog readership to accommodate a huge flow of traffic. After all, there’s no point in sharing your articles and views through your blog if nobody cares about reading it, right? Unfortunately, with the ever-growing number of blogs that are created each day, getting your blog in front of your ideal target audience has become more challenging. And using paid advertisements to drive traffic to your blog will cost you a lot of money. That’s why in this article, I’m going to share with you the 10 best ways you can use to get free traffic for your blog.

Optimize Your Articles With Long Tail Keywords

No matter what niche you are in, you are bound to be faced with stiff competition. To stand out from the crowd, you need to create content that focuses on keywords with less competition.

Many people talk about optimizing blog articles for SEO, but my advice to you is that if you want to get your articles in front of your target audience effectively, you need to aim towards focusing on long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are better than just general term keywords because when you focus on general keywords, you are competing with a huge pool of other articles that are targeting the same sort of keywords.

For example, if you are writing about blogging, instead of using the word ‘blogging’ as your target keyword, you can choose to narrow down your article to talk about ‘blogging to make money’.

By focusing on more specific terms through long tail keywords, you will be able to reduce your competition and increase your chances of getting in front of your target readers faster. So you will get more visitors to your blog.

A good tool you can use to get long tail keywords is Ubersuggest.

Publish Relevant Content for Your Target Audience

Your target audience will not even bother reading your articles no matter how good the quality of your content is if you do not write posts that are compelling and relevant to them.

I know that many internet marketing gurus will be encouraging you to publish one blog post a day. But don’t fall into the trap into writing your article and publishing it in a hurry just so that you can meet your goal of the day to publish one article a day!

If you do not do your research to figure out what sort of information your target audience are searching for, then you’ll never be able to reach them.

Why?

It’s because everyone is in a hurry these days. People do not have time to randomly read articles that they feel are of no use to them. Sad but true!

If you want to learn more about creating content that will attract your target audience, then I’d highly encourage you to read my blog articles below:-

How To Create Engaging Blog Content

How To Create Evergreen Content For Your Blog

How To Create Epic Blog Content That Will Rock Your Readers’ World

Use Catchy Article Headlines That Attract Reads

Even if you’ve prepared the best and most compelling content for your target audience, they still won’t read it if your article headlines do not excite them.

Creating catchy article headlines for your blog posts are equally important because the headlines are the first thing that your target audience will see before they decide to click in to read your article.

In search engines, they will quickly browse through article headlines to see which ones they won’t be interested to read. So at this point, you’ll be competing with all the different article headlines that are available.

So if you do not carefully craft attractive article headlines, you’ll lose out on your article viewership.

I’ve written an article previously on how to create catchy headlines. You can read the article below to help you get started:-

17 Catchy Blog Headlines That Actually Work

Publish Blog Articles Consistently

Try to at least contribute one blog post a week if you want your viewership to grow. Search engines love websites that are consistently updating their content.

So by having fresh content up on your blog frequently, you will soon be able to rank high in search engines. And when you get to rank in search engines, people who search the terms that are related to your blog articles will be able to easily discover your blog.

Besides this, people who visit your blog will be motivated to regularly visit your blog and let others know about what you write about because you are always updating your content. It becomes something exciting to your readers!

Be Active In Facebook Groups Related To Your Niche

Facebook Groups are a great way to do networking with people who are searching for topics related to your niche.

To promote your blog through Facebook Groups, you can join multiple groups that are related to topics within your niche. Once you’re approved as a member of these groups, introduce yourself and let others know about what you do. You can let them know about your blog if permitted by the group owners.

Be active in the Facebook Groups that you join. Take notice of the challenges of other people and if you’re able to help them, then reach out to answer their questions. By being a helpful person in these communities, people will want to get to know you and what you do. They’ll also be curious to visit your blog.

Don’t forget to add a link of your blog on your personal profile page so that they can find out about your blog!

This will help you to get traffic to your website for free.

Contribute Guest Posts On Popular Blogs

You can also start contributing guest posts on popular blogs to grow your blog traffic.

Before deciding on the blogs that you would like to contribute to, you must do some research to see if their blog audience will be interested in your blog content.

You can do this by looking at the types of content that they post. See which content that is gaining a lot of likes, shares and comments. Ask yourself whether your blog content fits within this category. For instance, if you’re writing about healthy eating, you won’t want to contribute to a blog that gives recipes that recreates unhealthy type of fast-food chain meals!

Another thing you need to consider is the popularity of the blog itself. To make your time worth, you need to aim at contributing guest posts to only blogs that have high readership. Because if you don’t, you’ll be just wasting your time!

And the last but most important thing you need to be sure about is whether or not the blog owner will give you a dofollow link back to your blog. This is the no. 1 thing you must ask the blog owner before even working on your guest post.

Because if they do not allow you to link back to your blog, there’s no reason to put your sweat and hard work in contributing an article for their blog, right? That’s because people won’t know how to find your blog…

Promote Your Blog Posts Through Social Media

You can also grow your blog readership by using social media to promote your blog posts. Although paid advertising in these platforms will get you traffic faster, you can still grow your blog popularity organically by constantly sharing about what you write about on your social media platforms.

The most popular social media platforms that you can use are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter. When you contribute posts through these platforms regularly, they will begin to show your posts to the potential target audience who are interested in topics that are related to what you share.

If you want to grow your blog faster, take some of your most popular blog articles and create multiple social media posts for them. It doesn’t matter how many times you post on social media.

The more you post on social media, the higher your chances will be in getting more people to notice your blog and blog articles!

Encourage Social Sharing In Your Blog

You can encourage your existing blog readers to share your articles by installing social sharing buttons under each blog post.

When you include social sharing buttons, it triggers a sense of excitement for people to share your content.

Even if the person who reads your articles have no direct use for the information you have provided, that person can easily share the information with others who might be in need of such information.

So by having these social sharing buttons, you’ll be able to get more people sharing your content to their friends and family.

This will increase your blog traffic fast, especially if you are great at writing content that can go viral!

A really popular WordPress plugin that you can use to do social sharing is Shareaholic.

Utilize Other Publishing Platforms

If you don’t want to go through all the hassle of submitting guest posts for popular blogs, then you can write on other publishing platforms with huge audiences to direct more people to your blog for free.

Some of the popular publishing platforms that you can use to promote your blog out there to more readers are such as Quora, Wikipedia, LinkedIn Pulse and Medium.

You can simply reword and paraphrase the content that you already have on your blog to contribute to platforms like Quora, LinkedIn Pulse and Medium. Alternatively, you can write on other topics within your niche to be published there.

When you publish your content on these popular platforms, you will have the potential of reaching a much larger audience. These platforms will show your content to their readers based on their search preferences, interests and reading history.

For Wikipedia, you can add information to an already existing write-up on their website and link back to your blog post that contains the information that you’ve provided. Don’t be spammy or promotional though because you’ll be banned from Wikipedia!

For Quora, you can also provide answers to the questions of others so that your potential target audience will begin to notice you and your blog.

For all these platforms, don’t forget to add a link to your blog where permitted so they’ll know where to find your blog!

Join HARO To Expose Your Blog Through Publications

You can also get ‘free publicity’ for your blog by contributing your answers and articles through HARO. Registering yourself as a source can be done in minutes. And all you need to do is pitch your answers to publications when they need resources or thoughts on some things.

When you contribute through HARO, you will get your name and website link featured. This will be a huge advantage to you as you will be able to reach out to a wider target audience who are already interested in topics within your niche.

This will help you to generate traffic and promote your blog for free.

I hope the strategies on how to get free traffic for your blog will be of great use to you when doing your blog promotion. Have you tried any of these strategies before and found them useful? Or do you have other strategies to share? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.