Blog traffic is important if you want to earn money online. Therefore, before you start monetizing your blog, you must increase your blog traffic.
There are three main ways to drive traffic to a blog:
- Social media marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
- Paid Traffic
You don’t have to choose only one way, you can use all three to drive traffic to your blog. Over the years I tried so many techniques to increase my blog traffic and get to new audiences, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, SEO, working with influencers, whatever you name it! And today I know exactly what works and what is a total waste of time.
My Strategy to Get Traffic as a New Blogger
First, I recommend starting with Pinterest, especially if you are a new blogger. Pinterest is perfect for bloggers who want to drive free traffic fast. By using Pinterest, I managed to increase my blog traffic from 0 to almost 200,000 page views per month in less than a year. Only five months after I started this blog, I accepted to Mediavine and started earning big money. Once your blog gets steady monthly traffic, you can monetize your blog and start making money.
If you are interested to learn how to drive free traffic fast using Pinterest, here is my Pinterest guide for driving more than 100K visitors each month.
After you get at least 50K monthly sessions per month, you can apply to Mediavine and start earning money. Mediavine is one of the leading ad management platforms that work with many bloggers and content creators around the world. Once you get accepted to their program, you can earn $7 to $30 on average per every thousand sessions (RPM rate). For example, if you get 100K sessions per month, and your RPM is $20, you’ll earn $2000 just for displaying ads on your website. I talk about this in detail on the How to Make Money Blogging page.
Here is a screenshot of my first 3 month earnings from Mediavine:
The next step I would recommend is to optimize your site for Google and other search engines. In fact, SEO is another great way to get free blog traffic.
Why not start with SEO for Google first?
From my experience, driving traffic with Pinterest is much faster than driving traffic with Google. That being said, SEO for Google is more important for long-term strategy.
Why?
Because Google’s traffic is more trusted than Pinterest traffic or other social media traffic sources.
I’d like to open up about a challenging experience I faced in 2021.
My Pinterest Traffic Drop In 2021
In 2020 Pinterest started changing its algorithm by adding new features and prioritizing different types of pins.
When I had this sudden traffic drop from Pinterest I thought I’m gonna die!!!!!!!!!!
One day, instead of getting 3000 visitors per day from Pinterest, my traffic dropped to almost ZERO!!!
Here is a screenshot:
This was insanely shocking for me because 90% of my traffic was coming from Pinterest.
My monthly income completely vanished ! ! !
No ad earnings and also no affiliate earnings (zero traffic!).
I tried to contact Pinterest a few times but I was getting the same message that didn’t include the exact reason behind the sudden traffic drop, instead, they continued to send me marketing tips that I was already following for years.
I read every article I could find online and I saw more and more bloggers who complained about sudden traffic drops from Pinterest.
A month after, when I was really frustrated and even thought about leaving blogging, my Pinterest traffic suddenly went up as nothing happened. I trust me, I didn’t even do anything, stopped publishing new pins or repping old ones.
The ad revenue was back, affiliate revenue was back, and I was back in business.
This day I knew that something must be changed.
I canceled my Tailwind subscription and focused on Google SEO.
Before this traffic drop, all my eggs were in one basket – Pinterest.
This was the moment I stopped being lazy and started Google SEO. Pinterest traffic was too good to be true but it was so comfortable and easy to drive traffic using Pinterest that I postponed SEO. I did this because I knew that it takes more time and effort to get organic traffic from Google.
But I had no choice. I knew that I can’t trust Pinterest anymore.
And you shouldn’t trust it too as the only free traffic source.
Pinterest is perfect for driving tons of traffic in a short time, but as a long-term strategy, you should focus on Google SEO. Anyway, you must promote your blog in a few channels, you never know who will change its algorithm.
Make sure not to miss the SEO best practices page that I share later in this guide.
When Should You Pay to Get Traffic?
Buying traffic for your website can be an awesome way to increase income. It’s also known as traffic arbitrage when you earn your money mainly through ads.
If you pay $30 for every 1000 sessions and your RMP is higher than $30, you earn money.
But this technique is not easy. You need to find the most profitable articles on your website and be able to run low CPC campaigns.
Another option is to promote affiliated articles, your services, or products you sell on your website.
You can advertise your blog/products on social media, Google ads, or other programmatic platforms like Taboola or Outbrain. But this is for another article.
Now let’s go quickly through all the best social media platforms that you can use to drive traffic to your blog!
The Best Social Networks for Cross-Promoting Blog Posts
If you own a blog, you may have populated it with relevant content, appealing images, videos, and more. However, what ultimately counts is gaining recognition for your blog and get blog traffic. Essentially, you need to promote your blog online. If you want to drive social traffic to your blog, sharing it on social media platforms is the optimal choice, as it will assist you in attracting visitors and increase your blog traffic.
The truth is that you can get tons of traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, and even Twitter.
For my blog, I use Pinterest to get over 150k sessions every month. It helps me generate revenue from my blog every month. Read my August 2023 income report where I share how I made $8k+ that month.
Promoting your blog on other social media platforms can serve as a risk mitigation strategy. This means that if something were to suddenly happen with one of your social media accounts, and you stop receiving traffic, you’ll still have other reliable traffic sources to rely on.
If you haven’t started your blog yet, check out my guide on how to start a blog and begin making money as quickly as possible.
What Exactly Cross Promotion On Social Media Means?
Cross promotion on social media, in the context of publishing your blog articles, involves sharing your content across various relevant social media platforms to maximize its reach and engagement. This strategy aims to leverage the strengths and user bases of different platforms to promote your blog effectively.
If you want to cross promote the blog posts on social media effectively, posting the same message and visual on all social networks isn’t a good idea. To get desired results, you need to customize the message and the size of the banner you want to post to match the audience and the social media platform requirements.
For example, every article that we publish on Urban Mamaz, we promote it on Pinterest, Facebook, and sometimes on our newsletter. Pinterest recommended banner size is different than Facebook. This means we make custom banners for each platform, like using 2:3 banners for Pinterest and square ones for Facebook. We also adjust the messaging accordingly and add hashtags where needed.
Wondering how to promote your blog on social media? What are the best social platforms to get traffic to your blog? Check out this list of the best platforms that are perfect for generating traffic.
Best Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Blog and Boost Traffic?
Facebook allows you to promote the blog through pages and your profile including groups. Not many knows but there are a few bloggers who manage to get a lot of traffic from Facebook for free.
Anne Moss from Yeys shares how she managed to grow here Facebook traffic from zero to 66K views in only 3 months. Here website was in the home and garden niche which she started in May 2023. Once she had a dozen articles on her site, she launched her Facebook page for that website and started publishing posts to promote the articles on her blog. In her strategy she first promoted her Facebook page though paid ads. This helped her gain more page followers which helped her get more posts exposure which she published on her Facebook page. She spent a total of $1530 on buying 27,000 likes, which means she got an average cost of 5.5 cents for each like. Eventually she stopped spending more on ads and only continued to publish around 10 posts a day on Facebook.
Jon from Fat Stacks explains that Facebook traffic is still possible. He talks about his colleague who gets millions of visitors from Facebook. Joe personally manages to attract 170,000 visitors from Facebook to his blog every month, which is really cool.
So if you have a blog, Facebook is really a great social media platform you should consider to grow your blog traffic. If you want to get traffic from Facebook, Here are a few tips to follow:
- Upload your images manually with links to your posts on Facebook (rather than opting for automatic link ) – it can help you reach a wider audience.
- Join related Facebook groups and share your posts within them. Be sure to review the rules of each group, as some may impose restrictions on self-promotion.
- Create beautiful banners – this can help you attract more visitors.
- Add an creative and catchy message, and a call to action to make sure people click the link and visit your website.
Don’t miss the chance to promote your blog on Twitter. Tweeting about your blog can be a great way to connect with your readers. With over 500 million users, you can find many new readers on Twitter.
Using Twitter well can bring a lot of traffic to your blog. To gain daily clicks, use a plugin like Revive Old Posts, which automatically tweets your content. Additionally, schedule your promotional tweets, especially when you have new posts to share. This strategy can yield hundreds of daily clicks from Twitter.
In addition, remember to be active, get creative, and use smart marketing when you tweet about your blog posts.
Using Twitter effectively has the potential to boost traffic to your blog significantly. However, merely posting your blog post’s title with a link to your site won’t yield the desired results. To succeed, you must take an active approach, tap into your creativity, and implement effective marketing strategies when tweeting about your blog posts.
But besides tweeting and trying to craft creative posts with graphs and visuals about your posts (because we don’t have so much time!), there is another great strategy to get free traffic from Twitter to your blog.
I discovered a nifty way to get free traffic from LinkedIn that’s perfect for bloggers. If you’re struggling to get people to read your articles, this can help.
First, pick one of your blog posts. It can be an old one that’s already popular, a new and interesting piece, or something unusual. If you didn’t know, you can also publish articles on LinkedIn. How can it help? you ask. You can use these articles on LinkedIn to create a short teaser article on LinkedIn that will link to your blog. Leave your readers curious and wanting more. This taps into people’s natural curiosity, and you can link them to your chosen blog post.
To start writing an article on LinkedIn, go to your feed (at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/) and click on “Write Article”.
LinkedIn articles often rank well on Google, plus your connections are potential readers. Don’t forget to use UTM tags to track your experiment’s performance, and consider asking friends to engage with your LinkedIn post early on.
Give it a try and see how it works for you!
Pinterest is a visual search engine. As I mentioned earlier, I get over 200K pageviews from Pinterest every month. You can read my Pinterest guide where I share the exact steps I take to get free traffic from Pinterest every month. Pinterest proved to be a significant turning point for both me and my blog. Unlike the more time-consuming process of attracting Google organic traffic, I managed to achieve 50,000 monthly visitors from Pinterest in just a few months. This milestone allowed me to join Mediavine and start earning a substantial income from my blog.
What do you need to know about Pinterest?
Images are the key factor on this platform. You can use the description space to just mention about what your pin is all about. Pinterest offers a space of 100 characters to brief in about the images.
It is always better to keep the descriptions clear and simple while using the most popular keywords. Hashtags are not relevant anymore.
Include a link with your pin descriptions to get more clicks to your URL as the users who click on your pin will basically be directed to the website. This is what’s so great about Pinterest.
You can also add call to actions, terms such as; learn more, and read more into the description to motivate your audience to engage more.
Before I have found out about Pinterest’s great ability to drive traffic, I promoted another website that I had on Google and Facebook. But it was nothing like Pinterest’s ability to drive tons of free traffic fast. Starting this blog and promoting it on Pinterest, increased my monthly income significantly!
In less than 5 months I managed to reach more than 64k monthly page views with my new blog!
By the end of the year, I reached almost 200,000 page views! I-n-s-a-n-e!
After two months of exploring Pinterest, I built a Pinning strategy that works. Check out my “Pinterest Guide to learn how to increase blog traffic with Pinterest.
As I mentioned earlier, driving traffic through Pinterest is much easier and faster.
Instagram is ideal for blogs focusing on food, fashion, home decor, crafting, or any niche with inspiring visual content. But let’s be honest, Instagram is not the best social media platform to generate traffic. This platform displays images in a continuous flow which can also be great as a branding tool. The duration for which an image stays on Instagram is shorter as that on Pinterest and Facebook. Most of the interactions here occur during the initial hours after posting.
The captions included on Instagram can go up to 2,200 characters out of which first 3 lines are shown on news feed. The users can click on more to view the entire post, but you can’t add a clickable link into your posts.
Hashtags play an important role on Instagram and even the captions seen on this platform contain hashtags. The keywords of the blog posts can be used as hashtags so that more and more users on Instagram can easily come across your post. Around 30 hashtags can be added.
Final Thoughts,
Using social media to promote your blog posts is a powerful way to reach more people, grow your blog traffic, and increase your revenue. I’ve covered various strategies, like ways to share content and engage with your audience. Just remember, it’s an ongoing journey, it took me months and on some platforms even years to get the traffic I want and I’m still working on this everyday.
To keep it simple, start with Pinterest, Google SEO, and Facebook, and then add more platforms if you want. This way it will be easier for you to keep them active. I truly recommend starting with Pinterest since it can drive tons of free traffic to your site in a short time and Google for long-term strategy.
Now let’s move to the most interesting part of this guide on how to make money blogging.
Happy blogging!
