How to Increase Your Blog Traffic Exponentially!

Last Updated on 1st March 2022 by Sophie Nadeau

This post may contain affiliate links. Please check out my privacy policy and disclosure for more information.

In the beginning, increasing your blog traffic can seem like a Sisyphean task: it can feel as if no amount of effort you spend creating pins, learning about SEO, and all the rest will ever be enough. However, growing your blog audience and traffic is totally possible if you do it the right way. Here’s a quick step by step 10+ point guide on how to increase your blog traffic…

Blogging resources

Hosting: For my blog’s hosting needs, I use Lyrical Host. I find their customer support and help to be some of the best I’ve ever had during my time blogging and couldn’t recommend them more! If you use my affiliate code ‘solosophie’ then you’ll get 10% off your first hosting plan payment. See more details here.

Email: One of the best ways to capture your return subscribers is by building an email list. I personally love Flodesk. Sign up using my link or the code ‘SOPHIE’ to get 50% off your subscription. See more details here.

Affiliate programmes: As well as display advertising, one of the best ways for bloggers to make money is by using affiliate programmes. In order to refer tours on this website, I use numerous providers. This includes Get Your Guide and Share a Sale.

Grammarly is a good tool to check through your work for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and bad phrasing. Find out more about Grammarly here.

Take your blog seriously

When I first started my blog, I didn’t tell anyone but my mum! As a result, no one even knew the website existed and so no one knew to go and read it. I think I maybe had 3 readers in that first week! Looking back, that’s probably a good thing because bullet points aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing blog layout.

However, the easiest way to get readers for your blog is to tell people you already know and get them to read it. Share your blog on your existing social channels and tell everyone in your social circles that you’ve launched your new site. And if you want to up your professional game that bit more? Go old school and create business cards.

Don’t compromise quality for a few extra dollars!

Although your ultimate goal may be to make money from your travel blog, you should never compromise your integrity (or quality) in exchange for a small sum of money. Before starting your blog, it’s worth detailing the boundaries you’ll set for your business and brand.

This can be anything from which businesses you would not want to work with, what kind of compensation you believe your work is worth (Social Blue Book is a great place to start!), to the nitty-gritty behind the scenes. For me, this includes never selling do-follow links on my blog. There are no exceptions to this rule!

Taking your blog seriously also means investing in it. In the beginning, I wanted to spend as little money as possible. This was a mistake, Instead, investing in things like a theme, plugins, and a good host and hosting will make all the difference for your user experience. For me, this also meant purchasing a camera to suit all my photography needs. I currently use the Sony A7iii with the 24-70 mm lens.

Have quality writing!

If there’s one tip I could give you that might help grow your blog traffic more than any other, it would be to focus on well written content. After all, no matter how good your ideas or imagery is, if something is too hard to read, then readers will inevitably click away, and thus losing you valuable traffic! Here are some top travel writing tips, as told by a full-time travel writer!

Post on a regular basis

The number one tip I could give for increasing your blog traffic is to post on a regular basis. Now, obviously, posting at least once a day is pretty much impossible in the beginning when you’re not used to creating blog content. Instead, aim to post at least three times a week or your new found readers may start to forget about you!

Plus, the more you write, the more your writing ability should improve! There will be a period where no one is reading your blog and you’re going to have to motivate yourself to write anyway. Here are my very best tips for how to carry on writing when no one is reading your blog.

Stop watching TV. Instead, read other blogs, other material and well, everything!

If you speak to anyone who writes seriously, they’ll tell you that they never stop reading. They read other people’s work in their field, they read fiction, they read non-fiction, they read anything and everything that they can get their hands on.

I personally recommend purchasing Lonely Planet’s guide, ‘How to be a Travel Writer‘ for some tips, tricks, and introductory writing techniques. Encompassing interviews by other bloggers, the book includes how to pitch yourself, SEO strategies, and the like.

Stephen King –aka one of the World’s best horror writer– said to become good writers, people should stop watching TV and instead read as much as possible as TV is “poisonous to creativity”. Plus, if you’re studying/ working and writing a blog seriously simultaneously, then it’s unlikely that you’ll have much time to catch up on your favourite shows!

Keep a notebook with you at all times…

… or, at the very least, your phone! I always get ideas for new blog posts at the most inconvenient times, in the shower, walking the dog- you get the idea! Make sure to keep a notebook (or your phone notes) on you all the time so that you can write down all of your best ideas.

When wandering around a town or attraction I know I’ll be writing about later on my blog, I note down notes as I go along, and even often plan the post in situ, so as to reduce writing time at a later date. If you’re taking a press trip, then bringing along a notebook as opposed to an electronic device can look more professional.

Improve your blog layout

I’ll be honest with you here: go for a ‘premium theme’ straight from the start. The WordPress free themes are good, but they’re not great. And we’re looking to build something great here, right? Investing in a premium theme for your blog will ensure that the coding is lightweight and make your site speed load time a lot faster.

Theme Forest and Etsy are both great places to start shopping for a theme. Seen a blog layout you like and want it for yourself? If the website is built on WordPress and doesn’t have too much customisation, then you can check whatwpthemeisthat.com

Improve your site speed

In the first three months of this blog, I had a couple of hundred visitors a month. Now, I can get that many in a day. In the beginning, more traffic bounced and I lost plenty of potential return readers through having such slow site speed. I wanted to save money by paying less for hosting but it ended up in a lose-lose situation.

Be honest with yourself, when was the last time you waited 30 seconds for a page load? With competition for pretty much any ‘niche’ fierce, then it’s obviously going to be a no! If you’re just starting out then you might consider setting up hosting with Siteground.

Today, I use Lyrical Host. I find their customer support and help to be some of the best I’ve ever had during my time blogging and couldn’t recommend them more! If you use my affiliate code ‘solosophie’ then you’ll get 10% off your first hosting plan payment.

Guest Post & Network everywhere…

The easiest way to get your name out there is by finding your ideal audience. What this often means is guest posting or finding a regular contributor slot within another blog in your niche.

Not quite sure what your blogging niche is yet? Try not to worry too much! Instead, post about the things you’re interested in and this selection of hobbies will naturally form a niche.

When it comes to networking, attend conferences and reach out to other bloggers in your niche. If you’re a female lifestyle blogger, then feel free to join my blogging group!

Learn to utilise Pinterest Effectively

In the beginning, I used Pinterest all wrong. You see, the problem was that I looked at it like just another social media platform. However, Pinterest is much more than that. It’s actually a search engine, where having clear images, bold text, and SEO optimised text. To create pins, I use Canva.

When it comes to Pinterest strategy for growing your travel blog, I use the following method: I’d start by creating one pin per article (I’d recommend creating a few per post eventually but start with one pin per post).

Use Canva (as mentioned above) to create your Pins (it’s free and easy to use). Make sure that your pins are vertical and easy to read (I mean big, clear fonts) as up to 80% of Pinterest traffic now comes from mobile.

Use clear images and don’t make your pin too cluttered. To get an idea of the kinds of things that do well on Pinterest, go on the search bar and type in something like ‘New York’. The top pinned posts come up first and these are normally clear, beautiful designs (but never copy someone’s pin exactly).

Always add your pin to the bottom of your articles with a clear call to action “pin me” or something. Set up rich pins by setting up a Pinterest for a business account. This will make your pins more SEO friendly and give you access to analytics.

On the topic of SEO, Pinterest works as a visual search engine so be sure to add a complete description to all of your personal boards and the pins you create (you can add a description by filling in the ‘alt’ tag on your blog images).

Don’t be afraid of SEO!

This is something that most bloggers shy away from in the beginning. However, once I began implementing various SEO techniques to my blog, my traffic soon began to grow.

Now, I receive tens of thousands of readers from search engines each month. I now offer consulting services for Pinterest & SEO. For more information, email me [[email protected]].

Stop using Instagram to promote your blog!

This one may seem counterintuitive, but using  Instagram to promote your blog is a horrible idea. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easily my favourite social media network, but it’s also not the place to look for blog readers. Instagram is the place where you can define your Instagram niche, build your brand and add some personality to your online persona.

Not only is promoting your blog through Instagram a lot of work, but there is only one hyperlink per profile. Now again, be honest with yourself, when was the last time you clicked on the link of someone’s bio when they told you to? I thought so…

Don’t waste all of your time on social media

Unlike 2016, where it felt like I devoted time, energy and even more energy into Instagram 2017 was the year I really focused on building my own blog. It was at this time that I realised I didn’t own the platform.

Instead of actively pursuing growth on Instagram and other social media channels, I preferred to post every few days so that I could concentrate on growing this blog and finish my studies. (Yes, I also finally graduated from my university in 2017!)

When it felt like everyone else had started spending less time on their own little corners of the internet, I still worked away most days on this blog. I was worried that my Social Media following was a lot larger than the traffic to this website (I can now happily say that that’s no longer the case!).

You see, the thing is, when you post on Social Media channels, you aren’t in control of the platform. This means that when an algorithm changes (as it does frequently), then your content can soon become buried in a sea of other people also trying to figure out how the new order of the social media channel will go.

The thought of this stressed me out a fair bit since I decided to go into full-time blogging mid-2017, and so I stopped posting daily on Instagram and focused on trying to create daily content on my website instead. I would encourage others to do the same!

Have a monetisation plan

Though there’s truth to the fact that you need to carve a niche and focus on what you’re passionate about, if your ultimate goal is to grow a passive income (though it’s fine if your goal is for blogging to be a creative outlet), then you’ll need to come up with an income plan from day one.

What this means includes implementing affiliate links (such as ShareASale, Booking.com, Amazon, etc), cultivating contacts for press trips and sponsored posts, and growing your traffic so as to add ads at a later date. For more information, check out this post on how to become a full-time blogger.

Start learning to brush off criticism

The way I see it, your blog can’t be everything to everyone. And that’s okay! 

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