How do blogs/articles gain traffic?

Hey Avery,

Like the fact that you chose Ghost as your CMS. We did too, check it out: https://blog.pixelic.io.

I think what Gary Vaynerchuk said about content distribution is really important, that "key to gaining traffic is in what you do after you publish an article."

• This is building trust/relationships with communities of your target audience that when you publish something and share it with these communities, people will read it.

• SEO efforts. plan your keywords, make sure your social graphs/meta descriptions reflect on those keywords.

• Consistency. I seldom see blogs taking off right off the bat. It takes time to build trust with users and gain traffic.

• Reposting via canonical link. Try reposting your content on medium or linkedin for extra distribution. But be mindful to link your original blog at the beginning of your repost! don't want to loose traffic from this.

• Reaching out to the relevant audience to ask their feedback, just like how you would manually craft your initial users at first.

• Submit your post to renowned publications/blogs. Ask them to add a link on the content so you can generate traffic from this.

hope this helps!

Hi Avery,

I found your blog interesting, good work on the effort you're putting into your project! FWIW, I'm busily trying to dive traffic to my own site. Out of everything I've tried, twitter seems to be the easiest. If you try and engage with people and help them share their links, they will reciprocate.
I think the old advice is the best. Just keep adding valuable content and keep sharing your links!
Good luck my friend!

The biggest source by far is Google. It takes time, though. The important parts are:

1. Make sure your site content is accessible without javascript (try running curl yourdomain.com/yourarticle from the command line and see if the content comes back)
2. Write things that people are searching for that are either un-served or under-served by other writers. Anytime you google hard to try to find something and come up empty, it's a good sign that there's an opportunity to write an article about that.
3. Make sure that the title and summary of your page that appears in search results is something people would click on.
4. Have a sitemap
5. Set up metatags for facebook, twitter, pinterest and other social networks
6. Off page SEO (aka "link-building" techniques)
7. Never engage in "link trading", "link purchasing", blackhat SEO, etc if you care about traffic in the long-term. Google is good and always improving at spotting this kind of thing and they punish it.

I don't know if Ghost has this functionality or not but with WP and most blogging engines, every post will also automatically ping various RSS/blog aggregating services that something new is out there. This also helps google find your content. Speaking of RSS, it's far less important than it was a decade ago, but I'd still recommend making sure your blog is generating a feed.

Aside from Google, building a social media following, syndicating your content elsewhere, and guests blogging are ways to build an audience. Bonus points for guest blogging since it also results in a link to your site.

try to get the post published through some good publication on medium. all the best