How to drive more traffic to your blog even without a large following

Almost all of us have been disappointed with the traffic we got for our first blog or post online. It is quite obvious and naturally expected but still, it feels disappointing.

Over 7 million blogs are published every day and it quickly becomes a rat race to get the appropriate community's attention.

The thing is, getting traffic online is like a rolling snowball.

One thing can lead to another and before you know it, your content is in the media chain. No opportunity or platform is too small in the starting stages.

Here is a quick story of this chain reaction in action:

The story of DonorsChoose.org is an example of the modern-day media chain in action. It is a site that allows teachers to raise money for classroom projects.

Many teachers in New York City were using the site to raise money, and several local outlets reported about this effort. Soon after, Newsweek picked it up.

One of Oprah’s people saw the article in Newsweek and she decided to name DonorsChoose as one of Oprah’s favorite things for 2010. Eventually, Gates Foundation picked it up and the rest is history.

The lesson?

When starting out, it is imperative to utilize all the platforms at your disposal by cross-posting them, in the hopes of leveraging the millions of users that visit these platforms.

Publishing on different platforms

Next time when you've published a blog, share a gist of it on Reddit, write a thread on it on Twitter and post a summary of it on Facebook. Also just because you posted your blog on XYZ platform, doesn't mean you can't repost it on ABC platform. There's where canonical URL's come into play. It drives SEO traffic from XYZ to ABC platform or vice versa depending upon your canonical URL.

What is a canonical URL?

Since you would be posting your content on different sites, and since all of these sites already have great SEO, Google or any search engine may get confused about which page to be ranked higher on, surely it can't rank multiple sites having the same content in the front page.

To solve this, it looks up canonical URLs. The canonical URL basically tells Google which URL is the original source of the article and hence deserves to be ranked ahead of the duplicate ones.

For example, if you write a blog on your personal site and then repurpose it for Hashnode, you can set a canonical URL( the URL of the blog that's living on your personal site) on Hashnode. So when Google comes to index Hashnode, it notices the URL of your personal site and ranks that instead.

It is a great hack to boost the SEO ranking of your personal site.

Sharing on Social Media

As per Similar Web, Twitter gets a whopping 7.1 billion in traffic in a month and an average user spends roughly 10 mins on the site.

That's an insane number. This is why it is crucial to post your blog as a small thread or a link to these social platforms because not only will it drive traffic to your site but also you can build a following there and slowly build a community that spans multiple platforms.

Use hashtags on Twitter to reach the right audience.

Similarly, Reddit is also a great place to post the content. Reddit is beautifully segmented into various groups called subreddits and there is a group for every genre, from cooking to conspiracy theories to marketing to parenting. There is a high probability that whatever niche your blogging in, chances are there is a group for that niche.

Sharing your blog on Reddit is another fantastic way to get readers and build a community that resonates with what you are sharing. There are also dedicated communities such as Indie Hackers & Dev.to that target a particular segment of users.

There are more such communities available on the internet. Hive Index is probably a good place to search for new communities.

However, it is important to not just treat social media as link dumps. Besides posting links to blogs, also follow people who are active in the niche you're posting and it is also a good idea to interact from time to time with big accounts in your niche. You won't have to dedicate a lot of time, just 15 mins daily.

This is because people warm to people, not brands or blogs.

But over time it becomes quite tedious.

You wanted to blog about the cutting-edge tech you learned the other day or the recipe of your grandmother's cookie or just wanted to share what's up with the community.

But now you have to deal with setting up your own site in WordPress, worry about SEO tags, and later learn that it is not enough these days and that you also need to work on sharing blogs on various sites.

It can be overwhelming, especially if you just wanted to get some traction(traffic) and show the community your blog. It may seem unnecessarily complex.

But doing this consistently for at least 3-4 months can surely get you a following on multiple platforms.

What if there was an easier way of doing all this?
I am creating the first, all-in-one platform dedicated to Bloggers called Leansence. It frees the writer from all these problems & technicalities.

It handles canonical links and copy-pasting so you don't waste time that could have been otherwise spent on creating a new blog, while you still own all the content. Feel free to check it out or DM/comment if you have any feedback.