I started a blog about technology's impact on the environment, but I'm not getting much traffic, what can I do?
I started my blog towards the start of lockdown in France, and have since been updating it (almost) every week and trying to get more people to visit it. It's called The Detechtor (hopefully you noticed the "tech" part) and I write about the impact of technology on the environment, our health, and how it's changing our day to day lives. I've been very much enjoying this little project but it can be a bit disheartening when I see days where I'm getting as little at 10 unique visitors. At one point a link to one of my articles about Carbon Capture (https://www.thedetechtor.com/post/carbon-capture-usage-and-storage-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis) made it onto the first page of Hacker News which was amazing! But since then things have been quite slow, I've been doing all the regular methods of promoting my blog (social media, news aggregators,...) but the traffic has been minimal, any advice on what else I could do?
I agree with the previous comment.
I am also curious as to what you are doing in terms of content marketing and SEO.
Are you writing content about topics you know people are already searching for?
Is your content better (a lot better) than the existing top three results for the same search terms you are targeting?
A great content marketing tip is to include quotes and strategies from top influencers in your niche, then make sure they know they've been quoted once your post goes live. They'll promote it without you even asking them to do so.
Another effective strategy is to run $5 per day ads promoting your blog posts. Traffic drives more traffic.
Notice that I'm not focusing on the common SEO tactics, like on page optimization and page titles etc. Those things matter, but more so in the long run. The promotion and great content matter so much more, both in the short and long term.
And you don't have to post frequently. That does not matter. Make the content great,.even if it takes a month to create.
Hey - I just went to check out your blog. I think this content has a lot of potential and you're doing a really good job. Here's a few thoughts.
-The time it took to resolve your webpage was a bit slow. I'd look into speeding that up. As I wrote this, I actually went to go test your website's speed to see if it was just me and was kind of shocked at the reports.
Two different tests:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedetechtor.com%2F
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.thedetechtor.com/kpnUV9ho/
-I'd look at redesigning the landing page a bit. One issue is that you have a lot of great content but I can't really see what the article is about from the homepage. Most of the content is cut-off. Check out digg.com or Medium for examples. Let the content shine!
-I think you have to really make a focused effort to interact with people on Twitter that care about these issues. They'll see your handle, then your website, they'll start following you, they'll start re-tweeting you. I think the goal should be interact (comment, tweet, retweet, like) with people for at least 10 minutes per day. Not going to happen overnight but you'll probably start building an audience after 3 months of consistency.
Hope his helps and good luck!