The 4 Mistakes Costing You Blog Traffic

I’ve heard talk lately saying that social media and blogging are dead. “They don’t work anymore.” “There’s too much noise.” “It’s impossible to get heard.” “It doesn’t drive traffic.”

I’d like to go ahead and call bullshit on that right now.

Social media and blogging absolutely do work to drive traffic, you just have to be smart about it.

The mistakes I most commonly see clients and peers making that render their blogging and social media efforts useless are:

• they are inconsistent
• they aren’t making their content highly shareable
• they only promote their content once
• they rely entirely on automation

Ok. Let’s briefly talk about why each of these mistakes are costing you blog traffic.

Inconsistent

Whether it’s being inconsistent with a blogging schedule or with blog topics, your audience will get confused and move on.

This starts with knowing your audience and creating content that they are going to care about. Then, get on a consistent schedule of publishing content that makes your existing audience and your dream people say fuck yeah! They’ll read/watch/listen to it and share it.

It’s important to create a schedule and stick to it if you want to create any kind of momentum. If there is no new content, the audience you’ve been building is going to stop coming back.

Not So Shareable

The best way to get in front of your dream people is to have your existing audience share your content with them. Chances are, your existing audience is connected to a lot of other people with similar interests that would eat your content up, too. If you’re not making your content shareable, though, they aren’t very likely to make the effort to spread the good word about you.

Here are a few ways to make your content more shareable:

• install the Pinterest share plugin on your website
• install other social share plugins like SumoMe to make it easy to share to other networks
• create captivating blog graphics with a catchy title
• add a click to tweet to your posts
• make your tweets less than 120 characters for easier retweeting (some tools like Hootsuite will still cut your retweet off if it’s too long)
• write that ‘fuck yeah!’ content that your audience wants

Make it so easy to share your stuff that people can’t say no.

One-Time Promotion

A lot of people write a new blog post, share it on their social channels that morning, then never speak of it again. This is a huge fucking waste.

The life of a tweet is like 90 minutes. You can’t expect everyone ever to see it in that one tweet. This is why you should be sharing your content several times in the first week to get any traction on it, and keep it as part of your regular social media rotation for a while.

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers says you should be spending 20% of your time on content creation and 80% on content distribution. Most people do the opposite and, as such, miss out on major traffic.

Click below to get my guide on sharing and promoting your content more than once to get more traffic without annoying your audience. Know how often to share to each social channel, and how to reach out to get more shares from your audience.

 

Automation Station

Automation can be a life saver for busy freelancers and entrepreneurs. It’s fantastic in some cases and can totally work to attract an audience and even convert them into clients and customers.

But automating your social media 100% is a mistake. There lies a huge opportunity in interacting with the people sharing your content or discussing keywords in your niche. Being human is a crucial element of a winning social media strategy because it builds trust, it makes people care about what you’re doing, and it brings them back for more. No one gets emotionally invested in a robot.

Try freshening up your automated shares of older content every few weeks so your twitter feed looks a little less recycled. Mix in new content with a human touch, like personal observations or quote images.

Tools like Edgar, CoSchedule, and Buffer help with automation while still giving you control to change your message and keep it fresh.

What tools and methods do you use to drive more traffic to your blog?