Blog & Blogging News: Want More Blog Traffic? 7 More Tips for Author-Bloggers

Blog traffic problems?

Attracting traffic to your author blog is probably the biggest challenge for new author-bloggers. (After actually getting around to starting the thing in the first place and writing some posts.)

The problem is that most of the stuff you read about blogs isn't terribly useful to authors. Blogging advice is usually aimed at writers who are blogging for its own sake and aiming to monetize their blogs. Author bloggers are in this to bring attention to their books, not "make $12 gazillion dollars a month blogging" or whatever that book on blogging written in 2005 promises. (And do, please, be wary of those things. Very few people are getting rich with blogs these days.)

In Part 1 of this post, I offered 6 tips to bring more traffic to your author blog:

Comment on other blogs for visibility and networking

Guest blog

Learn basic blogging do's and don'ts

Learn to write Web content

Post regularly

Write grabby, Tweetable headers

And because that got way too long, today I have 7 more tips:

1) Pack Your First Words With Crucial Information

Half a century ago, journalists were taught to "humanize" stories by starting with a human interest line.

"Wendy Writer shouldn't have a care in the world. She's a pretty thirty-something freelance writer living in a gorgeous Victorian triplex in Old Town. She's sitting on the front porch of the house she moved into last month with her cat Hortense. The three-story home was once owned by one Mildred Biggins, who died in 1924…"

The reporter could wait to get to the lead (then known as the "lede" to differentiate from the metal originally used to make type) in the third or fourth sentence, but these days, you've got to give us the facts in the first 50-60 characters.

50-60 characters. That's all Google shows in the search results, so make them work hard.

It's also what will show in any preview that appears on Facebook, Google Plus or other social media, so you don't want to save any "good stuff" for later.

Start with a bang: "Wendy Writer's house may be haunted by the ghost of Mildred Biggins." Just say it.

2) Use Images and Choose them Wisely

When I started blogging in 2009, images weren't as important as they are now. My old blog header photo that went out with all the posts was just fine.

Later, the "book of the week" became the featured image.

But that was in the days before Twitter images and the rise of image importance on other social media. These days a blogpost without a sizable, recognizable image is pretty much invisible.

According to social media guru Frances Caballo, colored visuals increased people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80% and content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

Also it's good to know that WordPress favors a horizontal image at least 675 wide and 375 high. Twitter also likes horizontal (landscape). Facebook and LinkedIn like square and Pinterest and Google+ favor portrait.

I discovered the importance of images recently when I was called for interviews by two prestigious magazines—one a women's fashion magazine and the other a prestigious journal for lawyers.

The interviews were on very different topics—book reviews and fears of becoming homeless—but the reason I was called in both instances was that my blogpost was the first entry that came up on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that was accompanied by an image. I got the interviews—and the chance to pimp my books—because my picture was there on the SERP.

But do make sure you use copyright-free images. Some bloggers do a quick Google search and use an image without making sure it's free to use. Six months later they get a nasty surprise bill from the copyright holder. Not fun.

Choose images from WikiCommons, Wikimedia, Pixabay , Unsplash, Morguefile or one of the other free photo sharing sites (or take your own.)

3) Social Media is Your Best Source of Blog Traffic

Most of the traffic to a new blog comes from social media and other blogs.

This is why you need those Tweetable headers I talked about in Part 1. You also really need Google Plus.

Google Plus:

You know how I said my blogposts were the first to come up in a SERP in many subjects? Well, it wasn't actually my blog. It was the announcement of the blog posts on Google Plus.

Google Plus is your most effective medium for driving search engine traffic to your blog.

And Google Plus rewards wordiness, so post a couple of paragraphs as well as the link.

Twitter:

I usually tweet the post a couple of times a day all week, with different hashtags. Hashtags make a big difference with Twitter. I'm told they do with Pinterest, as well, although I haven't really got the hang of Pinterest yet.

With my new book blog, I use the hashtags #mystery #crime, #poisons and #gardening. To find out what you want to use, Google "Twitter hashtags" for your subject matter.

Pinterest:

Post photos from your blog to your Pinterest boards. You can tag your blog photos with hashtags to snag Pinterest users (thanks for that tip, Tam Francis) and use keywords in the photo description.

Facebook:

Don't just post to your Facebook author page or personal page. You can get a big boost in traffic by posting to relevant groups you belong to as well, (but don't overdo it. I once got reported for spam by some creep I was trying to help with a link to a post that answered his question and got put in FB jail for a week, with a CAPTCHA on all my links for a year.)

And don't forget other social media like LinkedIn, Reddit and StumbleUpon, or wherever you have a presence.

A link to this blog somebody put on StumbleUpon last January got us 5555 hits in one day.

4) Learn to Use and Format Subheaders

I touched on subheaders in Part 1 and promised some more in-depth info.

Subheaders are essential for drawing traffic and keeping it. They have three jobs:

Emphasize your important points.

Draw the eye through the piece.

Include keywords and signal your topics to search engines.

So if you're writing about Mildred Biggins, you want to use subheaders that contain words like "ghost", "haunted", and "poltergeist", rather than "Flappers in the Night" or "Mildred or Hortense…who's Flushing the Toilet at 3 AM?".

IMPORTANT: Be sure to use the "header" and "subheader" mode in your blog program, and not the "normal" or "paragraph" setting.

For Blogger users, the subheader menu is on the left-hand side of the toolbar, where you see the word "normal". That window has a menu, where you can choose Heading, Subheading, or Minor Heading.

For WordPress users, it's in the menu where you see "paragraph" as the default setting. You can choose "Headings" from 1 down to 6.

5) Choose Strong Anchor Text for Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are all-important in blogging.

What are hyperlinks? It's okay to ask. I had no idea how to make a hyperlink for the first six months I blogged.

You make a hyperlink when you turn an ugly url like this http://annerallen.com/beware-bogus-literary-agents/ into a live bit of text that you can click on. Like this link to one of my very first blogposts: Beware Bogus Literary Agents.

You make a hyperlink by selecting the text (called "anchor text") that you want people to click on. Then you go to the icon that looks like two links of chain up there on the menu bar. Or in Blogger it is cleverly identified with the word "Link".

See how I didn't make the link above with the word "here" or "this link"? That's because the words "here" and "this link" don't mean anything to the Google spiders (the reason these robot/algorithm things are called "spiders" is they "crawl" around the Interwebz looking for content.)

Those algorithms only notice links with identifying text. So either use the title of the piece as I did above, or say something about it, like "the time agent Janet Reid visited my clueless-newbie blog."

That means somebody searching for info on Janet Reid might run into my post. Also searches for "clueless", "newbie" and "blog".

Also, one of the ways a website "ranks" with search engines is with "backlinks" or "sites linking in." Those are sites that link to your blog, which are a very good thing.

So if I stop by your blog and like something you say—or even dislike it—as long as I mention it and link to it from this blog, that's a huge boost for you. So you want people to talk about you (as long as they get your url right!)

6) Tags Attract Blog Traffic, Too

The "tags" or "labels" you put on the end of your post look as if they're for helping you organize your archives. And of course that's their primary purpose. But they're also noticed by those all-important spiders. So use as many tags as possible, including all your keywords, plus the names of people you're quoting or writing about.

If they're tagged, those people may get a Google alert that you've mentioned them. That means they may grace your blog with their presence, which is what happened to me with Janet Reid, on my fifth blogpost ever.

I had twelve followers, but there was the QueryShark herself, telling me I had a "nicely written post." Oh, how I basked! (But she rejected my query anyway, alas.)

7) Some SEO Tips

I know SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of those jargon expressions that makes most writers' eyes glaze over. A lot of people think it means repeating the same words over and over.

But search engines actually favor using regular speech these days, so you don't usually need to do anything strange to "optimize" for a search engine. All you need to do is use simple keywords to help Google and other search engines find you with those algorithmic spider thingies.

Using keywords means using the most basic (and unfortunately least interesting) words about your topic. So when you're writing your copy or header, think of what words somebody might put into a search engine on the topic you're writing about. Can you tell which would work better for SEO?

#1 My Cat Hortense is a Genius

#2 Can Your Cat Learn to Use the Toilet?"

If you're catching onto this keyword/SEO/header thing, you chose #2. A person looking for information on cat hygiene is more likely to type "cat use toilet" into Google than "Hortense" and "genius."

So if you want somebody to read your piece about how Hortense learned to flush the toilet, leading you to believe there was a poltergeist in the bathroom of your new apartment, use a header that the Googler might think up if she had an interest in toilet-flushing cats.

The best thing to do is check after you write your post to see if you have keywords in the following:

Headline

First paragraph

Subheaders

Anchor text for hyperlinks.

Blog & Blogging News

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Want More Blog Traffic? 7 More Tips for Author-Bloggers

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