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Increase-your-traffic-fast
When you manage a blog, your expectation is always to see the traffic sky-rocket. Obviously you wonder how this will be possible, and above all, how people will crave for what you write. Unless you are a huge celebrity and have thousands of visitors every day already, this post is for you. Here are 3 golden rules to help boost your traffic. By applying these rules you should see a considerable increase in less than 12 month.

1- Choose well your blog article topic & title

When you are looking for blog article ideas, you should always consider a few things first. What is your legitimacy in writing about a specific topic? People will read what you have to say if they understand that your experience (professional and personal) allows you to have a certain opinion about a specific topic. So you better choose well, otherwise you will be just another person talking about something among the 123 million existing blogs. Once you have defined your expertise field, there are a few ways to find out the topics to talk about. Obviously you should always write about things that passionate you, otherwise you will spend your time talking about things that you are not interested on. Here are a few tools or platforms to help you find the hot topics.

Google Trends, the place to start with

Google is the place where almost all worldwide searches happen. So if there is a good place to start your trends analysis is Google. The American giant created a specific tool to allow you follow trends based on billions of searches. You can find it here: https://trends.google.com 
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Increase-traffic-blog-free
Google Trends also allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is in its ability to show news related to the search-term overlaid on the chart, showing how new events affect search popularity. Google Hot Trends is an addition to Google Trends which displays the top 20 hot fastest rising searches (search-terms) of the past hour in various countries. This is for searches that have recently experienced a sudden surge in popularity. For each of the search-terms, it provides a 24-hour search-volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results. Hot Trends has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches.

Reddit, the place to be right now

Another interesting web ressource is the Reddit platform. Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down that determines their position on the page. Submissions with the most up-votes appear on the front page or the top of a category. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”. Subreddit topics include news, science, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, image-sharing, and many others. The site prohibits harassment, and moderation requires substantial resources. If you find your topic, you can easily see what topics people are talking about. You can get inspired to write the same. Here below the “Luxury news” section on Reddit, the main hot topics. You can also browse by new topics and rising ones.
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Once you have identified the right topic, there is one important thing you need to take care of: the title. Things go fast and very often people will judge if they should read your article or not by reading the title. A few seconds that can bring a huge difference. In order to improve your titles, you can spend some time reading different news website. Some of them have been trying hard to optimize their titles and even article length. As everything, increase your traffic can take time. You need patience. So keep writing regularly and with quality. At one point it will pay off.

2- Develop your social networks and communities

If your ambition is to become an influent reference in a certain domain, you  need to gather your community. Social media is the perfect platform for it. By increasing your social community of fans, followers and subscribers, you will have the perfect traffic driver to your site. There are obvious choices and new ones. Facebook and Twitter are great traffic driver platforms. Since an algorithm manage these platforms, “free visibility” became a challenge. Facebook says that in general an average Facebook user can be exposed to 1’500 pieces of different content each day. So the probability that this user might see your content is almost close to zero. Nevertheless, if you keep engaging with your fans, the organic reach might still be something interesting. Otherwise you can spend a few dollars pushing the content into a targeted therefore qualified audience. Instagram and Snapchat are two great platforms as well, unfortunately linking to external websites are not the most efficient tool available in these platforms. But they represent a great way to increase your reputation and influence.
The rising platform that is perfect for publishers is Flipboard. Flipboard is a news aggregation and social network aggregation company based in Palo Alto, California, with offices in New York, Vancouver and Bejiing. Its software, also known as Flipboard, was first released in July 2010. As of March 2016 the company claims there have been 28 million magazines created by users on Flipboard. If you create a magazine on Flipboard you can share your blog articles, so if what you write is really interesting, you will easily get traffic from the platform.
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Last but not least, let’s take a little moment to talk about Pinterest. Pinterest is a web and mobile application startup that operates a software system designed to discover information on the World Wide Web, mainly utilizing images and on a shorter scale, GIFs and videos. This platform is great vehicle of traffic if you have amazing imagery in your website. By pinning the images present in your article into Pinterest, you create entry doors from social platform to your website. Since organic visibility is almost dead on Facebook, Pinterest and Flipboard became two amazing referrals to most of websites.
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Social media is a great way to engage with people with your content. Obviously the content need to be great, unique, original and sharp. With billions of interactions per second, social platforms are great traffic drivers. The great thing about social media is that you do not need to have millions of fans and followers. Better to have 10’000 followers highly engaged with you and your content than a million fans not connected. So work your social networks wisely.

3- Improve your website SEO. Nothing complicated, just a lot of courage and time.

Last but not least, if you wish to increase your website traffic, you need to help people to find it. As 97% of people searching, utilize a search engine, you better help the search engines to scan your website and allow people to find you. Generally we say that if you are not present in the first page of the search engine results, basically you do not exist. One good joke is: Where is the best place to hide a dead body?” The answer is: “the second page of google search results!!!”. It is very funny but quite true. So if your ambition is to have a good traffic in your website you need to learn SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques. You need to facilitate the search engine crawlers, or scan robots to easily find the content of your website. There are several free online tools to analyse your website.

SEO-Analysis-free

You can generally learn a lot from them, especially points of improvements. Here are a few online free tools but there are many others:

Let’s be honest, after checking your website with a SEO analyser, you will probably discover many issues. How to solve it? Either you will become an expert or you will spend some good money trying to fix it. In terms of SEO, once your website is technically speaking perfect, then you need to comply with certain important criteria (according to Search Engines) like back-linking. This means the number of other websites  that link back to yours. This would set up what we call your website “authority”. This is not up to you but more up to your network or other people that will designate your website as a reference.

In conclusion, if you start doing a real work on your blog, this should pay at one point. In any case the most important thing you need to ask yourself is why you run a blog? Do you want to share a passion or start a business? Depending on your ambition, you might then adapt your approach.

Jose Amorim

Info sourced in the different websites mentioned and luxuryactivist.com experience. All content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available. Images are for illustration purposes only.