There are blog posts and there are blog posts that bring you traffic.
For most businesses and organizations, traffic leads to sales. And that’s why any business is operating – to earn sales and profit.
You don’t need to get a lot of traffic. You need to get the right kind of traffic.
The phrase, right traffic, is a cliché in the online marketing industry, but it’s the best way to describe that you want to get your target customer to read your blog posts because it can lead to earning their business.
How can you get new traffic from your target customer?
Here are a few blog posts that will make it happen.
1. Top Lists
Lists are some of the most common blog posts around. Bloggers use them like crazy because people love lists. They’re easy to understand. They’re easy to consume. They’re also easy to argue with.
For your purposes, creating lists is about tapping into the audiences of people that complement you. There are businesses and people out there that share the audience you want to have.
I use the example of country music artists to explain how this works.
You’re like a new country artist. You have a few good songs, but you’ve never been played on the radio and you’re just starting out. You need access to the country audience.
To do this you go to the established stars and ask if you can play on their tour as the opening act. You don’t take much, if any, pay. You provide a good warm-up show for the artist and in return you get access to their audience who happens to be your potential audience.
When creating lists, add the people, businesses, blogs, websites and more to those lists. Then email and tweet these people letting them know that you included them.
They’ll often share the list with their audience and slowly (and sometimes quickly) you’ll get new traffic.
2. Interviews
Interviews work the same way as top lists.
Find people that share the same target audience and that complement your business. Offer them your platform and interview them. Make them look good. See if you can get some really interesting and useful tips and pieces of information from them.
Then publish the post and have them share it with their audience.
You’ll share it with your growing audience as well. That’s why the interviewee is giving you permission to interview them in the first place. You have to do your part to help them out first.
3. Co-Authored Posts
Sometimes you’ll find that instead of doing interviews that people will want to co-author posts with you. These can work out great because you’re combining your brainpower and your audience power to help each other out.
I had a basketball coach once who took our team into the weight room. He had a bar with about 400 pounds on it. We stood there staring at it. He asked each of us to give it a shot; to see if we could lift it.
None of us could lift is, of course, and we all kind of laughed as we tried.
After we were all done trying the coach told us to all to grab to the bar and lift. We lifted the weight with ease; as a team.
The power of two is better than the power of one. Combine your smarts with someone else in the industry to create an amazing blog post.
4. DIY Guides
People are always looking for help with how to do things. We’re curious people. We want to figure out ways to make our lives better, more enjoyable and easier.
If you have knowledge, even if it seems basic to you, that would do these things for your target customer then share it with a blog post guide.
Guides are some of the most popular blog posts out there. Give action steps that readers can follow to get the desired result.
5. Unique Stories
People still react to stories. If you have stories to share about your business then share it. You don’t need to have an agenda with the story, but they can help if you’re trying to convey a message or looking to make things easier to understand.
I shared the story of my basketball coach earlier. The goal of that is to give the point more meaning and more of a visual. It also gives you some insight into my background, which strengthens our connection and understanding.
6. News Interpretation Posts
This one is big.
I’ve always thought that anyone can share the news with people. That’s one thing. People can get news from a number of sources, but they’re more choosey when it comes to interpreting the news.
For example, Google makes a change. That’s news and that’s fine, but what business owners with websites want to know is how the change will affect their SEO programs.
Interpret the news for your followers and you’ll have the type of posts that will really be in demand.
Conclusion
Publishing blog posts can really help your website traffic.
Any kind of post has the potential to do well, but these few above have proven to do well in the past. You can use some of these posts to build your blog and website traffic, but also experiment with your own blog posts. Create hybrids from the ones above. Figure out what works for you.
That’s how you build a successful blog that brings you new traffic and new business.
