If you’re looking to make money out of your blog then an important metric for potential sponsors and collaborators is your blog traffic, which is essentially how many people visit your site and read your content. The more people your content reaches the more valuable your blog will become, so if you’re trying to boost your traffic, here are five things to consider.

1. Ensure you are applying the principles of SEO

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation which means making your blog more easy to find through search results on search engines such as Google or Bing. SEO is a vital measure to ensure that you are receiving organic traffic, which means traffic that is unpaid, unlike an advert or sponsored position.

Organic search results account for the majority of all online searches and have the ability to generate 20x more traffic than paid positions.

The basic principles of SEO centre around the use of keywords or phrases which make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your blog pages and index them correctly. SEO can be a little tricky to get your head around but you can easily conduct the basics yourself if you have a willingness to learn. If you don’t have the time and want to make sure you’re getting it 100% right then consider using an SEO agency such as Ignite Digital, who will conduct an SEO audit for you and help you to become search engine optimised.

2. Promote your content through social media

Writing and publishing quality content is a great start to generating blog traffic but promoting it is where you’ll start to see a dramatic increase in your traffic numbers.

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are all great places to promote your content, you can download plugins that will automatically publish your blog content for you or you can do it yourself with social media scheduling platforms such as Hootsuite.

To get the most out of using social media to promote your content you will want to ensure that you are building a real following on these platforms and make sure to use the relevant hashtags to help people find your posts.

3. Write a captivating Meta description

Your meta description is like the blurb of a book or the synopsis of a movie, it’s the couple of lines you see below the title of your page when it appears on a search engine and should entice a reader to click and choose your content.

Many people neglect to specify their meta description which means that the search engine will just display the first few lines of text from the page instead, but this may not be the most captivating part of your post. Meta descriptions should be kept to under 155 characters, keep them short but informative and use action-orientated language such as ‘discover’, ‘learn’ and ‘find out’ to encourage searchers to click.

4. Provide valuable content

Attracting return visitors to your blog is the key to consistent blog traffic across all of your content, and the only way to ensure that people come back and read your new content is to make sure that everything you publish provides real value.

In addition to making sure your content is of consistently high quality also pay attention to the usability of your blog as a clunky, difficult to navigate site can put people off returning in the future

**This is a collaborative post.**