#4 Best ways to get more traffic for blog

 I guess you could say I'm a hacker. I can hack golf, life, [music getting louder] and traffic. But I'm guessing what you're interested inmost is traffic. So in this video, I'm going to show you howto get traffic to your website backed with 7 real-life examples, stats, and everythingin between. Stay tuned. [music] What's up marketers? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Now, if you're new to digital marketing andstruggling to drive traffic to your website, then you're in the right place. Over the past 10 years, I have personallyrun countless experiments with both free and paid traffic techniques. But that's just me. Combine that with some of the smart marketershere at Ahrefs, and we have decades of experience to share with you today. Now, if you're like me and you're tired ofhearing advice like "use hashtags," then make sure to watch until the end of this videobecause I am confident that there's something valuable in here for everyone. Let's get to it. 

Quick sidenote: this video isn't meant toencourage you to look for hacky ways to get more website traffic. It's meant to encourage you to experimentand implement new tactics into your broader marketing strategies and processes. Alright, the first strategy is to use forumslike Quora. So, Quora is a popular question and answerforum where people ask questions, and anyone can answer them and link back to their site. But Quora in itself isn't some magical trafficvault. In my experiment, I wanted to see how muchtraffic you could get to a brand new website from just Quora. And not just any traffic, but qualified traffic. Meaning visitors will turn into leads and/orsales. So I bought a new domain on October 27, 2016,threw up one answer that was linking to my new domain and here are the results. Around 48,000 users and 15,700 subscribersfor a wholesale clothing line that didn't exist at the time. Alright, so conventional wisdom will tellyou to search for a popular topic on Quora, write a "great" answer and link back to yoursite. But the biggest gap in this strategy is youhave no way of knowing which pages on Quora are actually generating traffic today. But we do know that Quora gets a ton of trafficfrom Google - over 100 million monthly search visitors according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer. So what I did and what you can do is searchfor relevant keywords that Quora ranks for. And once you find a page that's getting agood amount of consistent traffic from Google, you can post your answer there and get somefree exposure for your website. Here's how it's done. I'll go to Site Explorer and search for quora.com. Then I'll go to the Top pages report, whichranks the pages by the ones that get the most search traffic from Google. Now, let's say that I have a blog on fashionand style. I would just type in a general keyword inthe Include search box to find relevant pages. And the first two results look pretty legit. One on colors that go with purple and theother about types of fashion styles. Now, there are three very important things thatI learned throughout my experiment. #1. Context is king. So in my answer, I had four links in total. The first one was a link back to my personalblog on a business-related topic, the second and third links were to other well-known wholesalesites, and the fourth link was to my experimental landing page. While I can't tell you how much traffic wentto the second and third links, the fourth and most relevant link had around 39x thetraffic from Quora than the first link.

 #2. The second thing I've learned is that a page'sranking position in Google can change quite randomly and frequently. So you want to find pages that have had steadytraffic or are currently growing. You can do this by clicking on the caret beside theURL you want to answer, and then go to the Overview page. Then look at the Organic search tab, whereyou can see the history of that page's traffic. And this one looks pretty steady so I'd saythat it's worth posting on. And the last tip is to look at view velocityof the top answer. If you're logged into Quora, then you cansee the number of views each answer has earned. So just take the total view count and divideit by the number of months from the time it was answered, and you have a general ideaof what you can expect if you were to rank high for that answer. Alright, the second strategy is to tap intountapped paid advertising platforms. I get it. You might not have a huge budget for thingslike PPC advertising. But I'm not talking about the more popularadvertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook. Both are great, but in my experiment, I wantedto test out some of the "less popular" ad platforms like Pinterest, Yahoo Gemini, Outbrain,Taboola, and Reddit. The two that worked particularly well forme were Pinterest and Outbrain. Let me expand on my favorite ad platform - Pinterest. The goal of my experiment was to see if Icould pull off some good old affiliate arbitrage, which meant to make more in affiliate commissionsthan I spend on ads. Here are my results from Pinterest. I spent around $17,000 and have earned around 2.5x that without doing much more than creating an image, choosing some keywords, and payingmy monthly dues.

 Best of all, my total Pinterest spend hasn'tbeen on just this affiliate site. I've bought about 10,000 clicks to anothersite on a completely unrelated topic. Now, I know that I haven't exactly spent millionsof dollars, but I've played with Pinterest enough to learn a few things: #1. Traffic is cheap. So with an average CPC of around $0.26 across all of my campaigns, it was a no-brainer for me to push as much money in as the impressionswould allow. #2. Pinterest sends super qualified traffic frommy experience. The majority of their users are in the USand if you think about what people do on this platform...they "pin" pictures of things thatthey want to make or buy. In fact, Pinterest ads have converted betterfor me than Google Adwords, Facebook, and Bing ads...combined. Now, before you start advertising blindly,you should consider Pinterest's audience. For example, a website that sells bags willlikely do much better than a steel mill looking for investors. So how can you set up Pinterest ads? It's literally just a matter of choosing aninterest-based audience or entering a list of keywords. That's up to you to experiment with. I won't go deeper into the affiliate strategysince that's outside of the scope of getting traffic to your site. But if you do want to see more about thistopic, leave a comment and we'll go from there. The next strategy is to update "out of date"content. At Ahrefs, we have a ton of data on keywordsand backlinks.

 So we created this cool post showing the topGoogle searches. A few months after publishing our post, wegot thousands of free visitors from Google search. But since people are searching for differentthings every month, the article went out of date and rankings dropped. So we decided to update the post in April2018 and almost had a near instant spike in traffic. And we updated it again in May, June, September,October, and now December for continual growth. Here is how you can identify pages that couldbenefit from an update. First, if your content is about a topic thatrequires "freshness" in the real world, then it might be worth updating. For example, a topic on the "best headphonesin 2019" would likely need to be updated the following year because manufacturers willcontinue to release new models and there might be new brands that come to market. And second, if you're starting to see yourrankings fall, then it might be worth updating. But don't be rash and jump to conclusions. Just like in our "Top Google searches" post,you could see that we were losing rankings and traffic. So we figured that we had to keep it freshto a certain extent. The next traffic hack is to repurpose yourcontent to different media types. If you're going to put time into creatinggreat content, then why not get the most mileage out of it? Repurposing content can easily double yourreach and traffic. Here are a couple of things we regularly doat Ahrefs. On social media, we'll take some of our moresuccessful list posts and repurpose them into bite-sized tips on Twitter. Now, this tweet has 23 retweets. If we were to average half that number forall 75 tips, then that would equal 862 retweets. We also take interesting points from our blogposts and share them on social media without a link. This has resulted in way higher share ratesfor us and naturally, new people who have never heard of our brand will look us up. Another way that we repurpose content is toturn our blog posts into videos and our videos into blog posts.

 Confused? Let me explain. Some people choose to literally turn a blogpost into a video verbatim. And that works to a certain extent becausesome prefer video over text and vice versa. So at Ahrefs, we sometimes use the same topicon our blog and YouTube channel, but each content format will have slightly differenttips. For example, our video on SEO tips was inspiredby our massive post from our blog. But you'll find that about 60% of the tipsin the video are different from the blog post. And our video series on WordPress SEO wasactually repurposed to a blog post. And both the video and blog post have performedwell. So how do you choose which content to repurposeand which ones to leave alone? Two things. First is to research keyword popularity onthe platforms. And second is a pretty self-explanatory rule called "does it make sense?" So popularity of a keyword can easily be foundusing Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Just select your search engine and enter ina keyword you want to target. And you'll see that on YouTube, there arearound 1,100 monthly searches for WordPress SEO in the US and 7,000 worldwide. Now, let's switch the search engine to Google. And you'll see a good amount of searches eachmonth around the world here too. Now, does this strategy actually work forus? Well, our blog gets around 220,000 monthlyvisitors from Google search alone. And our YouTube channel got over 100,000 viewsin the last 28 days. So yes...yes it does. The next tip is to improve CTR on all platforms. CTR stands for click-through rate. It's the ratio of users who click on a specificlink compared to the number of times the link or advert is shown, which are called impressions. Now, I want you to think about this for asecond.

 Let's say your page appears in 1,000 Google searches and 5% of people click on your result. Then you get 50 visitors. But let's say you could double your clickthroughrate to 10%. Then you'll double your traffic too. There are three basic parts that are responsiblefor enticing a click. These are the title, the description, andthe image. And these are pretty straightforward. You want to write something that sounds enticing,solves a problem or evokes curiosity. And your image should support your main topic. A great way to know which headlines to improveis to dig into your analytics. No matter which platform you're using to gettraffic, whether that be Google, YouTube, Facebook or whatever, they should show youyour click-through rates. For example, if you're trying to get trafficfrom Google, you can use Google Search Console to see the different queries people are searchingfor, how many times your web pages appeared for the search query, and the percentage ofclicks that your page got. If you find that you're ranking high, let'ssay top three, yet your click-through rate is abysmal, then it might be a sign to updateyour title to something more click-worthy. We have a full video on optimizing title tagsand headlines to maximize your click-through rate, so I highly recommend watching thatvideo. But for now, we're going to move on to thelast and in our opinion, the best way to get free, consistent and passive traffic to yourwebsite or blog. And that's SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization,which is the process of optimizing your pages to rank higher in Google. Just like I showed you before, we get over220,000 search visitors to our blog alone and nearly half a million Google search visitorseach month to our website as a whole. 

The thing with other traffic acquisition tacticsis that some only work for as long as you're willing to pay and others might have a shortperiod of "virality," but eventually, it'll die down. This is what Rand Fishkin refers to as "thespike of hope" and it looks something like this. You'll see hope and quickly be disappointedby the flatline of "nope." Now, when you use SEO as a marketing strategy,the opposite tends to happen. Your traffic should steadily grow. SEO has a lot of moving pieces. From keyword research to link building toon-page SEO and the list goes on. So if this is something that you want to benefitfrom or improve, I highly recommend watching one of our many SEO tutorials. 

If you're new to SEO, then click here to watchour SEO for beginners video, and if you already have the fundamentals down, then watch thevideo here, which is a little more advanced and should help you get more #1 Google rankings. But before you go, make sure to like, shareand subscribe, and of course, if you have any questions, leave a comment below.