Grow Your Blog: Increasing Pageviews

Hey, friends! Today, I want to talk to my fellow bloggers for a few minutes.  If you’re a reader who likes coming by here for craft ideas, no worries, I’ve got a post just for you tomorrow!  But in the meantime, I want to chat with those of you who have blogs of your own about something that’s important to every single one of us.

Pageviews.

No matter whether you started your blog five years ago or just yesterday, you did it because you have something to share and you want people to see it, right?  Many of us see our blogs as a source of income, or hope to someday, but sponsors aren’t interested in blogs no one visits.  That’s why they want to know lots of numbers, especially our pageviews when we apply for campaigns.  Others may have no interest at all in monetizing, but even if the goal is simply to inspire, that falls flat if no one ever comes by to see our posts.  So.  How do we go about increasing pageviews?  How do we get people onto our website?  And what’s more, how do we get them to stick around and check out our other work once they do stop by?

Grow Your Blog: Increasing Pageviews

Here are a few tips and tricks that will hopefully drive some new traffic to your site.

1. Get your work featured on submission sites!
Websites like Craftgawker, Foodgawker, TasteSpotting, and the like are a great way to show off your latest projects.  Yes, they can be very particular and you might get ten rejections for every one accepted project…but it’s totally worth it.  You will see a huge traffic boost anytime your work is featured on a popular submission site.  It’s ten times the exposure you get from link parties, and way less work because you’re just submitting to that site rather than fifty different parties every day.  There are lots of content specific sites too, like FunFamilyCrafts.com, where you can share anything kiddo-related, as well as sites like LooksiSquare.com that still maintain high quality standards without being quite as, um…selective…as the gawkers are.  If you want some tips and help for getting your work featured on these sites, check out my “Getting Gawked” post!

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2. Pin your work to group boards.
When I pin something to one of my personal Pinterest boards, it gets seen by the people who follow me {about 4,000 of them}.  That’s a great number, and gives me good exposure.  But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what happens if I pin on a group board like Mod Podge Rocks, which has a whopping {are you ready for this…} 90,000+ followers!!  That’s more than twenty times the audience!  So, if at all possible, join some group boards with a larger following than your own.  Sometimes you’ll just receive invites to these; other times you may have to reach out and ask to become a pinner.  Once you’ve got a few big group boards in your repertoire, make use of them for sharing your work with a much bigger audience than you can reach by yourself.  Of course, always follow Pinterest etiquitte and be sure you’re only sharing things appropriate to that particular board {ie: no chocolate cookies on the Mod Podge board}.

3. Join with other bloggers to promote each other.
All of us have friends in this big old bloggy-world who we like to bounce ideas off of, chat with, and support.  Join together with a few of those friends and make it a weekly habit to help promote one another’s posts.  I’m a member of several blogger groups on Facebook and we have weekly schedules that help us share each other’s work across the various social media platforms.  One day, we all share posts we’d like the others to pin.  Another day, we stumble a post or two from our friends.  Sometimes we +1 each other on Google+ and retweet each other on twitter.  Because we each have our own individual reader communities, when we cross-promote, we reach people for each other that may not otherwise have seen a post.

4. Tweet/share old but seasonally appropriate posts.
All of us have posts in our archives that never got the love they deserved.  I have some really awesome Halloween and Fall projects that were only seen by about 12 followers back in 2011.  As a particular season or holiday approaches, tweet, pin, and share the links to those old posts so that people can enjoy them!  I mean, let’s face it, none of us are going to have a brand new fall craft or recipe every single day of the week, but if we pull out the oldies {but goodies!} we’ll have a lot more to share with our readers who are looking for those seasonal ideas.

5. Link to your old posts in your new posts.
When you share a new project, try to add in links to previous projects that may be related in some way.  This encourages people to continue exploring your site.  For example, on Monday, I shared a post about how to make some Crystal Dangle Earrings.  The beads were the same as one I used a few weeks ago for another jewelry project, so it was only natural to link to that and say, “You may remember these beads from my Beaded Necklace Charm…”  Anytime you can, get people to stay on your site and check out your other work.  Plugins like LinkWithin and Engageya that feature “You may also like…” and then show thumbnails of a few related posts are awesome for this too.

6. Make use of SEO plug-ins.
SEO.  Search Engine Optimization.  This means making the Google-bots think your post is THE most relevant post on the internet for whatever Jane Smith is going to type in her Google search bar.  Search engines are my #1 source of traffic.  If you’re on WordPress, there are great plugins, like Yoast, that will help you to optimize your posts so that they show up as close to the top of a search result page as possible.  Make sure you take advantage of these; they’re easy to use and will really make a difference.  When I switched from Blogger to WP and started paying attention to SEO, determining and using keywords, and doing all I could to optimize my posts, my pageviews literally doubled.  Just do it.

There are other tips too for increasing pageviews, which we can talk about in some upcoming posts, but these are some great ones {I hope!} to get you started!  Good luck!  If you try some of these ideas, I’d love to know how they work for you!

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3 Comments

  1. Any tips on how to combat the summer slump when you don’t have old content to promote for the summer? That’s my battle these days.

  2. Thank you for this, Amy! I am a newbie blogger and am so glad I came across your site. I appreciate you sharing all the great tips in a wonderfully well-organized way! 🙂

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