There’s nothing worse than publishing a new blog post and hearing crickets. No clicks, no interest, no traffic. Why isn’t anyone paying attention?

The most common culprit is publishing new posts in a vacuum without supporting them through savvy content marketing techniques. But good news: 11outof11 can help. We’d like to share some tips for increasing your blog traffic and getting the most out of every post.

1- Build Blog Traffic Through Links

The first thing you need to know is that content alone isn’t enough. Simply publishing blog posts isn’t a true content marketing strategy. Your blog posts need support.

Build traffic for your blog by directing people to your posts through other channels. Add a link to your blog in each newsletter you send. Include a blog link in your whitepapers and ebooks. When you have customer service interactions, encourage people to visit your blog for more information about your products and services. 

2- Use the Strength of Social Media

Social media is also an excellent opportunity to build blog interest. On social media, people are already interested in forging new connections and exploring topics they find interesting.

As a content creator, you can help people solve their problems while teaching them more about your brand in the process. So, for example, if you’re already publishing an explainer video about one of your products, make sure you plug the blog during the video and encourage them to go there for more insights about the topic.

3- Create Blog Post Categories

Are you including at least one category with each post you publish? By sorting your blog posts into categories and tagging them, you create groups of similar posts. This has two big advantages.

First, it creates better organization on your website, which can have the downstream impact of improving your search engine rankings and customer conversions. Let’s say you group all of your “home services” posts into a category, which helps you realize you have only 1 or 2 posts on the separate but popular topic of “discounts and deals.” This spurs you to create more posts about deals, gaining attention from search engines and interested buyers.

The other advantage is that category sorting helps people stay interested in your site after they’re already there. Someone might see your blog post about “organic countertop cleaner” and decide to click to see your entire category of posts called “organic products.” The net result is more time on site and more engagement with your brand.

4- SEO Check Before Publishing

Here’s something that’s easy to overlook when you’re new to blogging. Your content strategy should include a routine search engine optimization (SEO) check before each post is published. 

An SEO check involves running your content through Yoast, Google Keyword Planner, or another search optimization tool to see what kinds of tweaks you could make to improve it. When you get in the habit of doing this, you’ll find that your individual posts rank higher, your online reputation grows stronger, and you get much closer to hitting your long-term content goals.

Although companies worldwide spend more than $65 billion on SEO strategies, a small-scale SEO blog post checkup is free and fast. It usually takes less than 10 minutes to touch up a 500-word post, so it’s definitely worth your time.

5- Maximize Your Media

Each time you create a piece of content in a certain medium - like a blog post, podcast, or video - convert it to other formats and share it in each channel. For example, turn a video into a blog post that goes deeper into the topic, and use both formats to cross-promote to the other.

Ideally, every piece of content in every medium should have matching pieces of content in other formats. This helps you get the most out of every topic and builds steady traffic across your channels. 

6- Ask for Help When You Need it

Okay. Now you’ve read all of this helpful advice, but you simply don’t have time to do it all. We get it. Blogging takes time. So does content marketing.

When you’re struggling to make it all happen, 11outof11 is your secret weapon. We have content strategy experts on staff who stay up to date on the latest techniques for producing excellent content and securing strong rankings with search engines.

Contact 11outof11 now if you need a bit of blogging backup.