If you're new to online writing, and even if you're not, it's easy to get confused by the various methods people use to increase traffic to their articles or blog posts.
In fact, with so much to remember and so many different things to do, to keep the traffic and money coming in, it can be overwhelming and paralyzing.
That's how it felt for me when I first approached the possibility of making money by writing online.
It was totally different than any other type of writing I'd done up to that point.
However, with my income potential limited to what I could do from home, writing was the only avenue open to me.
Because of that, I decided to look at writing online as a journey of discovery, rather than something I needed to know how to do all at once.
My progress would be slow.
That was obvious to me, but I hoped it would also make me a much smarter writer.
Since my goal back then was to have residual income firmly in place by the time hubby retired, I didn't feel rushed. I simply took things one step at a time and learned as I went along.
It's been over 15 years since I started writing online and things have changed dramatically.
I've had a few failures and a few successes along the way.
Some of the lows were beyond my control, such as my experience with Panda, Suite 101, and personal clients; but overall, writing online has been good. I've learned a lot.
So if you're having trouble getting search engine traffic, here's 7 things I've learned about increasing article visibility and getting people to read your articles and blog posts.
1) Give Yourself Permission to Write
We all want to be successful.
Whether your end goal is to make money, improve your self esteem, help others grow, solve a problem, or you just want a platform where you can present your unique perspective and insights to the world, writing online comes with a steep learning curve.
With millions of blogs hogging the online landscape, the game is crowded but not impossible to play.
Give yourself the space you need to learn what you need to know.
If you're new to the online writing world, you're not likely to hit the ground running, no matter how much you want to. During my first six months at Suite 101, I made less than $20 total, but Suite was my very first writing platform.
I had no clue what I was doing.
I knew nothing about keyword research or targeted traffic.
You learn to write by doing. Not by reading and hoping. And not by waiting for the perfect article idea to surface from the depths of your subconscious mind.
If you've been dragging your feet about writing consistently and publishing what you write, commit or recommit to writing regularly, and accept your current limitations.
If you wait until you reach some distant level of perfection or knowledge, that day will never come.
People can't read your articles if you don't write them.
Stop judging yourself to be inferior and start writing.
One of the tips I often hear in various writer forums is to watch your article portfolio. When you see something doing well, write another article on the same topic to duplicate that success.
Sometimes, that will work well.
For example, when I wanted to test the topic of dietary ketosis at Infobarrel, I wrote an article on why people following a low-carb diet might have trouble getting into ketosis.
It took off nicely, so I decided to duplicate that success by writing a beginner's guide to ketosis. That second article did well, but you can't always depend on that.
At Suite 101, my autism and gluten-free articles were my top earners. They received tons of traffic and made me a decent income. But Infobarrel was a completely different story.
What worked at Suite 101 didn't work at Infobarrel.
What I learned is that taking your articles down and placing them on another content-site comes with a high degree of risk. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to duplicate the same success.
When those articles were first written, they were very unique. The idea that gluten can be hidden in fragrances or people reacting to gluten in ways other than ingesting it was new.
That wasn't what many celiac experts or high-profile bloggers believed, so my readers were grateful to know how to solve the problems they were having.
Once those articles were published, many of the topics – and sometimes the original articles themselves – were plagiarized, scraped, rewritten, and overdone by so many other websites and blogs that the topics were no longer unique.
With millions of blogs hogging the online landscape, the game is crowded but not impossible to play.
Give yourself the space you need to learn what you need to know.
If you're new to the online writing world, you're not likely to hit the ground running, no matter how much you want to. During my first six months at Suite 101, I made less than $20 total, but Suite was my very first writing platform.
I had no clue what I was doing.
I knew nothing about keyword research or targeted traffic.
You learn to write by doing. Not by reading and hoping. And not by waiting for the perfect article idea to surface from the depths of your subconscious mind.
If you've been dragging your feet about writing consistently and publishing what you write, commit or recommit to writing regularly, and accept your current limitations.
If you wait until you reach some distant level of perfection or knowledge, that day will never come.
People can't read your articles if you don't write them.
Stop judging yourself to be inferior and start writing.
2) Don't Expect to Duplicate your Success
One of the tips I often hear in various writer forums is to watch your article portfolio. When you see something doing well, write another article on the same topic to duplicate that success.
Sometimes, that will work well.
For example, when I wanted to test the topic of dietary ketosis at Infobarrel, I wrote an article on why people following a low-carb diet might have trouble getting into ketosis.
It took off nicely, so I decided to duplicate that success by writing a beginner's guide to ketosis. That second article did well, but you can't always depend on that.
At Suite 101, my autism and gluten-free articles were my top earners. They received tons of traffic and made me a decent income. But Infobarrel was a completely different story.
What worked at Suite 101 didn't work at Infobarrel.
What I learned is that taking your articles down and placing them on another content-site comes with a high degree of risk. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to duplicate the same success.
When those articles were first written, they were very unique. The idea that gluten can be hidden in fragrances or people reacting to gluten in ways other than ingesting it was new.
That wasn't what many celiac experts or high-profile bloggers believed, so my readers were grateful to know how to solve the problems they were having.
Once those articles were published, many of the topics – and sometimes the original articles themselves – were plagiarized, scraped, rewritten, and overdone by so many other websites and blogs that the topics were no longer unique.
Today, it's just more of the same.
That's how it looked to Google, like I was just rehashing the work of others, instead of being the originator of those ideas.
However, I don't consider the time I spent revamping and publishing those articles on Infobarrel to be a waste of time. The experience taught me how to evaluate my Suite 101 articles. Until I'd published my Suite 101 articles to Infobarrel, I wasn't able to grab onto the insights that I have today.
While duplicating your success at other content sites is entirely possible, as my low-carb articles have taught me, it's a good idea not to expect it to happen. Readership will be different, and crushed expectations can be self-destructive for a writer if you don't know what to do with those unrealized ideals.
If you're able to duplicate your success, consider it the frosting of your writing life, rather than the cake.
3) Learn How to Write an Attention-Grabbing Titles
The title of your article or blog post is the first impression you make on your reader. If it doesn't catch their attention and entice them to click through to your article, the rest of the words on the page won't matter.
No one will ever see how well you crafted your article or how well you optimized the page. Even epic articles and foundation content will wither if a reader doesn't get past your title.
Granted, search results generally places a heavy weight on the words you use in your title. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidelines generally tell you to place your major keyword or keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
But packing your title with keywords and keyword phrases you believe people are searching for isn't the answer. A stuffed title will look stuffed and won't have the same appeal as one that:
- answers the reader's question
- makes a promise to solve a problem
- ignite's the reader's curiosity
- or makes the reader an offer they can't resist
While we each will be inclined to click on different titles, due to our unique interests, the object of the exercise is to learn what gives a title that irresistible pull.
Try to walk away from an enticing title without clicking on it.
Can you do that?
When I did this exercise myself, I went back to the titles that grabbed me. I couldn't walk away from them.
While you need your most important keyword or keyword phrase somewhere in your title, so search engines will understand what your article is about, the most important aspect of your title is reader appeal.
4) Use the Same Language your Readers Use
When I was new to the world of online writing, everyone was using Google's Keyword Tool and regurgitating the long-tail keywords and keyword phrases it came up with.
So that's what I did, too.
I thought there was something magical about the phrases Google said people were searching for.
After several months of writing on the web, and failing miserably, I finally began to catch onto the fact that keywords were not what Google said they were.
The order of the words wasn't important.
In fact, if you focus too much on individual keywords, your writing will be stiff and unnatural.
What I came to understand was that keywords are the language your readers are using. They are the words that people actually type into a search engine to find the information you're sharing.
This took me quite a while to wrap my brain around because people in the Suite 101 forum were so focused on writing articles with a commercial keyword slant that most of them were missing this important aspect of writing for the web.
Language was never talked about. I just stumbled onto the revelation myself.
At the time, I was the Featured Writer for Suite's autism section, so I was spending several hours per week skimming through autism forums around the Internet.
What I quickly noticed was that the term “sensory issues” and “sensory processing disorder” kept coming up again and again. It was an important topic to the parents of autistic children.
It was something they really cared about.
Since experimentation is part of my personal nature, and my writing at Suite was not doing well up to that point, I decided to do something different.
I totally ignored Google's keyword tool and the prevailing advice in the Suite forums to avoid using general search terms at all costs, and crafted a title I knew many autism parents would type into a search engine.
At first glance, the title looked like something that would quickly become buried in Google's search results. I placed “Signs of Sensory Processing Disorder” at the beginning of my title – a much overdone topic – and then the specific “ in the Vestibular System” at the end.
Throughout the article, I also used the term “sensory issues” because I knew it was a popular way of describing the disorder.
I was breaking all of the SEO rules that I was currently aware of.
Yet, the title turned out to be a complete hit!
Why?
Because I'd put myself into the shoes of my readers and asked what was extremely important to them.
I was able to duplicate that success the following Christmas when I penned an article about how to choose gifts for autistic children.
That holiday article received a link from a parent of an autistic child on a major website. They had written an article about appropriate gifts for a child with autism and included a link to my article.
Due to that one link, my traffic soared!
So don't ignore the importance of how your readers think and feel.
5) Don't Underestimate the Value of Social Interaction
Social interaction isn't just about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. While these social sites drive traffic to your site, it's also about participating in forums, writing emails to connect with important figures in your niche, or making insightful, well-thought-out comments on the blog posts and articles of others.
In Google's new world of online business, who you know and who links to you matters more than you realize. But that doesn't mean you need to run around linking to yourself from low quality link farms or leaving shallow comments on blog posts and articles, linking back to yourself from the comments.
Google frowns on those types of practices.
However, a strong comment that pertains to the actual topic of the blog post or article can do wonders for getting you noticed, both by the person who wrote the article, as well as readers who take the time to read all of the previously posted comments.
Since your name often links to your website, you don't have to leave a spammy link inside your comment when commenting on blogs. People will actually click through to your website from your name to learn more about you and your life's purpose if they like what you say.
In addition, if you happen to pick up a link from someone who has thousands of readers, such as my holiday autism article did, some of their traffic will trickle down to you.
When I first started my low-carb blog in 2007, no one was reading my posts, but I continued to write them anyway.
After a little bit of social connection, using a link to my blog in my signature at low-carb forums, and snagging a few high-quality links from those with a strong low-carb presence, my low-carb blog did and continues to do extremely well.
There are many ups and downs, due to weight loss being seasonal, but overall, that blog has been very successful.
But it didn't happen overnight.
It was very slow in coming.
6) Did You Know that Controversy can Increase the Traffic you Receive?
Since my low-carb blog doesn't follow the party line, but helps those with unique metabolic issues to find alternative ways to make a low-carb diet work for them, I sometimes find myself the center of ridicule and angry blog post rebuttals.
If this happens to you, just ignore the urge to defend yourself.
I didn't understand the value in doing that when I published a piece at Suite 101 on the Dr. Andrew Wakefield vs Brian Deer controversy regarding mercury in vaccines a few years ago.
But I started to understand the benefits of controversy after posting my experience with Nutritional Ketosis at my Life after Low Carb Blog (now, Just Do You). A lot of paleo and primal followers found me there and began to comment like crazy.
Later on, they migrated over to my Kickin' Carb Clutter blog after someone posted a link to my Nutritional Ketosis article. Also, I received a link from a nutritionist that I was following.
When controversy rages, look at what's happening in its true light.
Yes, you'll get some angry comments from people who want to defend whomever they believe you've wronged. Go ahead, and delete those nasty comments if you feel the need to.
However, due to the controversy, you'll pick up some new readers and loads of traffic from those who will cheer for you and return later on to read your latest blog post and articles.
This doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with you.
Many people like to debate strong issues and see an opposing viewpoint as stimulating. Whether your readers are cheering you on or debating with you, these are the people you're looking for.
So just continue doing and being who you really are because that will increase your following naturally.
7) Do Something Different – Find the Holes and Fill Them
The key to increasing your visibility in the search engines is to do something different from what others are doing. It's about finding a topic, subtopic, niche, or personal angle of interpretation that people will want to read and share with their family and friends.
It's about your audience trusting what you have to say.
In the above autism example, there wasn't a lot of information online about the vestibular system or the proprioceptive system for parents with autistic children. At least, not when I first published those articles.
For that reason, I gained a lot of visibility within the autism community from those two articles.
Before I knew it, my autism articles were making money.
They were being shared on Facebook over and over again. They were being followed by parents at G+ who didn't have the time or energy to do the depth of research that I was doing.
I quickly learned that if you want to increase your traffic naturally, all you have to do is write on a topic that people are interested in, but it also needs to be a topic that hasn't been overdone already.
Since the first two articles on the vestibular and proprioceptive senses was so successful, I completed the series by writing one article on each of the 7 senses (most people believe we only have 5). Many of those articles didn't do as well as the first two because information on the 5 senses is readily available.
The only exception to that was an article on touch sensitivity.
With the autism success driving me forward, I tried the same thing at my low-carb blog.
I wrote on a topic that people following a low-carb diet are obsessed with:
KETOSIS
Rather than addressing the basic facts, as my ketosis beginner's guide does, I decided to fine-tune the topic to fit a question that comes up again and again in every single low-carb forum I've ever visited:
How do you get back into ketosis faster after you've cheated on your diet?
The blog post took off in exactly the same way as the autism articles did, so I tried the idea again at my gluten-free blog. This time, I used a simple recipe for gluten-free oatmeal bread.
I had noticed that Google's Keyword Tool said that there were hundreds of people searching for a gluten-free version of oatmeal bread, and there were no gluten-free blogs that had the recipe.
Not one!
In response to that hole, I created a recipe for gluten-free oatmeal bread myself.
Just like my prior experiences, the blog received thousands of page views. More views than any other gluten-free post I had ever made.
Why?
Because I'd discovered a hole in the massive online-information highway and filled it with something I knew how to do.
These successes came without a lot of social media to back them up.
What I did was create something that Google had no choice other than to send me the traffic for. I was the site who was the most relevant for the query. There wasn't anyone else to send the searcher to.
That changed later on. Traffic reduced as other bloggers started writing their own oatmeal bread recipes.
In the wake of Panda and Penguin, being different is one of the most important keys to increasing visibility and traffic.
If you're looking for ways to increase your articles' visibility and traffic, it's always best to use smart techniques, rather than shady practices. Over the past 16 years that I've been writing online, the rules have changed drastically.
I expect them to continue to evolve as time goes on.
Although, there are tricks you can use, such as writing an article series to keep people coming back for the next installment or giving away stuff for free, readers have to care about what you're writing, or they won't come back.
Most authors are obsessed with their own ideas and viewpoint. They give the needs or beliefs of their audience little thought or value. To gain a following, you have to be credible and know what you're talking about.
You also have to provide your readers with exactly what they're looking for. The days of being able to offer general knowledge on a topic are long gone.
Today it's all about relevancy.
Google is determined to give the reader exactly what they are searching for. Their goal is to check every corner of the Internet, so they can find the most relevant web page to fit the query.
If you take the time to give your readers something that no one else has, you'll gain traffic, visibility, and plenty of reader interaction to keep you busy and making money for a very long time.
In the wake of Panda and Penguin, being different is one of the most important keys to increasing visibility and traffic.
Give Your Readers What No One Else Can
If you're looking for ways to increase your articles' visibility and traffic, it's always best to use smart techniques, rather than shady practices. Over the past 16 years that I've been writing online, the rules have changed drastically.
I expect them to continue to evolve as time goes on.
Although, there are tricks you can use, such as writing an article series to keep people coming back for the next installment or giving away stuff for free, readers have to care about what you're writing, or they won't come back.
Most authors are obsessed with their own ideas and viewpoint. They give the needs or beliefs of their audience little thought or value. To gain a following, you have to be credible and know what you're talking about.
You also have to provide your readers with exactly what they're looking for. The days of being able to offer general knowledge on a topic are long gone.
Today it's all about relevancy.
Google is determined to give the reader exactly what they are searching for. Their goal is to check every corner of the Internet, so they can find the most relevant web page to fit the query.
If you take the time to give your readers something that no one else has, you'll gain traffic, visibility, and plenty of reader interaction to keep you busy and making money for a very long time.
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