How to Grow Blog Traffic Depends on 4 Goals

How to grow blog traffic requires an intense focus on four important goals. They are quality, quantity, frequency and distribution.

Anyone can write anything on the Internet via blogging, but the writing matters only if people find the blog, think it’s interesting and come back for more.

Otherwise, it’s only writing as a hobby for yourself and not as a business for an audience.

Quality, quantity, frequency and distribution divide failing blogs from successful ones. Let’s see what each trait means for blogging.

1) Quality Blogging

Quality is defined as writing with original material, good grammar, organization, conciseness and timeliness, among other factors.

Search engines know how to identify original content. They reward original and punish duplication by how they rank results. They allegedly can identify good grammar as well.

Being concise is another way of describing information density. An informative article that gets to the point has much more value than a shallow article that takes a long time to get from one point to another.

Quality also reflects the knowledge of the writer, which in turn leads to trust, authority and credibility.

2) Quantity Blogging

Quantity means both the length of posts and the number of posts.

The standard for length of post is now more than 400 words. It’s also likely that at some point length becomes counter productive.

A 5,000 word article with all 5,000 words on a single page will be tedious to read and slow to load.

But research also suggests that longer posts — more than 1,000 words — get the best treatment from search engines. But at some point readers bail out because they get declining value from what they read.

Postings done over a period of years that leads to thousands of articles all easily found by search engines or through clean, intuitive site navigation.

3) Post Frequency

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Frequency is obvious from the paragraph above about quantity. The more often a blogger posts, the more easily the blogger will draw a crowd.

That quantity should be published on a consistent schedule as much as possible.

I post about once a week on this blog because I have other priorities. But I know from more than a decade of posting here that posting at least once a week is important. Daily, which I do on another site, is much better.

But drawing a good blog audience also requires good distribution.

4) Distribution

Distribution is achieved through submitting posts to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Medium and other sites. Some sites build related videos for YouTube. Others buy advertising.

Good distribution of course requires optimizing pages correctly for search engines and maintaining a presence on other relevant sites.

Considering the millions of blogs now active on the Internet, all of the above is necessary to grow blog traffic successfully.

But there is one more ingredient. Call it longevity, patience, determination or whatever.

Most sites with limited resources require a long time — usually years — to get their heads above the majority of the sites out there and build a healthy blog audience