To compete against the more competitive topics is difficult to say the least. So a clever trick is to look for and find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

You can use any keyword tool to do this. Google offer a free keyword planner you can access here. You’ll need an Adwords account to access it. Once you have access to the tool, type in your main keyword. The planner will give you multiple keyword ideas which relate to your main “seed” keyword. To find those which offer the least competition, scroll to the end of the list where you’ll find longer tail keywords which have fewer monthly searches.

Now, you might be thinking, fewer monthly searches? I want the keywords which get thousands of monthly searches to give me more traffic. But those top keywords with the most views also have the most competition. So ranking content for them will be incredibly difficult. Instead, go for the “low hanging fruit”. These are the keywords which have fewer competing website results on Google. As such, you have a much better chance of ranking for them in the SERPS. Once you start ranking your content, you can get free traffic to your blog.

At first it may only be the odd click, here and there. But if you consistently create more and more content, using this strategy, your blog traffic will grow as more of your articles rank.

Free Traffic For A Blogger – Blog Post Promotion

Of course this strategy takes some time. Depending on your blog niche, it can take months and it can take years before you are flooded with free traffic. But if you want free traffic, you have to pay the price. That price is the discipline of continually creating content over the longer term.

Just creating content isn’t enough either! You also need to actively promote your content too. Publish your content and share it as much as possible. Use your email list and send new posts to your subscribers. Post on social media platforms and anywhere and everywhere you can.

Link back to your posts from other websites and from your new content. Over time, the backlinks you generate will be a signal to the search engines as to what your content is about and how to rank it. As visitors find your posts, they will link to them and share them too, if your content is of high quality. So the better you can make your content, the more likely it will naturally thrive over time.

I use an SEO tool to help me write my blog posts too. Yoast SEO is a great free tool which anyone with a WordPress blog can use. It helps you write SEO (search engine optimised) friendly blog posts and gives them a better chance of a first page ranking.

Free Traffic For A Blogger – Timescale

How long it will take to have a steady stream of visitors will depend on a few things:

• The quality of your content
• How well you promote it
• Your SEO
• Blog post length
• How people perceive it – bounce rate, natural links etc.
• Your domain age and authority
• Backlinks to your blog
• Your niche and the relative competition

Google has thousands of signals which it uses to determine the quality of a blog post and how to rank it. But don’t forget there’s other search engines too such as Bing, Yahoo and Ducduckgo.com. These search engines will pick up your content too, and often you’ll rank more easily on them than Google. So although it can take some time before you are swimming in free visitors, it’s worth persevering with this strategy.

In a competitive niche, it will take much longer to get traffic than in an uncompetitive one. So ideally pick a topic in which you have a passion. There’s a couple of major benefits of doing this:

• It’s easier to write about something you know about and have a passion for
• You’ll be able to sustain the project much longer than with a difficult topic you have no interest in.

Free Traffic For A Blogger – Critical Mass

When your website traffic takes off, you will see a sudden uptick in your visitors. If you set your website up with a good lead magnet, you’ll be able to turn (some of) those visitors into leads and sales.

However, this doesn’t happen as quickly as you might like. In fact, the progress of a blog isn’t linear like you may expect. Instead there’s a time lag, or a dip. James Clear calls this phenomenom the “valley of disappointment” as you can see in the picture from his book Atomic Habits.

Sadly this means many bloggers will quit on this journey, especially if they have chosen a difficult topic in which they have little interest. But if you persevere past the point in which you think is necessary, and keep going, you should find an exponential rise in traffic, leads and sales.

How many blog posts does it take to get traffic? Well this depends. You might see a jump in traffic quite quickly with only a few posts in one particular (uncompetitive) niche. But in another more competitive one, it might take hundreds of posts and thousands of backlinks.

This is why it’s important to choose your niche wisely and plan for the longer term. Don’t simply look for the most profitable niche for blogging, since you may be unable to get traction if it doesn’t suit your interests.  If you don’t see yourself writing more than a few posts, you’re probably in the wrong niche. Think about spending several months if not years writing continuously on your topic and you have an idea about what it takes.

See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for a number of recommended plugins.

Excitement Of Passive Traffic & Therefore Sales!

There’s something very exciting and rewarding about getting free traffic from the search engines. When you can visualise this happening, even when you have no traffic, it’s a huge motivator and has kept me blogging for years! Once people start seeing your content, they share it and link to it too. This has the effect of improving your SEO and you jump up the search listings on the SERPS. As more people see your blogs, more do the same and this has a compounding effect.

The trouble is there’s a heap of work you need to do to get to this point and most people won’t stick with it that long when there’s nothing to show for all their work! Stick at it because there’s some exciting rewards if you do! Sales on autopilot was always my goal as an affiliate, and with free traffic. I just didn’t realise how much work was actually required to make it a reality.

Once you start making a regular income from your blogging, it gives you more faith and trust that it can happen. When this happens you give more time to creating more and more blog posts. The added motivation and the compounding SEO means you’re now creating content at a faster rate, (and hopefully of higher quality too).

This tips the balance and you will soon be on your way to replacing a full time income from blogging! When this happens, you’ve made it! You can blog full time or part time and the previous work you have done continues to draw in traffic, leads and sales, while you create more and more content. You can also link to older content as you go, thereby improving your SEO and driving your content further up the SERPS. 

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